Never there until you get there

Back from Europe and managed to scoot through a window. Planes, trains, security alerts, volcanic ash, mix with two quarts Perrier and you have it, a royal travel mess. Ah, international travel, how I've missed you so.

I started reflecting (while serpentining my way in a [in]security line) how things have changed since I started my traveling career. In the beginning it was simple, buy a ticket, get on a plane, land somewhere, travel around taking pictures and scribbling your impressions of the place, come back and do a story. Now it's wake up, pop the computer on, check seismic reports, read financial forecasts, survey the upper atmospheric wind patterns, check latest State Dept terrorist reports, load the iPhone with key destination apps, gather the dozen different chargers to keep my digital existence powered up, THEN, think about hitting the road and going to work.

But then I started thinking, hasn't that's always been the challenge for gypsies, staying fleet-a-foot and one step ahead of the obstacles. Just after the first of the year the word proprioception entered my weekly vocabulary. Up until now it was uttered as I gasped for air and dripped with sweat between sets of one exercise or another dished out by my fitness coach Phil. That proprioception directly connected to my spine and lower back, and their general inability to communicate with the rest of me. Proprioception popped up today as I juggled BBC volcanic ash reports, flight schedules and substituting TGV reservations for a hire car; in this case my brain communicating with the flexibility of my travel intentions.

'Travel proprioception' is something I got very good at long ago, but it came in other names and descriptions: A cameraman friend from LA use to describe it like this - our ability to eat most anything and not get sick, get toss around in a helicopter and not turn green and sleep not just anywhere, but everywhere. Another person put it "leaving your baggage behind." For the most part that's baggage filled with preconceived notions of what a people, place or thing should be - even what traveling there should be like. And as a wise, and oh so salty woman once said to me, "Want to be a good writer in this place [Africa], follow your nose, but keep your nose pointed down, out of the way."

Phil, loves to say, "sometimes ya gotta go slow to go fast" - I think it applies to travel proprioception as well. I have a bit of the Energizer bunny hopping about inside me - and it's taken 50 years to learn how to slow the little hopper down - and I still can't always catch the little hare. I once arrived in the mountains of Papua New Guinea and was still flying around in some artificially sped up world of my own; my metronome pulsing to beat of a world consumed by devices--computers, cell phones, deadlines, downloads, 24-hour news--and an elder I was suppose to meet with was not available; I was going nut. Two days later he said we could meet now, when I found him in his garden, leaning on his handmade hoe, mande tene wig slightly askew, but happily adorned with bright saffron-colored everlasting daisies, he said, "you are finally in time." I had no idea I wasn't until that moment. From that trip onwards I always took two days off before coming to the village - that's about what it took to reset my clock.

I use to have a saying when travel was my only way of life, "You're never there until you get there." People would ask me are you excited about going to this place or that, my reply, "after I get there, then I'll think about getting excited." Because the flip side of excited is total downer. It becomes a yo-yo ride that can spin out of control. On the other hand, if you are truly a journey-person not a destination-person then "there" may turn out to be a whole different place, and the place you really were destined to be. Not always an easy reality to wrap your mind, body and soul collectively around.

The one thing I have gotten smarter at is creating fertile fields for the "there" of which I had no reckoning. Heading for Belgium and France I was excited, mainly because my travel proprioception feels totally turned on, lit from within. When I first began traveling I intentionally cast my plans away from Europe, towards lands untamed, maps that still claimed "Here be dragons", places that struggled to be pronounced (like Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano - I mean, c'mon, that's a scrabble goldmine!). Europe is now a journey - I'm am excited - because I have no idea where it will eventually lead.

Water thoughts

Last week rain finally fell on Portland, and my garden, and the roads I ride, but every drop of it was lapped up with joy and welcome - like a friend long absent.

Nearly daily I read articles addressing water issues which 'ping' my thinking about how to approach and communicate the our planet's growing water concern. Like the water problem itself, the solution for me photographically is equally elusive. Most of those stories, like this -Water reform is 'needed in Asia' - on the BBC news online, go unnoticed amidst the global panic over economies, wars, terrorists, etc. Ironically, in the coming years, regardless of how our car companies fare, and what leader is this week threatening his neighbors, water will remain at the core of our economic and security woes, it IS our woe. Yet for now, and likely until the day the tap runs dry in the homes of America and Europe, it's a problem to postpone. In the mean time:

• 1.1 billion people live without clean drinking water
• 3 900 children die every day from water borne diseases
• 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation

And the statistics flow faster and with more clarity than the water we need - if you are interested check out the World Water Council and International Water Management Institute to get a broader perspective.

Over on my Japanese gardening blog (diary) I made note of the rain returning here to "my" little planet - it was a very personal reunion - both to my thirsty little green friends and my water bill, which has soared in trying to keep the little green friends alive. And that has made me think and post this blog - water isn't personal enough - "enough". Enough is the key word. How do I create images that tell what "enough" is, means, feels like, to those impacted today, so that those who are not will sit up and say, "hang on, we have a nightmare on our doorstep!" We simply, we the American/Europeans of the world, don't face the problem in a personal way daily or any day usually, we don't walk miles for a gallon or two of "clean" water, we don't have our children dieing agonizing deaths in our arms from ghastly sanitation conditions, so it doesn't really exist as a problem.

Hang on, be right back....

Whew, thanks.

I was really thirsty spouting all that, needed a glass of water, wow, that was easy, just turn on the tap, fill the glass.

Back to the blog....

In search of a solution, both to my creative challenge and, more importantly, to the real challenge, I wonder if it doesn't lie in a garden a top a mountain chain in the Highlands of Paupa New Guinea. There 25 years ago I met the Huli people, the "Wigmen of Papua", the spectacular fellow in the picture above, in their tiny mountain valley high above the world and it's problems. Where the Huli live is near Eden, the Tagali Valley , but off the map, most maps anyway (Google map it - it's a blank spot). The soil is lush, alive, and the rain falls with Swiss-like regularity. Literally, stick anything in the ground and it will grow. And that's what has me thinking. From childhood Hulis are gardeners - every man, woman and child works in the gardens. So pervasive is gardening in the Huli culture that even young men passing through the bachelor cult igari haroli must succeed as gardeners - specifically they must grow an orchid-looking bog iris plant (padume). Durning this period they also learn a series of chants important to their passage into manhood, one of them is the "Water Chant". (Women may likely have similar passages but as a male I was not privvy to them.)

For other, but similar reasons I use to thinnk wouldn't it be incredibly valuable if when entering college every student was handed a small seed or seedling and we said "here, care for this and see it grow, and at graduation, in addition to your 'other' studies, you must present this little plant, alive and flourishing, to graduate." Imagine how that would change our lives? Imagine how that would change the way we view life? Imagine future generations of young people who actually value life?

And now I wonder - Imagine how that would make us view every drop of water we use on this planet?