Why Travel?

The soul is not a tourist.

Travel is more than bragging rights. I think it’s soul growth, a way to live your life more deeply by seeing more wholly what the world is. Participation is key, I believe. Actually learning the language of a different culture is a deep dive into the vision a culture lives by.

Its language has the imprint of history and how those people took hold of their surroundings, how they saw, judged and felt. It embodies a vision. It may not be an all-encompassing vision, but it’s definite and sees things invisible to other cultures.

It establishes a shared vision and sets it to the song of the common speech of those who speak that language.

I’m a traveler, not a tourist. I want to do more than just go and take a documentary photograph of myself there. I want to live in the foreign place and get the deepest experience I can of the food, the ambience, the mindset and the ways of communicating. I want to learn the song those souls are singing.

I may sing it a bit off key, but I want to feel as close as possible what they feel in their version of humanity. I want to somehow drop my cultural suit and try on theirs for a time.

Of course it’s an impossible project and I know that but that’s what I try to do. It’s a kind of method acting of travel.