Wanderlusting to Home

I have always been a wanderer, a nomad. Although I have settled in one place or another for relatively long stretches of time, my heart has always ached to wander. Perhaps this is because I have never really felt at home in the various places I have lived: in between the rock gorges of Ithaca New York, at the precipice of the main line and White Anglo Saxon Protestant America, in our nation’s capital for more than a decade.  Perhaps it is the ever addictive pull of perspective.

But now I do, have a home. This farm, its hills, that magical breeze, the forest of trees, the gravel driveway underneath my feet, the long winters and the preciously short summers, the Technicolor dream coat of leaves that masks our perimeter in the fall, the sheets of rain that pour heavily on the tin roof, my horses as they run and chew and gnaw on the wooden fence boards, my dogs as they sleep and awake me each day just a little too early for my comfort. I call it home.

As much as I had always yearned to see Ethiopia, and, in fact, every single one of Africa’s 54 countries, on this last trip abroad, what gave me solace was home. The world is chaotic and its problems are infinite and of overwhelming magnitude. I now, after my 35 years here, finally see the value of home.

Life, of course, is showing me the danger of finding a home. This year has been unpredictable at best. Impermanence is shining its blinding light. The bedrock of my existence has been pulled from underneath me, first with the death of my mother and then with the dissolution of my marriage.

It’s no one’s fault but my own and the way fate has willed it, if fault can be declared at all. 

As life would have it, my home may now cease to be. It is dangerous, I think, to find our home in physical sense. I would imagine that the most happy of us all have that sense of home right there inside. They can find it there, where they live, or 10,000 miles away, on the other side of the world. It isn’t affected by a difference in smell, taste, and a sense of security. It is owning what is you.

In my wanderlust, I hope I can eventually travel to, grab, wrap myself around, and never let go of that elusive place I can call home. 

The Road to Nekemte

Boom. Flash. We were eating dinner at what is known as the nicest hotel in Nekemte and the rainy season had finally made its exuberant debut.

I will admit: my colleague and I definitely jumped. Nekemte, a vibrant city, 350 km to the West of Addis, is true Africa. It is the open markets and the dirt. It is the young and old and people moving, walking anywhere and everywhere. It rises out of nowhere, from the mountains and the lush green fields of teff, maize and sorghum. It is jumping and bustling, a sharp descent from another trip through God’s country.

Unlike my colleague who has traveled through Rwanda and Uganda and professes the road West of Addis to resemble her previous trips, I, myself, had never known such a journey. If I had to compare what I have seen in Ethiopia, Lalibela would be the dry peaks of the American southwest, while the mountain road West of Addis is the lush, green mountains I’d seen in parts of South Africa. But I hate to make a comparison that isn’t comparable.

The dirt is the perfect red-brown, and the people are poised to traverse the steep cliffs above and the muddy rivers below. They are tall and lean, with skin made to absorb the sun, the rain, and the dirt that only makes them seem more a part of the Earth. The green is tremendous and overwhelming. It feels as if the Earth has to be endlessly fertile and that the space around you will never end. It calms those aching, compulsive anxieties, and allows you to imagine a place where humankind could be born. This green universe could give birth to anything and everything, forever. It is only logical that the fertility rate remains high and many Ethiopians, despite their circumstance, continue and continue to procreate.

This natural wonder is punctuated, for the better and for the worse, by development. The road, the entire way from Addis to Nekemte is paved, which made the drive more pleasant, but also allowed for the easy passage of large trucks. They carry goods and materials, maybe to further the development of Addis. They dash precariously past, sometimes on the correct side of the road and sometimes almost not, their fumes lingering long after their descent down the mountain. Small- and medium-size villages arise every now and again, with the open-front storefronts and the same types of scenes that tend to characterize developing countries: animals wandering aimlessly; the shoeless, the shirtless, and the extraordinarily thin coupled with the young men and women in Western clothes who could be meandering down a street in Washington, DC. Many of them look at you in your ominous white SUV and you feel like a big gaping sore thumb invading what isn’t yours. At the same time, pastoralists with their herds block the road, some more accustomed to the passing traffic than others.

It was the new with the old: the heart of Africa, of the Earth, being pulled very slowly from itself.

