In this age of going somewhere, I’ve been thinking about the times I could not sit still. My life has been defined by the arc of traveling. If my mother hadn’t boarded a train from upstate New York to Hollywood in 1942, leaving with just a suitcase and a handheld typewriter to Los Angeles and becoming a nurse she never would have met my father.
If my father hadn’t been on shore leave U.S.M.C. in SoCal solely on the basis of his love of dancing, telling his friend that he was going to marry that woman (my mother to be) before he even danced with her~ I would not have been born in the States. If my parents hadn’t crisscrossed purely by coincidence, movement may not have felt so integral to who I am.
And~ if I had not traveled to a different island to visit perhaps one of the biggest festivals in the Philippines I wouldn't had met the person who would be my son's mother? And I couldn't imagine my life without my son!
Growing up, my father was in the Marine Corps and would be stationed in different areas but going to the airport meant I was moving in the direction of change. To this day, the rush of a terminal brings me back to that childhood feeling of safety, a lit excitement in my stomach that signaled the journey home, though “home” was always nebulous territory.
Finally moving to San Francisco from Southern California I would take odd jobs with bands either traveling with them in my vehicle or a little bit later airplane and or buses, that was my ticket to freedom to freedom.
I chased these sites into adulthood, choosing travel over all other pursuits. My family thought I was looking for adventure when I traipsed just by whim and a thought. Is my mother would call it the Peter Pan syndrome.....
But I was hunting for a sense of belonging: a place to feel like myself without question. I suppose I was getting lost on purpose to find myself Perhaps wanderlust was an itch, always corporal, something under the skin. But I wasn’t looking for temporary relief. In the cycles of taking off and touching down, I was looking for something holy, and something to make me whole because I wasn't sure of who I really was at that moment and it would take me a lot longer? Being in transit meant I never had to choose.
But what does it mean to love a city that wasn’t built to love you back? I didn't want to be a product of her environment. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, my approache to this NeverNever Dreamland had been shaped by capitalism and a sense of conquest. Instead of finding the self that I wanted to be, I was thrown into relief with what I did not want to become.
But of course that was a naive notion. Knowledge and access are intertwined. I couldn’t really go there to “learn” about myself or my family without dragging the colonial framework just as endemic to my personhood with me.
My search for a complete sense of cultural identity was just as exploitative as any Wayuu mochila resold for triple the price on Etsy?Constantly traveling, remaining stubbornly mired in this sense of nonbelonging, was actually a denial of my privilege. It wasn’t that this place had failed me; it was that I had failed it. Like a codependent lover, I tried to make it my world, force it to define me.
A year plus into lockdown, my years prior spent fanned across Asia mostly I feel literally and metaphorically far away. I see now, in a way I couldn’t quite grasp back then, that this cultural cherry-picking made me no different from any other clueless tourist. I couldn’t keep running away from the responsibilities of who I am, even if who I am is an inherently slippery concept, filled with fissures.
There is no place that can fill up the fissures, and to try was to fail before I’d even begun. Every Paradise has priced pay there's a trade-off and nowhere is perfect although I kept looking and I think I found something very close to it.
I had divorced 8 yrs back and finally got custody of my youngest son (my bestest friend) who's with me. For that time I had been taking care of my mother one on one throughout the last 10 years as she laid my arm with her last breath holding her for an hour before that last breath and an hour after before allowing them to take her away.
My father had passed away 40 years prior and my two older brothers are also gone. I've taken my mother's cremated remains to Bali to Mexico to Southern California and now here in Hawaii soon back to Bali where I shall put her in a seashell with orchids incense and rice within bring her to the ocean and set her free where I dive quite frequently.
Something funny has happened to me during the pandemic. In the before times, I wanted to run from my feelings—hopping on the next train or bus or plane in search of some unlocatable belonging. I allowed that longing to solidify into idealization, making “home” a site outside of me. Now, I’ve learned to sit with my multiple, and not-always-welcome, selves, to track the surge of multiplicity rising inside me without fleeing.
I see myself as malleable, thoughts flexing like weather patterns. If I wait long enough, I’ll get to the other end of the emotional spectrum. Maybe we’re meant to be porous, our selfhoods built to bend, shrink, or expand the vertebrae of our being. Maybe I’m meant to take off right where I’m sitting and perhaps Pele is in control of the moment while we are guests and hospitality is served by my dear new friend of John's & mine, Ms.Carol McCarthy.
Someone whom we had not met prior although had been invited perhaps four times to visit here we are and extremely grateful and humbled by her friendship and whom this person is showing up in the world alive is what's inside her ‼️
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