For the last two years, I've had calendars about journeys and travel on my wall, priming me as it were for the first journey that I took last year.
One of the calendar quotes, by Maya Angelou, was "Life is Pure Adventure," and originally I was going to use that as the title for this blog, but blogspot informed me it was not available. So I googled and discovered more titles, and each of them felt a good title.
For
instance, there was the so apt Steinbeck quote, "we do not take a trip; a
trip takes us." You might consider that as a title for what you read here.
Martin Buber's "All real life is meeting" seemed a worthy candidate too, as did Basho's "Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home."
There was also a lovely Abraham Heschel quote about the "endless pilgrimage of the heart" which I loved, and a wonderful Wendell Berry quote, with its reference to a "pilgrimage wandering and unmarked," both of which I also invite you to consider as title for these posts.
Martin Buber's "All real life is meeting" seemed a worthy candidate too, as did Basho's "Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home."
There was also a lovely Abraham Heschel quote about the "endless pilgrimage of the heart" which I loved, and a wonderful Wendell Berry quote, with its reference to a "pilgrimage wandering and unmarked," both of which I also invite you to consider as title for these posts.
I
ended by creating a blog "away-from-the-safe-harbor" from Mark
Twain's passage: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by
the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the
bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore. Dream. Discover." I decided, though, to let that hold last
year's trip, and to begin a new one for this one.
Somehow
in the end, have landed on the present name (from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Go where there is no path"), which in some ways is very similar
to Steinbeck's "a trip takes us," and Wendell Barry's pilgrimage wandering
and unmarked. And
since I was bypassing the dozens of
volunteer placements provided by the myriad volunteer organizations online that
charged between $400-$1000 a week (some of them excellent programs), and had spent
hours googling to discover direct opportunities, in some way I was forging my
way where there was no path prepared
and paved for me.
And certainly even once there, it was more like being on a boat carried here, then there, by shifting currents, rather than on a path with clear signposts to follow. Flexibility and openness were the key attributes called for; the path was formed in the very steps forward as the way cleared, and visible only in the looking back where the steps had found foothold. Even at the intersections, the challenges were in there being no path, allowing only openness directly into what the moment held, offered, invited…and richly gave.
And certainly even once there, it was more like being on a boat carried here, then there, by shifting currents, rather than on a path with clear signposts to follow. Flexibility and openness were the key attributes called for; the path was formed in the very steps forward as the way cleared, and visible only in the looking back where the steps had found foothold. Even at the intersections, the challenges were in there being no path, allowing only openness directly into what the moment held, offered, invited…and richly gave.
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I
had started with a couple of leads for possible volunteering from my trip last
year, but got no response to my emails. After
hours online I finally located a monastic school in Sagaing near Mandalay
called the International
Buddhist Education
Center, which offers Buddhist
Dharma and standard education for the novices and children who cannot afford
government schooling, free of charge.
After myriad unanswered emails, and almost at the point of giving up, I
finally received a warmly welcoming letter to submit for a visa application.
Visa letter in hand, I made plane reservations, and the following week also received an invitation from Nyunt Than, my neighbor in Albany, to spend a few days with the trainees in a small company he is helping start in Yangon. So I changed my reservations to fly into Yangon instead of Mandalay, signed up for an online TEFL class, made arrangements to leave my car somewhere where it wouldn't collect four street cleaning tickets, and late November, took the BART to the San Francisco Airport for my midnight Eva Airline flight.
Visa letter in hand, I made plane reservations, and the following week also received an invitation from Nyunt Than, my neighbor in Albany, to spend a few days with the trainees in a small company he is helping start in Yangon. So I changed my reservations to fly into Yangon instead of Mandalay, signed up for an online TEFL class, made arrangements to leave my car somewhere where it wouldn't collect four street cleaning tickets, and late November, took the BART to the San Francisco Airport for my midnight Eva Airline flight.
What
follows are the emails from that trip.
Only like some ancient script that is read from right to left, and what
would be our back of the book forward to the front, the blog structure means
that to follow the journey chronologically, you must begin at the bottom, reading at the end, moving upwards.
note: Although I include a handful of photos interspersed among these posts, I could not begin to include them all, but to see them you can go to: https://www.flickr.com/photos/129187095@N02/sets/. The first album "Top 400" is a selection of the best photos, so that would be the one to look at unless you have time and interest to look at more in any particular phase of the trip.)
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