Traveling Toward the Simple Truth of Connection
Today I’m returning home from retreat, having flown all the way around the globe in the course of two weeks. And I’m struck by the sense that the further afield I go, the more connected I feel to center, to the deep, universal truths that permeate.
It helps to be curious. What is this place about, what is it made of, what does it mean to be here, or to be from here? Finding out usually means stepping a little bit off the beaten path (and often, getting a little bit lost), just to see what’s there. More often than not, you’ll find something familiar - in playground games, in ritual, in coffee shop conversation, in crowded night markets and grand temples - you’ll find a kindred spirit, or something you already knew but didn’t have words for yet, or a familiar, if forgotten, corner of yourself. I will offer a tiny, beautiful example.
Sometimes I look at something with such focus and delight that other travelers will follow my gaze, hoping to see something worth writing home about. Almost always they seem disappointed by the intricate roof tile or climbing vine that has me rapt (probably we write home about different things). Last week I was enjoying morning walks through the labyrinthine alleyways of Kyoto. Two days in a row, I saw the same person in roughly the same place, near a small archway adorned with braided rope and folded white paper, marking the entrance to a shrine. Before he passed the archway, he turned to face it, bowed slowly, then paused another few seconds before continuing on his way. On the third day, I walked a little earlier, and saw the same person but at a different part of the alley. I saw his brisk pace slow as something on a doorstep caught his eye. He paused a few seconds, in precisely the way he did before the shrine, and then continued on his way. When I reached the same doorstep, I paused too and looked down to see a tiny purple flower had pushed its way through the concrete and was perfectly framed in a slant of morning sun.
I laughed because it was the kind of thing I would have caused some other traveler to pause and look at. I was not disappointed. I could have read in a guidebook that people in Japan often bow before passing a temple or a shrine. It would not have had the same effect as this person on his morning walks, who affirmed for me the importance of reverence and beauty, and that either (especially when framed in a slant of morning sun) is worth pausing to observe.
Witnessing this pause, I saw my own way of being, resonant in a stranger on the other side of the world. The world became smaller and infinitely greater at the same time. Travel will do that.