When we finally arrived in Nekemte, seven hours later, we were ready to rest and eat. We walked into the hotel and were greeted by a strange smell. It was the mix of the ancient sauna on the lower levels (and the sweaty men using it), the Ethiopian meat being broiled in the restaurant, and the wet, humid air quickly moving in. Always sensitive to smells and still suffering from the nausea acquired in Lalibela, I shamelessly breathed conscious, shallow breaths.  When I got to my room on the third floor, I was met with at least 50 huge black moths that had entered the open window above the shower. Horrified at the sight of the insect tsunami, I asked for a room change.

I now sit at the penthouse level (floor 4) and I realize how sheltered I had let myself become since my hiatus in Niger and my trips abroad more than five years ago. Farmland Hotel has running water, a Western toilet, toilet paper, a real bed with linens, and even a television with four channels. I am staying in a country where the majority of people still live in abject poverty, female genital cutting persists, and girls are still forced to marry at an age when I was buying my first bra. I’ve become spoiled.

God's Country

After five days of hotel hopping in Addis, I finally found God’s country. I awoke at 5:15 am on Friday, the Ethiopian day of fasting, to jet to the airport. I was going to go at the trip alone, but I met a nice travel companion during my hotel hopping and conference managing to accompany. We boarded an early morning flight from Addis, touching down in Gondar, and quickly kissing the sky again above Lalibela. I closed my eyes on the tarmac in Gondar for a quick power nap and awoke just below the clouds and just above the towering mountain-scape for which Lalibela is known. The Lalibela airport is just a pinprick in the infinite space of its surrounding universe. Two floors and three rooms, we easily saw our names written in red marker, held by the drivers sent to pick us up and drive us through mountains to the historic city of Lalibela.

The drive is 35 kilometers, but can feel a bit longer because of the winding mountain roads, and because of the pastoralists and their animals: unaccustomed to vehicles and the necessity to hop out of the way upon their approach. There in that van, I definitely felt like I was invading a sacred space, one in which people are still unified with nature under God’s sky. People who look to be 70, 80 years old climb the mountains with loads of timber strapped to their backs. Men with long sticks steer their oxen, goats and donkeys up the long mountain pass. They are often almost shirtless, threadbare, and seem unequipped without water and sometimes without shoes. The women wear their long syrongs and worn sandals. They look as if they have climbed the entire mountain range, or have been dropped straight from the sky, their sharp features and lean figures an ideal for tackling life here on Earth. 

I reference God, here, not because I am a Christian, but because a trip to Lalibela will make you want to believe. Lalibela is famous for its ancient churches, built in the 12^th Century by King Lalibela and his army of angels. With a small pick ax and chisel, along with his angels, it is said that the 11 churches were built in just 23 years. Today, this may not seem remarkable, but when you see the tools and feel the density of the rock underneath your feet, you could almost believe an army of angels was indeed present. Lalibela was created as a second Jerusalem. King Lalibela made the Holy Land a more convenient place of worship for his chosen people by moving it to Ethiopia.

The Ethiopians are true believers. They believe in willing their lives to chance under the promise that God will inevitably have their backs. They still have many children with little resources and walk for miles in the name of God with little food in their stomachs. They believe in priests that extricate demons. The most devout believe that by bathing a barren woman in a fertility bath, she could become the next Virgin Mary. Living among the luminous mountains, the eternal sun,  the dry mountain air, the rain that falls just enough to allow the crops to flourish, and the forgiving clouds that often leave a sliver of sky open to the wandering eye, it is no wonder these people are believers. Ethiopians, the most exquisitely and structurally beautiful people I have ever seen, are living in God’s country.

That day in Lalibela, as we trekked through the rock face caves and gullies which connect the 11 churches through the mountains, we walked among the most devout. We happened to arrive on the Day of Michael, one of many religious holidays on the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar. Thousands of Pilgrims had also arrived to worship, to pray, to chant and to sing. They had come from across Ethiopia to celebrate their saint, young and old, but mostly old. Their faces told stories, but their feet told many more. Some of the oldest wore sandals worn to the dirt, and some of the youngest, sneakers and socks.

They prayed and kissed the rock-face churches. They fell to the feet of Jesus, as he was depicted 900 years ago. Some of them, they walked hundreds of miles to stand and kneel on the old carpets that cover the rocky church floors. A priest sits all day in each church. My mind wandered to how the priest is filled, his thoughts and his journeys as he keeps watch and leads prayer. His mind must wander so differently from mine, as the concept of being sedentary for long stretches of time, in the name of God, is about as foreign as Lalibela itself.

