Traveling Light

I bought myself a plane ticket to Spain for my birthday. I leave tomorrow. I intend to spend the dawn of my 28th year on earth in misty mountain solitude, listening to medieval chants and wandering around the oldest still-functioning monastery in Europe.

After that, I'm going to Barcelona to party.

I am refusing to take a suitcase on this trip (not such a strange thing, for me) but I am also resistant to even taking a backpacking pack. It's too big. I'm packing a duffel bag for this trip, the kind of bag one takes on a long weekend. A "weekender," the fashion people would call it. It's fake red leather, and my mother spotted it on the free table at Value Village Thrift Store two months ago and brought it home for me. It has no rips and no holes and the strap is still attached and the stitches are firm and the zipper works, so I'm not sure why it was on the free table, but it has a good home, now. This is a bag I will love.

I have my little duffel loaded up with clothes: underwear, cardigans, a cocktail dress. A toiletry bag. A current converter. I'll add a pair of fancy flats later tonight.

I have a backpack, too, a carry on, the backpack that has been on every single trip I've taken since I was fourteen and went to Oceania for three weeks. This backpack has been around the world. It's been to Australia and New Zealand, it's been to Spain before, it was with me when I got stranded in Morocco, it's been to Paris and seen the Mona Lisa, and it's held water and sandwiches while I hiked in the Schwarzwald. It's met my daughter's father. It's climbed Mayan ruins on the Yucatan, seen waterfalls in the Andes, gone to street parties outside of Santo Domingo. This backpack has been to New York City more times than I can count, seen the redwoods of Big Basin State Park in California, wandered around downtown Detroit. It's been to St. Louis and Indianapolis.

Into this backpack I will put my camera bag, laden with camera and lenses and lens filters and cleaning cloths and memory cards and a battery charger and a card reader. I will put my tiny pink computer, and its charger. I'll put my phone and its charger. I'll put in two books and a wallet and a passport and three packs of American Spirit cigarettes, in the yellow box, and a lighter. The lighter will also be yellow.

I've had butterflies in my stomach for days now, anticipating this trip. My insides are quivering in anticipation of being unattached for seven entire, glorious days. My wanderlust is ferocious, voracious, and stems primarily from a desire to have no attachments at all. My daydreams are always about taking off into the sunset and leaving everything behind. My fondest, most impossible wish is to start over, completely, from scratch. I want to disappear with my duffel and my backpack and never come back, never look back, reinvent everything about myself.

I can't do that. Having babies really puts a damper on your ability to disappear without a trace. Well, unless you're my baby's father.

(Heh.)

So, I take the next best thing: Whenever I can, I go somehwere alone. Like tomorrow.

I have many vices. Cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, pretty dresses, vintage hats, ridiculous high-heeled shoes, loud music, driving too fast. Some of these are probably even full-blown addictions. But of all my vices, and all my addictions, this is most certainly the worst. This is the one that could cause me to abandon everything, hit rock bottom, sever every tie. It would be so easy since the addiction is to rootlessness, restlessness, the ability to move on whenever the urge hits, to put one's life in two small bags and go, onward, forward, sideways, backwards, it doesn't matter as long as you're moving.

The addiction, you see, is to this fluttery feeling I get before stepping off into the unknown. I am addicted to the rush of adrenaline and the limitless vistas of possibility. This feeling is better than any drug, than any drink, than any touch. This feeling is better than any love. This combination of knowing everything theoretically and nothing concretely and being able to see everything and nothing all at once is better than anything else you can name. I would chase this feeling endlessly if I could. I would step off every cliff, climb every mountain, turn down every blind alley to find it again.

If I could. If only I could.

Moments, Liminal

I don't often read advice columns. I am fascinated by people, and their problems, and their neuroses, and so reading advice columns seems like a natural thing for me to do, but I don't often do it. I find them inherently condescending, primarily, and that makes them difficult for me to read.

It's probably a good thing that I don't read them often; as was pointed out to me recently in disparaging tones, the last thing I need is to become further steeped in pop psychology and dime-store theories. All the good intentions and compassion in the world will be for naught if I start to believe too strongly in my own cleverness.

But sometimes, the tag line is too good, too close to home, too grabbing for me to ignore. Tag lines like "Must I Choose: My Muse or My Wife?" are more or less guaranteed to get me reading.

I'm not male, and my personality is not really set up for clear-cut dichotomies, but this is a thing that I have often struggled with. I require, for better or worse, a great deal of stimulation. I need people, different people, different perspectives, new ideas. I crave them. I crave the interaction that is exchanging thoughts with someone, and I crave variety in that enterprise.

My ex-husband had a less charitable view of this desire of mine; he told me that I required a lot of attention. That is probably true, although not, I think, entirely in the way he meant it. I am not someone that requires the full attention of another person at all times. I crave copious quantities of solitude as desperately as I crave new ideas and interactions. I need time to recharge and regroup, to integrate the sum total of those new ideas gleaned from new interactions into my cosmology and adjust as necessary. But I would be lying if I said I don't enjoy the attention of the people that I love, or admire, or respect. Who doesn't enjoy attention, honestly?

But the thrust of this man's problem is that while he very much wants to be a good husband to his wife, he finds he is consistently projecting desire onto other women and using the resultant emotional reactions as inspiration. He is creating muses for himself. And he is afraid he is hurting his wife in this process.

I very much want to be a good partner, but I require a lot of stimulation. No one person is ever going to be enough for me. And that can be hurtful. Jealousy is an ugly, wily, slippery thing, and it can rear its poisonous head and kill even the heartiest love dead.

Most of the columnist's advice I found unhelpful and unnessecarily downing. But there was one line, one line in the whole response, that sent the hamsters in my brain madly turning their wheels: "I also think it might be useful for you to read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Why do I think that? Not sure."

Read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Don't know why, just do it. Perhaps the columnist knows more than he is telling, or perhaps he intuitively knows something he can't verbalize, or perhaps it was just a random stab in the dark because this guy really likes the concept of liminality. I don't know. But that was the best bit of advice I have ever seen in an advice column in my life.

Read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Just do it.

A liminal moment is a threshhold, it is the state of being betwixt and between two concretely defined states. Liminal moments occur in all strata of human organization, from individuals to the world at large. The term was originally coined in 1909 by Arnold van Gennep in the classic anthropological tome Rites of Passage. I studied van Gennep; I remember being fascinated by the concept seven years ago.

Because the columnist did not see fit to elucidate his reasons for recommending reading about liminality, I can only guess what he was trying to impart. But I know, very clearly, what I got out of reminding myself about the concept of liminality.

I am spending my life searching out liminal moments. If I could, I would live entirely in the threshhold, in the state betwixt and between all definite things. It is in those moments, and that state, that creativity is most abundant. It is in those spaces where all stability and order have passed away and new orders and structures have not yet been erected that inspiration is clearest. I have spent my life, and I will continue to spend my life, seeking permanent liminality.

New people and new interactions and new ideas are merely vehicles for finding those things that force me into liminality, so that I do reorder my cosmology. All that attention is fodder for the productive use of my solitude.

Some part of me, the heedless, reckless, wild part wants to say that art is that which is a catalyst for liminal moments. Art is that which sends you careening into the space betwixt and between the ordinary structures of the world. Anything else is mere craft, no matter how well constructed.

And I want to create art. I want to live in the empty space between letters, in the pause of the comma and not in the words surrounding it.