Distance, Health and the Life Virtual
Three nights later, and I still have not returned to an east coastal sleep pattern. While it is “only” five time zones away, the body and the mind take in so much information in such travel that the consequences are deeper and broader than the meager mind would care to admit.
Some years ago I spent six months on the island of Java, in Indonesia. The island rests on the equator. My home town away from home was Yogyakarta, in the central Java, a city of some 600,000 at the time, snuggled at the feet of Mount Merapi, an active volcano. Every once in a while the ground shook, and my Midwestern mind reeled as it tried to assimilate moving earth vs twisting skies. On the equator, the sun rose and fell with complete regularity, weighed heavily at noon, was broken by a thundershower at 2pm, and set peacefully accompanied by an soft offshore breeze. Everyone was a foot shorter than I was.
After 6 months, all of this was normal, my perception of size had even adjusted so that I felt I was the same height as all of my friends. I rode my bicycle in the early morning and in the evening, and left the blazing noon for a few air-conditioned cars of the very rich and the rickshaws of the moderately wealthy, pulled by the very poor.
And my return to the States shattered the world I had unconsciously built day by Javanese day.
I flew 15 hours East to LA, then several hours further to Great Falls, Montana, where my aunt lives. Great Falls is in the dry hollow of land which was cut over the millennia by the Missouri River. All clouds stop at the Great Divide, and leave their moisture to the fertile lands to the west; to the east you find the driest lands, ranches which occupy hundreds of square miles, mule deer, and big sky.
In late November, when I arrived, the cultural and geographic shock was complete. I spent some time in the downtown area, looking for the source of my disease: yes, of course I was on the other side of the world, yes of course the time shift was there, that was obvious. But more subtle differences… Java is the most densely populated land mass on the planet, cramming more than 118 million humans into 2,200 square miles of area, much of which is mountainous and volcanic: on average that is two thousand people per square mile, but in practice the habitable areas are much denser.
Arriving in Great Falls, a depressed economy on a dry plateau, population 56,000 (and falling), and spread as only the Western States can be, the space between buildings and between people and between trees and everything else made me feel I had stepped into a vacuum. People did not swarm around me, and didn’t not my difference, or generally ignored my sameness.
And subtler still – what was it? Not the cold, that was obvious. Ah! I had a shadow! No, it was the quality of the shadow, not the shadow itself: a cool shadow, and indistinct shadow, whose body was filled in with the grays and the smells of late autumn.
~
So the upheaval of travel, when you have gone far enough and deeply enough to be changed, is profound. The immediate reaction of our bodies and minds which so love comfort is a simple “ugh!”. Why travel?
But in our customary lives, it is the upheaval itself which you should seek. By creating cracks in the foundation, you allow the water of change to seep in, to do its work, to touch the roots, to feet the trunk, that you might grow stronger and larger. That you might understand beyond the limits of your culture and beyond your automatic responses to the challenges of the world. And that you might exercise and strengthen your mind, which easily becomes contented with television news bites and habitual thinking.
The trick is to travel the well-lit path, not to engage in simple deconstruction: that is a puerile pursuit, and while it may have a point, it is not a point which can be located on any world map. It is in fact a path into the wilderness, or into the desert, or into nothingness or into no-sense. We travel the well-lit path, knowing that we remove the debris of our aging lives while replacing it with valuable behaviors or philosophies or patterns of thoughts which we ourselves have glimpsed and, seeing that they improve our lives, that we ourselves have chosen.
Spirit is where spirit is sought; and we simplify our faith in the vital energies of life, by removing the complications of thought we continually layer upon ourselves, dust upon a ripening seed.
So travel well: expect and welcome destruction: knowing that by choosing beauty along our path, we neglect darkness and despair, and retain and strengthen all the aspects of our lives we wish to keep. Light shines through the cracks.