ECLECTIC SKIES
Not too long ago I played a game that was meant to tell me my future; the game made me picture a desert, a cube, a horse, a ladder, and a tornado…in that order. My desert had a setting sun with a crimson red sky and massive rolling hills and dunes which were covered in red Saharan sand. What was most puzzling of my desert was its chaotic nature which seemed to be an image that only I, among the group, had contrived. We were first only told to imagine the scene before we were told what the imagined things of the picture represented. Later in the game when we were to imagine the last thing, the tornado, I couldn’t help but picture a menacingly, awe striking, storm of power which devoured everything in site. Though destructive, this alarming scene still had an element of beauty in it. Or so I defended my picture at the end of the game. Later, when we each told one another what we had imagined, apparently everyone else’s tornado had passed their deserts quietly by, leaving all in its place. Somehow mine managed to be the only one which tore up and destroyed absolutely everything in site! They had flat calm deserts of white or beige sand; mine was obstacle ridden, choked with hills and dunes, and completely covered in glittering crimson red sand!
It was all fun and games until we were told the meaning of each of the elements. It seemed that my life’s future didn’t hold all that much hope out for tranquility and serenity. The game was panning out to be disturbingly accurate as my desert was sounding all too much like my life, as some of you who have had the pleasure of helping me through hospital stays might agree! My red sand and sky symbolized a life that was to be full of…well…it was really up to me to interpret my picture. I said adventure, they said other things.
Suffice it to say, then, that I have been trying to master the experiment of adventure for as long as I can remember. Adventure has come in many forms and left me with many scars and even more broken bones. It has not all been gratuitous fun though as I have tried to couple this enthusiasm for life outside the realm of commonplace with some sort of meaning. Traveling the world has taught me so much. The rich and long flowing tides of culture that all people of the earth sustain, in their own disparate ways, are planets and galaxies yet to be explored.
My motorcycle adventures have and will continue to try and connect the thrill of traveling by bike with the joy of discovering culture in all of its forms. To drive through each new town without staying a minute to learn at least a little of the local baker’s life or the local butcher’s business is to miss the true beauty that the world has to offer. Though you might have more difficulty stomaching the local butcher’s trade in yak, dog, or horse; it’s the way this person’s trade connects them to their culture which I always find most captivating.
Jagged mountain peaks in the Himalayas or lush cascading rice fields in Vietna.m meant so much more only after I looked at them through the eyes of the cultures that surrounded them. These different ways of life connect the tangible and the temporal to a face and to meaning. They connect the physical to the spiritual. Really…they are so much the reason and the cause of what drives me to explore their distinct and contrasting characteristics. Making sense of the diversity of people and regions of the world has been the premise underlying this long drawn out adventure. The diversity of food is stark, colors of clothing vivid, shapes of habitable shelters and buildings unforgettable; the variety and beauty of culture throughout this world is enchanting. One of Grandma’s finest patchwork quilts, added to here and there throughout her long life; it now takes the form of a masterpiece. What has become most apparent to me through my experiences is that these patches are all affixed to one and the same piece of fabric; all of their threads are all indelibly linked to one another. That is all to say…really…that they must coexist for the quilt to always maintain its magnificence.
I have one habit that I got into a long time ago, which I have managed to maintain throughout all my world travels since. Whenever I passed through a new town and a new region I always made sure that I looked up to check the sky for a moment before I got onto the train, or plane, or motorcycle or whatever. I must have fit right into some cultures that often worry about the sky falling on their heads. In some of the other places, however, I must have looked like a very lost tourist looking heavenwards for directions having given up on the local dialect’s attempts to lead me to my destination. To some people, the sky looks unvarying, even mundane and often nothing special to take note of. But for a few, who study it a little more carefully, the sky always has a different texture, variation that is always distinctly noticeable from place to place. I have always been able to find a different shade of blue above or a different consistency in a region’s clouds. The unforgettable neon orange that radiates from the pollution covered Los Angeles sky or the threading purplish blue haze that can shine through the opening of the Arc de Triumph are images not easily transmissible through word or photo. Night time skies from the Yucata.n Peninsul.a are brightly adorned in entirely different constellations than those which speckle the sky of the long Northern Himalayan plane at the foot of Mount Everes.t
I suppose it may just me my overactive imagination at work again but I find these different skies mesmerizing. They are captivating peaceful signatures of a region which imprint their personality on my mind forever. I thought these skies deserved a special note because they are often forgotten when recounting the tales of adventures from far away places. I will continue to look upwards as a way to remember these far away lands, and I will try to convey some of their images as clumsily as I can to you through words and photos. Where I’ll go I don’t yet know, but, wherever it may be, I will most certainly always have a sky to accompany me above. These skies are the one thing I will always be able to tell you something about. So…through these stories, I will continue to write about new places and new cultures that I find along the way…through the one thing that ties them all together; their eclectic skies.
