Unmoored

I think it was somewhere flying over Greenland when I realized: air travel is just a highly concentrated version of travel in general. It is a container of time: suspended, unmoored, untethered.

In June, we spent three weeks traveling in the UK and Europe. First: London, where Matt brought over a group of 40ish singers to be part of a festival concert he was conducting at Southwark Cathedral. From the moment we touched down at Heathrow after a twelve-hour plane ride (Since when did flying from Albuquerque to Phoenix represent the most direct route to London?), the days were long and blurry. We arrived just as the Queen’s Jubilee was winding down. Quite literally, the last parade of the festivities was making its way across the city with throngs of people dressed in Union Jack attire —and not ironically!— as we were trying to navigate the streets in our coach from Heathrow to our hotel near Victoria Station. It was like arriving at a party half-way through the evening, the merrymaking in full, uninhibited swing.

Immediately we were thrown into the work of the music festival: rehearsals, meetings, logistics. The mass choir was made up four different choruses, but our particular subsection included best friends from Denver; colleagues from Minneapolis; friends of friends from Boston; an old friend from college that we had not seen in 30 years; and Matt’s brother and sister who had flown in from Thailand and DC, respectively. As someone said before we left, “You know, Amy, all these people will want to spend time with you guys. It’s a little like you are throwing a destination wedding. Good luck.”

Indeed. The next eight days were a whirlwind of rehearsals and concerts, long conversations over coffees and pints of lager, a Thames riverboat cruise and a daytrip to Canterbury, multiple plays and museums, long walks through parks and crowded London streets. The hours of sunlight went on forever—4:30am to nearly 10pm every day—making the jet lag even more pronounced. All good intentions—of course, I will still write, and read, and do yoga, and meditate every day—were quickly tossed out the window of our 11th story hotel room. We were busy, busy, busy, numbingly exhausted and blissfully happy.

After eight crazy-intense days, Matt’s singers went home or off to other adventures, and he and I boarded an early morning Eurostar train to Paris. Suddenly, as a nimble team of two, we were traveling lightly again. We checked into our boutique hotel right behind the Church of Saint-Sulpice and set off for four days of sitting in sidewalk cafés and watching the world—the oh-so-very-stylish-and-elegant world—go by. Paris was unusually hot that week; we compensated for the heat by organizing our days around afternoon naps in front of the fan, wandering through as many dimmed and cool museums as possible and drinking lots of white wine. After the whirlwind of the over-booked days in London, it was heaven: unstructured, unplanned, spontaneous.

And then we went to Belgium.

Bruges has long been on our travel bucket list, for no real reason other than I thought it sounded romantic. We had considered making our way to Belgium the last time were in Europe in January of 2020, but we daunted by the short, dark, cold winter days of Northern Europe and headed south through Italy instead (#noregrets). When we were considering how to spend our remaining time in Europe during this trip, Bruges jumped to the top of the list of possibilities.

It was as magical and romantic as I had imagined. The cobblestoned streets and canals were charmingly crooked and were lined with tall narrow townhouses each with its distinctive jagged rooftop. There were cafés along every canal, and flowerboxes full of geraniums and pink petunias on every bridge. The church bells rang constantly, each clock off set by just enough time that the bells never stopped. The first night we were eating dinner in one of these ubiquitous cafés along one branch of the endless canals when suddenly, I looked up from my Belgian beer and there was a flock of swans floating around the bend. It was such a cliché. By which I mean: it was perfect.

Beware, dear friends: Belgium is not a low-carb country. As far as we could tell, the diet of the average Belgian resident seems to focus primarily on four food groups: waffles, beer, fries, and chocolate. I am not opposed—and in fact, quite a fan—of all of these, but it does start to explain the bicycles parked haphazardly on every sidewalk and corner: one needs a lot of physical activity to counter this kind of carb load. You did not need to be fluent in Dutch to ask for any of these foods, we discovered, because everybody’s English was perfect, although I did take it as a compliment the couple of times we were mistaken for French while we were in Bruges (see above: oh-so-stylish-and-elegant). At least we were not pegged as ugly American tourists, I told Matt after we sheepishly had to say “English please” to a waiter greeting us in French. “Where are you from?” we were often asked. “New Mexico,” we’d say, only to be greeted with “Ah, yes! Cancun!”

In my next life I will speak five languages. Shamed by the inadequacies of my language skills after our last trip to Europe, for the last several years I have been trying to coax my high-school Spanish from the deep cellar and dusty attic of my cobweb-covered brain. Hablo un poco español, and no, I can’t tell you where the discoteca might be, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to reply in Spanish no matter what country we might be in or what foreign language we are hearing. This, I can tell you, is not helpful in Belgium. Or France, either.

