I was supposed to be on a flight to Tucson today but things unexpectedly changed at the last minute so I will be home this weekend. That is okay with me as I have about a hundred things to do here. Picking my way through a pile of papers after the radio show this morning I found a wad of notes stuck into a journal I carried around with me while traveling Afghanistan. I had filled the pages with my scribbled observations and so had moved on to another notebook, the contents of which I later ripped out on the flight from Vienna to Frankfurt and stuck into the first journal thinking it was best to keep it organized all in one place so that I wouldn’t have to look through different books when I was writing about it all later. Sometime in the exercise of unpacking my bags the whole mess found its way to the middle of the pile of papers I stumbled upon in my office today, three and a-half weeks after the paper shuffle on the Lufthansa flight. So much for organization.
I remember last year, after my wife and I returned from a trip to Maastricht and some other places, one of the bags was somehow set aside and it was a month before I found it under the bed in our guest room, still fully packed.
That was the trip during which all our camera gear was stolen. My wife and I had walked to a little café adjacent to our hotel in Amsterdam for breakfast and I left her there, with an espresso and the camera bag, while I ran back to the hotel to ask the concierge for a walking map of the city center. I wasn’t gone five minutes. In that time a couple of thieves, working together like they do in those old American Express commercials, distracted her long enough to grab the bag and disappear. When I returned she was standing in the middle of the café, shouting. The waitresses were looking at her as if she had lost her mind and for just the slightest moment I wondered myself until I realized what she was shouting.
He took the bag! He took the cameras!
Then she ran outside the café and I, slowly realizing what was happening, chased out after her. Then we stopped. We stood there, together on the broad expanse that on the one side opened to the street and rail lines separating us from the train station where we had arrived the night before, and on the other, the dense collection of structures that front the circular city center and canals. We were strangers in this place.
The thieves were long gone, swallowed up by the narrow streets emptying out onto the boulevard where we stood feeling sick and violated and bewildered and alone.
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Last Friday afternoon I was traveling to a retreat in the Rocky Mountains near Kremmling, winding my way along a road snaking it’s way up a sun-soaked valley. I was driving mostly north-northwest, alongside a river, taking off and putting back on my sunglasses as the sun danced just above the tree line on top of a high ridge. Finally, as the afternoon gave way to evening, I rounded a bend edging my way closer to the mountain as the road sunk into heavy shadow. It seemed suddenly dark and I thought to myself that it was unlikely the valley would open up again to the late evening light so I put the sunglasses away in the glove compartment.
Life can feel that way. We go through times where it seems very dark indeed and sometimes in the midst of that darkness we can’t imagine it ever being light again. We think, better get used to this.
A few minutes later the valley opened up, the river and the road curved left around a corner and a flood of sunlight filled the horizon. The brilliance of it was nearly blinding. Follow me, it beckoned. Steer toward the light.
