where to?

When I was a little girl my sister received a beautiful marble globe as a gift from our aunt on her birthday. 

When she wasn’t home I’d sneak into her room, sit on the carpet and study this planet. 

The oceans were the most royal of royal blue marble with the names of the seven seas written in sleek gold. The countries were all colored in various shades of greens and oranges, reds and yellows, pinks and browns. The details fascinated me, thousands of boarders designated hundreds of countries, capitals and cities, some so small you needed to squint to see them, and it was all wrapped so tidy in longitude and latitude lines, in that same elegant gold.

It was stunning. 

I’d find our little corner of the globe then I’d spin it half way around and imagine going to the far reaches of the world. I wondered what it would feel like to explore far away lands, eat exotic foods, listen to foreign languages, meet the people who call these mysterious far away places home. 

I would look up names and places in the old encyclopedias we had on dusty shelves in our basement. I began to compile a list. 

New Zealand

South Africa & Zimbabwe (with a particular fascination with Victoria falls.) 

Iceland.  

Peru. 

Singapore. 

Japan. It went on.

I loved the idea of being on the edge of a place. The eastern most tip or the point where two seas merge. What must that look like? Smell like. I’d be able to taste the salt. Feel the breeze. On more than one occasion, late at night, an image of a place would flash on the other side of my eyelids, as if I were right there, a group of colorful mailboxes, a bird flying along a backdrop of red cliffs and black sands, mountains covered in nothing but emerald green grass, a bright blue door. 

As if I had been there and these were the memories.

I misplaced my list but the images from studying that globe had been etched in my mind. All the colorful countries, dressed in different shades of marble. Steadfast in there places on the planet. Waiting. 

I did not know, then, how one went about seeing the world, but I knew I wanted to find out. 

And I did learn how one goes about seeing the world. More importantly, I have learned what it costs and that is this- it costs exactly our most precious and most valuable commodity: Time.

I have my own map, now, hanging on a wall in my home. While it is not nearly as beautiful as my sisters globe, it has a similar effect. I mosey over to it often with a cup of coffee or with my arms crossed and I study it.

Where to? 

It’s dotted with little pins of where I’ve managed to transport myself over the last few decades.

I recall the adventures and misadventures I have had the privilege to experience.

The thrill of catching an octopus in the south pacific, by accident of course. I can still see the colors it changed on the deck of the boat before we released back into the impossibly wide water off the coast of New Zealand. Or snorkeling the Great Barrier reef with my mom and sister, coral so bright and varied that mom inhaled in shock the moment she saw it through her mask, causing her to choke, coughing as she came up for air. Or hiking the highlands of Scotland, or standing at the very tip of South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet.

When I get to a place that my younger self scratched on that list over thirty years ago, laying on the carpet in my sisters room, I can only smile in disbelief that my own two feet have carried me wherever it is I might be.

It was as cool and as salty as I imagined it would be, to watch those two massive oceans collide, standing on the edge of the earth. Surprisingly peaceful.

I love this map.

I study it, still. Curiosity burns, so much to explore.

I am still attracted to those particular places on the edges of the earth. 

The Aleutian Islands for example- the long spindly finger reaching off the coast of Alaska that looks like crumbs on a counter that didn’t get quite cleaned up. I imagine what it would feel like, standing there on that little tiny tip of land? Right. There. 

Or Cape Horn- the last drop of land in Chile- surrounded by wild seas where the South Pacific and Atlantic meet. 

Or conversely on the far east - what’s it like in Mongolia? Sandwiched between Russia and china. Or to revisit a place, Prague, KaiKora or Rome. Would I remember her cobblestone streets?

I wonder, as time ticks by, nearly 40 years of it already, and ask myself,

Where to next?