Hither and Yon

photoTravel calls. It almost always does. I am grateful that travel doesn’t always require a lot of concrete resources. Because when travel demands that I join hands and run away with her, I may not have instant access to the time, money and practical resources needed for physically hitting the trail.

That’s when I travel Inward. While I love traveling in fabulous cities and foreign countries, unknown rural roads and famous tourist sites, I also delight in traveling the interior world. I make inner places both based on those lovely locales I’ve visited in real life or know of through others and on ones wholly invented by my strange little imagination, and they’re populated with all sorts of people and creatures, real or magical or, better yet, a nice mix of the two, doing whatever the denizens of such places should or can do. Anything can happen, and in the inner world I can be the one deciding what that Anything should be, playing puppet-master and ringmaster as I see fit, and returning home to my conscious and ordinary world of day-to-day life when it’s time to do so.

And when traveling Inward is not enough or the moment of wealth arrives when I can afford traveling Outward again, that’s what I like to do. So much unexplored territory remains for me to learn, experience and enjoy. To assimilate as fuel for further inner invention! So many friends and towns and countries I long to revisit. Beauty and mystery and joy and adventure that removes me from my ordinariness. That, whether my journey goes inward or outward, is a grand and miraculous thing.

May we all travel well, wherever our travels take us.photo

2 thoughts on “Hither and Yon

  1. Beautifully expressed, Kathryn! Of course, I so relate. And it made me think of one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems:

    I never saw a moor;
    I never saw the sea,
    Yet know I how the heather looks
    And what a billow be.

    I never spoke with God,
    Nor visited in heaven.
    Yet certain am I of the spot
    As if the checks were given.

    XO

    • There are so many places that I know I want to be,
      It’s hard to choose the one where I should start,
      But if I must decide for now, between just you and me,
      I know of no place better than your heart.

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