Enga mellom fjella

Someday Morocco?

Linda Zern wrote:

“I never need to go to Morocco. I’ve been there watching the women, their head-to-toe robes whipping around their bodies like bird wings as they picked over the bones and bits thrown in the pit near the burn pile next door.”

I continue...

So she wrote to no one and everyone. I dreamed she wrote to me. How in the years I never traveled I was taken places by strangers who crossed my path; how, if I would‘ve asked and listened closer, I could‘ve learned more about the world beyond the walls of my city, my job, the boring lives of my acquaintances, my own boring existence.

I kept roommates and guests from so many countries: Iran and Somalia; Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador; Argentina and Romania. But I was "busy". Too busy to learn all that I should've. I did learn a bit; but no one was cracking a whip.

Now, in ten days I return to a country and a landscape that increasingly becomes my own. The flow of the seasons, played out to the cycles of rain showers and flowers, draw me in. Their fragrance will whirl around me. The bird wings of Montana will have gone down before me. I merely follow them in my own slow flight.

I go to experience life. To stay would be a slow death of picking over my own bones, the life I once had long burnt to a crisp and discarded. I still carry small bits of it with me. I seek to lose them in new smells and new sights. Not quite… after this journey, perhaps.

This journey then, is to know a foreign country as well as the one I leave. To make it my own. To know the landscape better then the one I grew up on so long ago. I figure it’s best to choose living over becoming numb. I'm not that dumb.

My friend assures me that her neighbors left quite an impression. Goat slaughter and all. And I wonder what impression my travels will make on me, what impressions I can share that will connect with others. In ten days I travel. Not yet to Morocco, but someday…

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