Over five years since I had stepped outside the confines of North America, Lalibela did feel infinitely foreign. Only there for 24 hours, there was no time to adjust to uneven rock, the high altitude, the smell of open fire, the sound of chanting prayers. A pack of mating dogs kept me up all night and I awoke in nausea from my ambitious lunch that included raw jalapenos. Even God’s country is still developing.

The Buoyancy of Travel

It has been almost five years since I took the sky and crossed space and time. I don't count a small jaunt to a luxury resort in Mexico  and I discount any journeys  constrained by my own national borders. I am including the kind of travel that makes you so weary without sleep you feel high and completely disconnected from time and space. It had been half a decade since I engaged in this type of travel - since I stepped off of a plane from Sana'a Yemen and arrived back in Virginia. I carried with me a taste of honey perfume that I have used so sparingly that I still enjoy a small touch of it now and again. It brings me right back into the hustle of Sana'a and the bustle of men and little children taking inconspicuous glimpses of the Western tourist in the black turtle neck, standing enamored in the perfumery. 

This time, Ethiopia. Since I moved to the small farm in rural Pennsylvania, a place like Ethiopia seemed only another planet. I'd sewn myself into the fields and the trees and the grass and the enormous weight of care that comes with owning a farm and two horses. I'd dedicated myself, my entire being to that farm; its rolling hills, its long gravel driveway, the gift of its breeze, and the destitution of its February days. My days had become a swirl of  maintaining a regular job, and a well-kept home. I had always innately been tied at the soul to my horses, and this was no different. I had these magical creatures there with me, every day, and I owed them, and some ways sacrificed what I always knew was the beautiful unique lightness - buoyancy - of world travel.

Once those large international jets lift to the sky, you are helpless. You are helpless to your daily procedure, to getting distracted from your path, to veering here and there trying to keep up with life's dust. You are given a seat and besides a small walk down the aisle to stretch your cramping limbs, that is where you stay, floating buoyantly above the earthly pull of gravity. As I slept and woke fitfully during my the first leg of my flight from Baltimore to the UK, I did feel buoyant. It was the most buoyant I had felt in a very long time, maybe since I packed the small vile of honey perfume in my suitcase before taking to Sana'a's sky.

For 12 hours, I was stowed away in London. Few people knew the time and space I was occupying, and there was something magical about that too - occupying a space where nothing can be demanded of you, where no one has too many assumptions about you, yet; where you haven't yet tasted the air before a heavy rain or watched the sun as it folds in and out of the clouds, or been trapped in the corners of disappointment and despair. During my short hiatus in London, I took a trip on the tube to Covent Garden, a place that was a little too upscale for my comfort, yet alive enough to awaken in me a yearning to go back and spend more time.

Again, up, up and away, another night I spent buoyantly floating up there in the sky. This leg of the flight was entirely more lively than the last. Ethiopia had infused the walls of that big jet. The smell of the food, the aroma of the women as they sifted by in their soft white dresses and colorful head scarves and the little children, sounds which might have otherwise aggravated me trapped in some room or small restaurant, placated me.

Like many of us spoiled NGO workers are some times, I am now in my ironically nice, comfortable hotel room. Like them all before, these hotels have big walls and gates that only give us glimpses of the real city behind our walls. The tall buildings of Addis Ababa are calling out to me. I can see them, there, but they are still out of reach. I floated buoyantly in the hotel pool behind those walls and could have been up there in the sky again. I could have be anywhere, an entirely different person, as the water gifted me another moment of silence and solace that had been absent for far too long. Water, travel, flying through the sky heals.

I do good work, we all try to, but these places we travel to, these moments, and many of the people we meet along the way undoubtedly give us far, far more than they could possibly take from us. Ethiopia, thank you for taking me in, if only for a few days. I already know I will take you with me when I am back in the sky and inevitably when I land at the hooves of my horses.

Tribute to Meghan, Class of 1998

As a group of 38 young women, the Class of 1998 was one of the smallest classes to pass through the halls of Agnes Irwin. We not only knew each other by name, but even the least likely of friends realized some intimate detail about each others’ lives. So when cancer stole one of us away earlier this year, more than a decade after many of us had last seen her, we felt a palpable loss.