If the last trip to Europe—that innocent, pre-Covid trip in the weeks just before the world shut down—was marked by the short, dark days of winter, this one was distinguished by the endless, glowing light of the long days leading up to Summer Solstice. We were in Brussels that evening, a day of forever light. That night we were walking through a packed Grand Place around 10pm, just having finished dinner, and it could have been the middle of the day. Folks were milling about, singing and eating ice cream and drinking beer, and generally celebrating this longest day of the year with great spirit. I can’t say that Matt and I acknowledge the solstice most years, but I will always remember that one in Brussels, at the end of a long holiday, when time and light spooled out generously and abundantly. Maybe it felt particularly poignant after the last few years when time got so strange and twisted, and the world was so dark and scary. But for that one night, it seemed there was no time, and no darkness. 

So clearly, time had already warped way beyond a recognizable shape or form way before we board the plane in Heathrow on our journey back home. But in many small and large ways time has been distorted for months now. The horrible school shooting in Texas in May left many of us thinking, “Oh God, we’ve been here before.” Another wave of Covid comes and we don’t know what the appropriate behavior should be, or even if we should care anymore. (We left for Europe thinking that we’d have to prove negative Covid tests before returning to the United States, which led me to think: We can bring guns into this country, no problem, but heaven forbid, if anyone brings in Covid. Biden lifting that travel requirement just before we returned to the States was not just a blessing, but a miracle, really, because half of our group did, indeed, have Covid.) The reversal of Roe v. Wade sends women’s reproductive rights backwards into a time that I casually assumed was behind us forever. While this is no longer a personal issue, I find myself wondering what’s ahead for all the young women I teach and mentor. This summer, I turned 50. My mind spins: that age feels significant, but what it might mean for how I live my life, I don’t yet know.

But there over Greenland, as we were being served dinner (or was it lunch? Or a snack? It was 3:30pm London time, with eight flight hours still to go. Do they simply keep feeding the passengers to keep them quiet?), I found myself thinking: time doesn’t exist. Or at least, any time that is associated with normal routines or schedules.

For someone who is so married to her practices, this is disconcerting to say the least. I don’t want a meal at 3:30 in the afternoon. I get a bit out of sorts when I’m not doing my yoga and writing and meditating. I feel lost without my daily time at the piano. I want the routines and rituals that tether me to the ground and root me in place. Even on its best days, traveling is disorienting, literally and metaphorically.

Of course, if I am paying attention there is a lesson here.

I didn’t plan on this long gap in blog posts, but the sabbatical was thrust upon me thanks to series of website snafus. But when there was no next post that needed to be written, and no words were forthcoming anyway, I discovered that this was a pause I did, in fact, need. I have needed the internal clearing out, the great silence, the gift of creative quietude that the last few months has afforded me. I have needed to be still. I needed the chance to move freely and uninhibited by the restrictions and expectations of my normal life and routines.

I am reminded of a Zen story. Once a self-important and arrogant man came to visit a famous Zen master. “I have come today to ask you to teach me about Zen. Open my mind to enlightenment,” he said.

The Zen master began pouring his visitor a cup of tea. He poured and poured until the cup was overflowing, and still he kept pouring. The visitor shouted, “Enough. You are spilling the tea all over. Can’t you see the cup is full?”

“You are like this teacup,” the Zen master told his guest, “so full that nothing more can be added. Come back to me when the cup is empty. Come back to me with an empty mind.”

We live in a noisy, crowded world, stimulus coming at us from all directions. We are so proud of our accomplishments, our completed to-do lists, our noteworthy achievements. And rightly so. But what we too often lack is the wilderness, the solitude, the silence necessary that we might be able to hear the small, quiet voice within. One of the important Buddhist sutras on the Four Ideals to Practice throughout one’s life includes this idea of wilderness: Bodhisattvas should spend some portion of time dwelling in the wilderness as long as they live. Dale Wright, commenting on this sutra in a recent issue of Tricycle writes, “Buddhists who were serious about awakening carried that aspiration out by seeking some degree of seclusion from the mental spin of ordinary life so that meditative mindfulness and profound discernment might gradually become ingrained as their natural comportment…after even a few days alone in the wilderness…another dimension of personal accountability begins to emerge from within. You realize that there are fundamental decisions about the character of your life and death that are yours and yours alone.”

I suspect that every once in a while, we could all use a dose of disorienting, suspended, unmoored time. A trip to Europe. A gap in deadlines. An unexpected empty afternoon. A weekend in the wilderness. Twenty minutes on the meditation cushion. An early morning cup of tea in the garden. A summer of unstructured time. A pause in the endless, crazy-making chatter.

Travel, I often say, has a half-life. It seems to take about half the length of any trip to restore one’s normal life back to its routines, rituals and practices. Back home, I reminded myself of this as I fought jet lag and tried to dig through the piles of mail, the unanswered emails, the weeds and debris of my house and garden. And now, two months later, I stand inside another transitional space: my school-year teaching schedule begins this afternoon. My website troubles are hopefully behind me, which means I can resume my writing and blog posting routines. I have cleared out the heat-withered, bleached and dried summer garden to make space for fall plantings. I have a pile of new empty teaching notebooks ready for my scribbles and random thoughts. Four former students are coming to brunch this morning; the weekends ahead are full-to-bursting with concerts and rehearsals; dinner dates and visits with friends. Once again, our cup overflows.