For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Walt Whitman

I love to travel. Travel teaches me every atom belongs. What does that mean? It means we are deeply interconnected and interdependent — at a molecular level — and rely on one another and the health of everything and everyone around us to survive and thrive. It means we change, grow, and heal in hard, hidden, and broken places. It means belonging reaches across, into, and beyond, wrapping around our stories, making living in isolation, cruelty, and despair impossible. It means we experience next-level awe and wonder from altitudes, angles, and depths only our imaginations can fathom. It makes plain what we love in common. (Thank you for Ross Gay for talking about our need to talk about what we love in common.) Travel teaches me every atom belongs.

I leave on the first long trip I have taken in a while this week. We are going to Ireland. I will be writing about it for City Lifestyle Magazine. This is the first time I have taken a trip and written about it “on assignment.” (I have written about my travels for as long as I have traveled, but this assignment is an official first.) Putting the “press trip” together has been an exercise in community support, speaking something into being and the kind of persistence that shakes trees and turns over rocks. It has taken a village to make this happen. From the assignment to the people on both sides of the Atlantic who have supported my effort to secure flights, football tickets, room nights, meals, and experiences, I have been kindly held during the process.

I am overwhelmed with elemental gratitude. If our world is made of atoms and elements, then the substance of gratitude is all that — the substance of gratitude becomes tangible, visceral, and deep. Travel does that. Travel breaks life down into atoms and elements — we are both in and of experience — making wonder, awe, delight, something we can breathe, hold, and understand. Travel allows our story — our most elemental selves — to mingle, dance, bounce, and become.

What I am Learning

Leaving The Island

It must have been/ the slant of the light,/ the sheer cross-grain of rain/ against the summer sun, the way the island appeared/ gifted, out of the gleam/ and the depth of distance, so/ that when you turned/ to look again,/ the scend of the sea/ had carried you on,/ under the headland/ and into the waiting harbour. – David Whyte

I know what it feels like to want to both live on and leave the island. I know wanting both more than home and nothing but home. I know longing for something else or something more — asking “Is this all there is?” — while also pinching myself at the wonder that surrounds me. I know the courage of new and the comfort of old. I know the strength of leap and the value of stay. I know the allure of shine and beauty of worn. I know roots and trunk and branches sustain life.

Read more here.

Traveler There Is No Path

Traveler, there is no road; you make your own path as you walk. – Antonio Machado’s

Just keep walking. Just keep walking. Just keep walking.

I think about Pema Chodron who writes about life falling apart and back together. I think about leaping and trusting in nets. I think about rainbows with pots of gold. I think about the fact many roads start as desire paths. I think about the truth of a message communicated across languages.

Read more here.

My Periodic Table

And now, at this juncture, when death is no longer an abstract concept, but a presence – an all-to-close, not-to-be-denied presence, I am again surrounding myself, as I did when I was a boy with metals and minerals, little emblems of eternity. – Oliver Sacks

“My Periodic Table,” the third essay in Oliver Sacks, Gratitude, pays homage to his connection to the natural world. From a star-filled night sky, to lemurs hanging from trees, to musings about scientific discoveries, Sacks celebrates the natural world down to its very elemental essence. He names every birthday in honor of the element corresponding to the year and beautifully describes the lead (82 years old – the last birthday he has celebrated) and bismuth (83 years old – the birthday he will not see). With life’s light preparing to go out, Sacks reminds us to slow down and look inside.

Read more here.

Paying Attention

David Whyte’s “Leaving the Island“

Antonio Machado’s “Traveler There Is No Path“

Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself, 1 [I Celebrate myself]“

Finding Strengtht to Make Sunshine

Finding My Edge

In Touch With Insignificance