my stories
TAGGED: adventures, my stories, traversing, wandering, wonderingOver the next little while, I’ll be telling a few tall tales from our recent trip to Tasmania.
When I came home from the trip, I had a small list of ideas for the virtual bonfire that is Scrine. We were only away a week or so, so the list is not long.
I can’t help but wonder why I haven’t done the same for our big trip last year. After a month away, there was so much food for thought it was a feast. I certainly intended to share some of that time away, but each time I came to write my head was too full of strong images and intense emotions. In the end, the wintery and intense feeling of belonging and then the feeling of no longer being there was all I wrote about.
I know, in part, this is because some of the places we visited are far too devastating a tale for me to do the story justice. I think it is also because they are not my story to tell.
It might also be that my home, unbearably hot as I often find it to be, is inherently my home. It’s where I find it easiest to think.
Still, if I attempt to be honest with myself, it’s probably just about the mechanics. When I travel through places like France, Poland and Russia much of my available brain activity is spent panicking over whether I can correctly order a coffee, read a street sign or ask for help.
Yet, I haven’t given up. I’m hoping that the next few tales of traverses in Tasmania will help untangle the tales from Europe.
It will be fun trying. A road paved with tales. Are you packed and ready to go?
Let’s see if I am.
my country
TAGGED: adventures, my country, my stories, traversing, wandering
Ah, adventuring is such great fun.
There’s the preparation. The thinking about it, the doing of it, the lying in bed worrying at it. Then, eventually, there’s the adventure itself.
This adventure takes place in my country. Not my home, exactly, but a little bit further south of where it lies.
Where shall I start? Shall we dive right in to the middle? Will we delve into the microscopic detail? Or shall we stroll along and just see what we find?
Let’s kick up our feet and start from the top. Which is not the same as the beginning.
I’ve always loved to walk. Not quite so much as a swim, but it’s that same feeling that if I didn’t have a reason to stop maybe I never would. I can see that the older I get, the easier it will be to stop. But that’s for then and this is for now. Of course, there’s walking and there’s walking.
Walking around hills and mountains is an unbelievable high. (Pun fully intended.) I wouldn’t describe it as a feeling of conquering. What an odd notion that would be. A human conquering a mountain? With what? A shovel and an awful lot of time?
It’s a mixture of feelings. It’s a feeling of fatigue and aching muscles. It’s astonishment at the raw beauty of the landscape. A dizzy sense of flying, on sight of the view from the top. It’s a sense of quiet and of stillness. It is, for me, a gentle sense of achievement and of overcoming the physical body. It is unbearably, bodily beautiful.
I’m no mountain-climber, but even little strolls, like those around Crater Lake, may give you an insight into what that would be like.
One thing is for certain, whatever it takes of you to make the walk, it gives it back to you a hundred-fold.