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MY BAGGAGE MY TRAVELS
Monday Apr. 6, 2015
I’ll enjoy these next few remaining days.
And, I want to go home …
I want to be home.
And I am.
All that is me is captured here inside my skin.
Drive, fly or float me anywhere, I am still home.
I like the warm here …
Working passionately or struggling to accomplish things I find worthwhile doesn’t require a country, town or roof with my name on it – I’ve become very clear on that.
To describe home, I expect many people reach for comfortable clichés – being with partners, with ones they love. Everyone has their own questions, their own answers – but our reasons are likely not nearly so diverse. I expect people of every IQ level, nationality, climate, geography and stage of life have very similar views: that home is where we are, where we make home, that home is where our family is.
Roofs we sleep under can be anywhere. In any country. I’m not against those values – but I have others driving me.
And, beautiful as Maui is, if I make this place home I’ll never explore other possibilities.
Where is Mark’s home? Is it Calgary, Edmonton, Red Deer, Estevan, Fort Saskatchewan and Fort McMurray?
Could it be where my roots, history and offspring get their mail? Sure. I can unpack anywhere.
Or, should it be somewhere else?
And, is that place physical?
It travels well, this baggage I want to carry.
“Why do I have to be here to feel so great?”
I’ve been wrestling that. Purpose of this trip, more than anything, to decomplexify my answer. Two-theme focus – ‘whether my desire to live here is as strong as it once was (or stronger)?’; and the second, ‘can I create this kind of peaceful feeling and relaxation elsewhere?’ – and, to be clear, I mean 24/365.25.
There is so much pretty, pretty nice and ‘ain’t nature magical’ here. I think being somewhere where nature is the dominant star of the show (as opposed to tourism, money and ‘for show’) is important to me. I might more easily find that closer to home. Fantastic weather is important. Again, I might find that closer to home.
Which calls this questioner to task, to describe home – where it is, and what it means?
My home can be a suitcase.
My address is this complicated earth.
Stopping here, now, has been fantastic in a magical way. I’ve concluded that Maui will remain a place of happy memories and great learning – but it can never be the kind of home I seek. Yes, I seek love in my home. I have love in my life, lots of it, but none is connected to some metaphoric tent-peg in the ground with a postal code …
Mark Kolke
column written/ published from Paia, Maui, HI
morning walk: 17C/62F, I drove to and walked at Ho’okipa Lookout, watched morning surfers and tourists clicking shots of morning surfers – couldn’t bring myself to take pictures of tourists taking pictures of surfers … but that gave a chuckle. Those wave riders, risking their necks. Tourists, risking whether those no-cost shot will turn out. I’m watching them both – and what am I risking? Nothing. The theory goes, on the risk-reward continuum, that there is a relationship between those ends, mathematically explained. Not to put down the no-risk tourist or the high-risk surfer, life must be richest on the riskier side of the middle. Must be …
Reader feedback:
FEASTS, FEUDS AND RENEWAL
We humans are interesting indeed. It appears sometimes that the need to get along and live in peace is a pipe dream that we think we are expected to aspire to. Fact of the matter; if you take just two people and ask them to live together and get along, it would be an exercise in futility. We are different; each one of us with our own dreams, our own desires, our own ways of doing things the way we have always done them and sometimes just because. We don't necessarily want change and surely don't want someone coming along and telling us we have been doing it wrong all along. It has been this way since the beginning of time and will probably always be this way. You could isolate all the people who think the same way and there would still be an I, me, mine mentality. Just a fact of life....GW, Bon Wier, Tx.
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