On February 5, 2011, at 30 years of age, our dear friend Meghan Murphy left this world.

While at Agnes Irwin, Meghan was a leader, always balancing academics with issues she felt passionately about. She not only sat on the student-faculty committee, she was active in advancing race relations among the study body and was a member of umoja—which in Swahili means unity. She was one of the few students who participated in a committee to recognize gender awareness, and she expressed her deep commitment to public service through her representation on Agnes Irwin’s community service board. She rowed on the crew team, but more importantly, she acted as a positive force between the different personalities in our small class. Her humor brought lightness to our classrooms, and her friendship was important to so many of us. Often inspired by Meghan, we selected her to speak at our graduation in Bryn Mawr. While sitting there together listening to her beautiful speech, it was difficult to discern between tears of laughter and tears of sadness. Her speech struck that perfect chord between nostalgia, anticipation for the future, and a sense of history.

Following her young career at Agnes Irwin, Meghan attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where her commitment to the environmental movement flourished. After graduating from Cornell in 2003, she stayed among the hills, gorges, and the one great, long finger lake that comprises Ithaca, to start a biodiesel company and to become the editor of the book, Biodiesel America, which later became a movie. She volunteered at a local hospice care facility and threw the rest of her energy into working for T. Colin Campbell, the author of The China Project, the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted. Like Dr. Campbell, Meghan was a fierce advocate of sustainable living and the vegan diet. She was also a soul-searcher, and from Ithaca, traveled to India to partake in a spiritual retreat. For Meghan, no adventure was too big. No cause she felt passionately about was unworthy of her sacrifice.

When she found out she would have to battle cancer, she tackled it head on, staying positive and seemingly hopeful during her last year with us. Through an online journal, she reconnected with many of us, writing about her struggles, making us laugh, when all we wanted to do was cry. One of the most telling photographs of Meghan posted last year was of her hula hooping on the beach in Florida—where she sought treatment and care—with a grand smile on her face.

As Meghan’s spirit looked around at those of us attending her funeral service, she saw a reflection of herself. Songs sung by her friends filled the halls of the Ithaca church. Each friend and family member who spoke recalled her energy and enthusiasm for life. Collectively, we buried Meghan on top of a large Ithaca hill, in a nature conservancy, far from the sounds of the roads below. The wind whipped snow to our brows and we followed a large draft horse that pulled a sled carrying Meghan’s body, which was wrapped in a biodegradable cloth. She became part of the Earth, as it always was a part of her—to the singing voices of those who loved her.

…Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see
Coming for to carry me home?
A band of angels coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.

Dear Meghan, may you rest in peace.

Traveling through Vagus

I almost traveled again today, to somewhere otherworldly, through my vagus nerve. I was reading about how a bump on my leg could be sarcoma, or cancer, and I almost passed out.

The Vagus Nerve. It slows the blood pumping from our hearts. But sometimes mine malfunctions. Hemorrhage, self-destruction, starvation have broken it. Things that I fear, things that disturb me, often attack my vagus nerve, and break it. My mind assists with the havoc. It produces images that just don’t want to leave—the protruding ribs of a sick child, the arm of a heroine user, me on a surgeon’s table having cancerous cells scraped away. At those times, the blood moves rapidly from my heart, and I churn out all my defenses: liters of water, raising my feet horizontally, hanging my head between my knees, pretty thoughts. But before long, my feet start to tingle, my body shivers, my armpits sweat. The room sits under a heavenly light. And I fall from reality. I enter another world, where time, as we know it, ceases to exist. The seconds or minutes spent by those around me scrambling to wake me up, to raise me back into consciousness are, to me, days, months, sometimes years. While there, I’ve been under a horse’s hooves, I’ve had children dancing around me, I’ve been lying in a field of grass watching the sun set. I see people I haven’t seen in years. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to a coma, or death.

I’ve landed on carpets, bathroom floors, sidewalks, and stair wells. One time my head only slumped back while I remained seated in my chair. I’ve acquired large bumps on the back of my head, rug burn on my face, bruises on my knees, depending on how I fall. I’ve woken up with a smile on my face, crying, and in a hospital bed, always feeling as if my whole life has been drained from me. One time, when my vagus nerve was at its worst, I had a seizure.

My dysfunctional vagus nerve destroys my chance of ever entering medicine, being an injecting drug user, or maybe giving birth; for the better or for the worse.

