One of the greatest gifts my grandfather and parents gave me was to expand the borders of my physical world through international travel, and of course, what followed was the further expansion of my mind and ideals. What do they say? Once a mind is stretched beyond its original space, it can never return?The cost of this expansion is that the expanded brain fuels a wandering soul that never is contented unless it is seeking new terrain. Home becomes anywhere, anyplace, and the people that populate the spaces become family (Photo: Me, on the road to Hay-in-Wye, Wales).
Tonight, I find myself homesick as I return to Atlanta from eight days away on international soil, a loop that seems to be upside-down as I crawl into my own bed and light the candles that smell so familiar.
Perhaps it is because everything feels so new and unworn, and the building so crisp and stark in their infancy. I find myself echoing the words of Thomas Moore as I find enchantment in the worn, the aged, and the organic within the crumbling walls of the pastoral land in Wales, and Gothic cathedrals that have held worshippers for a thousand years.
As the lilting voices of the cherubic boys in the Westminster Abbey choir sing the same text that has echoed in these walls for a thousand years, I find that the enchantment of the old is the glue that cements us. (Photos: Westminster Abbey at dusk with Tower of London in the distance.) Perhaps it isn't homesickness that I am feeling tonight but disconnection from a world that feels far to familiar as it sits an ocean away.
I consider this tonight as I ponder the steps that my brother, sister, and I tread in the winter dusk aroun
d Chepstow Castle on the River Wye at the border of England and Wales, a site all our own as the sun set in winter. I fingered the dirt as I stooped low and then collected rocks from the earth cradling the castle since 1042. A gift from my family provides the deep magnetism I feel. Roots have been traced on my paternal grandmother's side connecting me to this world and rarely so, directly to the man that built the castle - William the Conqueror. I feel blessed tonight, blessed that such roots have been traced, but even more blessed to find forgotten trails near the River Wye that lead around the backside of the castle where I envision long ago relatives stealing a first kiss, or wiping tears shed over a loss due to illness, or a face breaking into a smile as they viewed the sunset that even now, I am viewing from my perch on a tree root erupting from the ground on a trail next to the castle. (Photo: Chepstow Castle at dusk)
d Chepstow Castle on the River Wye at the border of England and Wales, a site all our own as the sun set in winter. I fingered the dirt as I stooped low and then collected rocks from the earth cradling the castle since 1042. A gift from my family provides the deep magnetism I feel. Roots have been traced on my paternal grandmother's side connecting me to this world and rarely so, directly to the man that built the castle - William the Conqueror. I feel blessed tonight, blessed that such roots have been traced, but even more blessed to find forgotten trails near the River Wye that lead around the backside of the castle where I envision long ago relatives stealing a first kiss, or wiping tears shed over a loss due to illness, or a face breaking into a smile as they viewed the sunset that even now, I am viewing from my perch on a tree root erupting from the ground on a trail next to the castle. (Photo: Chepstow Castle at dusk)I breathe deeply and feel free as our wanderings are blessed by three rainbows within the first two full days of travel. Odd, isn't it, that the last three international trips I have taken have brought a beautiful rainbow on my first day within the country? - South Africa, Romania, and now England? It is as if my wanderings are being blessed by the universe.
Further blessings appear in conversations late into the night with locals - the warm familiarity of tongues that speak different words from my own and the mutual enlightenment we shed on one another as if we are holding hands across time and cultures. It seems appropriate at this time and away from the U.S. that I witness the swearing in of the first African-American President while in London. A man of many cultures and places that understands the shrinking of the globe.
There is so much to relive through the memories of the trip: the crisp cold from the ocean spray breaking at St. David's point in Wales (Photo: St. David's Point); the echoes of the sages in the alleys of Oxford; the bleating of the sheep near Stoneh
enge as they gaze on a wonder never to be understood by them (Photo: Pastureland at Stonehenge); the hot mist of the steam from a bath still holding water encased during the Roman Empires; a perfect cup of tea in its milky sweet warmth that touches the stomach like magic; and the bells, the bells of Westminster Abbey calling worshippers for a thousand years as my sister and I race through the cobbled streets to enter before the doors close to the sounds of the familiar liturgy echoed by ancestors.Tonight, I write this in the familiarity of my bedroom with the candles flickering. I am indeed homesick. Homesick for the connectivity of the generations that seem so present and understood in the countries where the terrain is deep with its echoes.
