Where Ya From?

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where…” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

-Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland

I mentioned in the post before last that I was in Peru for an ayahuasca ceremony.  That did happen, the day after my long hike to nowhere.  I’m not going to go too much into it, except to say that as usual, I gained some very helpful and unexpected insight that I’ll now try to implement in my life and see where it takes me.  The experience is a part of a longer process, as most experiences are, and as usual, you ultimately have to do the work yourself.  You can lead a horse to enlightenment, but it is super hard to enlighten a horse.  Or something like that.

It was difficult to leave Pisaq this time around.  I was expecting that, but it seems I’ll be bumping up my next visit to fall, making this a bi-annual (at least for 2013) event.  I have a deepening suspicion that this is the type of place I could get stuck.  Let’s talk about that.

In my travels, I have come across numerous places that seem to be magnets for transient peoples.  It’s always hard for me to parse the circumstances behind these sometimes urban, sometimes remote enclaves.  Is it the place? Is there an especially attractive quality to the place invisible to me but strong for a chosen few?  Or is it the person- is there a personality type, some strange nomad/homebody hybrid who travels vast swaths of land but is ultimately very drawn to the idea of a familiar kitchen?

In the past, I’ve always thought about it in terms of “getting stuck.”  And it usually looks to an outsider like a combination of a weary traveler, a just exotic enough setting and more often than not, easily accessible drugs and/or alcohol.  This last one is probably why I generally feel a little sorry for people I meet who’ve gotten stuck.  But that’s not to say intoxicants always play a role.  Everyone’s got their vices; some people just end up stuck.  And the idea clashes with my sense of what it is to travel (and live, apparently) just enough for me to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about it.

For better or worse, when I find a really interesting/beautiful/awesome place, I do enjoy it -but- after a few days I inevitably start thinking, well, this place is so great, I couldn’t possibly stop now.  I need to move on to the next place, because who knows, the next one could be even better!  This could perhaps be defined as a keen sense of adventure or conversely, a deep seated fear of missing out…which is a little bit of a madman’s fear, as one is always missing something.  Scratch that.  One is always missing most things.  You can only be present for very, very little on a global and even personal scale.  That’s why focus is important.  And it’s helpful for people like to me to remember that this narrow focus also makes the present and the individual experience very, very special.  Still, it is incredibly hard for me to sit still.

A part of me envies anyone who can be content in one place, it is simply not a quality I possess…but then again a part of me would rather be doing what I’m doing, as evidenced by all the decisions of the last oh, 30 years.  Maybe that makes me someone willing to sacrifice that level of domestic stability in exchange for one day finding what feels like home, and maybe that just makes me someone who will never be satisfied.  Time will tell, I guess.  Home is a bit of a complicated notion for me, and I don’t like throwing the label around, but I’ve found that people need to have that question answered in order to be comfortable.  Where do you come from.  What environ do you relate to.  A lot of times when I talk about “home” to others I name a place that doesn’t feel like home, but I know it’s the closest thing to what they mean.

As a TX to NY transplant, the “where is home” question is already loaded.  And as someone who is constantly leaving and returning to all manner of other places, it is downright confusing, frustrating, and full of a desire to continue the search for my personal truth.  So where is home?  Ideally to me, “home” is the place where you feel you belong, where the people there feel you belong, and where the people not there feel you belong as well.  The more I travel and live and meet the more the 3rd category grows and the more difficult it becomes to nail it down.  Part of what makes home a complicated subject is the knowledge that other people might recognize my home as somewhere different than where I’d like it to be.

Pisaq was really the first place I ever really understood that I too had the capacity to get stuck.  And it has become more and more evident that I am in fact getting stuck, in my way.  It occurred to me that I ever lost the ability to travel there cheaply, I might have to do something drastic.  Something about the place really speaks to me, but I don’t know if I could ever get stuck enough to call it home.  The idea of home is quite wrapped up in personal identity, and when I evaluate a place that could be home, I always look to the other people who’ve made it their home and think, do I want to be one of them?  Would I be ok if this were me in 20, 30 years?  With Pisaq, the answer is maybe.  But not right away.  I get the feeling that as much as we want to control the future, “home” is a reciprocal thing too.  It chooses you as much as you might choose it.  So then it’s not simply a matter of making up your mind and saying, This will be my home as much as a revelation of the present, I am home.