Month: April 2020

It’s the last day of April, which means this is also the last post in the Close to Home series. A month ago, I thought I’d be be writing about scenes photographed within a mile of my trailer home. As it turned out, I wrote more about how it felt to be alive during a pandemic. So it’s fitting, then, that I end the series with a post called Future, because that’s what all of us are facing now. As the lockdown eases in Florida, I weigh the risks of going back on the road vs. staying safe (but slightly…

For the last several weeks, I’ve been living in between a past I remember so clearly and a future I can’t quite imagine yet. The days have taken on their own rhythm, slower than before, more relaxed, and certainly with less eating out and less of shopping malls and movie theaters. The vagabond of the past is a memory, the vagabond of the future will stay closer to home base and be more cautious than before, at least for a while. As I get older, time feels elastic, stretching out and then snapping back. Was it really only two months…

Let’s go back to the “bloom where you are planted” bit I mentioned a few days ago… Flowers and trees can’t bloom all the time. They cycle between rest and growth, rest and growth, year after year. They know instinctively when to grow and when to conserve. In winter, the tree rests, storing up energy for what is to come. When Spring signals, it sends out tentative shoots, as if to test the timing. A winter storm comes and surprises them. The shoots die and the tree withdraws. It waits for warmer weather and sends out another round of new…

Graduations, weddings, birthdays, new babies, everyone has their list of special moments they have given up in the last few months. And then there’s the moments we don’t even know we missed: that special sunset on the beach, the crazy dinner with friends at the Mexican place across town, the quiet conversation with a friend you ran into at the corner coffee shop. Our lives can feel so constrained right now, if we buy into that feeling. While they weren’t the moments I’d planned to have, I’ve had some great moments in the last two months. In staying in one…

There’s a Jon Kabat-Zinn quotation that has stuck with me for years: wherever you go, there you are. When I was a traveler, I would get on a jet and, boom, there I was in a new place. One day Dublin, the next day Luxembourg. Is this flight going to Beijing or Sydney? In my last job, I traveled so much that I was never home more than three or four weeks at a time. Then I became a full-time vagabond and moved on average every 4-5 days. To wake up every morning in exactly the same spot for a…