I once thought the nerve would eventually become more insensitive, beating away slowly, lackadaisically, mechanically functioning as it should. As I grew older, I thought I would better be able to cope with the world’s demons, to better hide my fears, by inconspicuously remaining vertical despite a racing mind. But I’m fairly certain, at this point, that this condition is inherent; that the vagus nerve will continue to plague me. And as I age, I am almost certain that my vagus nerve will constantly remind me it’s there, not to be forgotten. Like most people, my health will worsen as my hair turns gray, which will require more trips to the doctor, more bad diagnoses, more surgeries, more blood work, more of the unpretty.

My mind, my affinity for all things of misery doesn’t help. I work in public health, a world of statistics about death and disease. I watch films about mothers giving birth and dying in a pool of blood because they couldn’t get to a hospital, infants whose diarrhea is so watery and persistent that it shrivels them up, eventually sucking the life right from them. I stood in a room and stared at a dead, gray, stillborn fetus. I write sad stories in an effort to produce a visceral reaction among my readers. I try to dissociate. Sometimes it’s easier, sometimes it’s not. If I’m doing my job well, it’s not.

So, occasionally the world will just be too much for my vagus nerve, and it will call it quits for seconds, or minutes. And maybe that is how I will be able to survive, by checking out for a while, traveling to somewhere more beautiful, when things become too ugly. Maybe, in reality, the vagus nerve is saving my life.

A New Sort of Wanderlust

I am not in wanderlust right now, at least not in the true sense of the word. I am not writing to the sound of Yemen’s call to prayer, from the Nigerien desert, or from Bali’s silent shores. I am sitting in my house, sipping wine, listening to Rachael Yamagata – but I feel so very far away.

It’s been a strange 24 hours. Yesterday, an old friend of mine passed away. At age 30, a cancer expanded and manifested, until it took her lungs, her heart, and her life. Meghan died only a day prior to the anniversary of my grandfather’s death – February 5 – such a strange day it will be always.

I can still hear her voice. She wasn’t my best friend. She wasn’t my sister. I hadn’t seen her in years, but she stayed with me. I remember listening to her give the closing speech at our high school graduation, with tears in my eyes. Because that is how Meghan rolled. She could make a sour soul laugh. She could reach inside us all with her smile. She could move us, but subliminally. I admired her. She lived organically. She lived to save the planet, but she couldn’t save herself.

She taught me things — about her lessons on dying. She stayed positive as she lost pound after pound, healthy cell after healthy cell. She kept making me laugh, when all I wanted to do was cry. She swung herself around, hula hooping on the beach. She walked in the sand. She tried hard to stay with the living. She got jealous of her friends with silver hair. Oh, if only she could age and grow old with her loved ones. She tricked us all, in her ascent to heaven. I thought she would always be among us — the living. She said that dying made her feel younger. She was smaller, more dependent, less herself as a woman. Her life froze and went in reverse. She couldn’t shift it the other way, although she tried her hardest.

And through it all, she wrote and shared her life with those around her. The online narrative that encapsulated her last months on Earth made me feel so very close to her. So, when I got the news that I wouldn’t be hearing from her anymore, I felt deeply saddened. I felt cheated.

Through all of this, I’ve never been a great believer in heaven. But today, things changed. My mind kept traveling there, to somewhere otherworldly. And a deep sense of calm prevailed. Meghan’s spirit was so big that it has to be somewhere. Life wouldn’t make sense if she ceased to exist. So, yes, Meghan is out there, up there, around there, here, everywhere. There just can’t possibly be any other way. Meghan has been stirring in my mind, teaching me things all day long. I thought of her as I rode my horse, and I felt more at peace, more positive than I ever had atop the horse before. Thank you, Meghan. Because me and that horse, we are here, and well, and we have what seems like all the time in the world. I only wish Meghan had the same.

While she is traveling around out there, getting acclimated to her new surroundings, I am traveling too. And with this, I am changing the meaning of this blog – to not just be about travel around this globe, but the traveling we do every day. Although it was a story of the most tragic sort, I traveled to Meghan, with Meghan. I heard Meghan through her writings, and I felt close to her because of her will and spirit to keep us with her. I hope I can keep you with me.

Meghan, as so many others have said, we'll miss hearing from you, may you travel in peace.