Unworn World

I’m not much of a traveler.  I didn’t grow up traveling much and it was definitely a stretch for me to spread my wings a little after Jason and I got married.  I remember sitting on our couch after we’d been married for about a year, talking about where we might go on our first “big” trip.  I had never left the country.  Jason, on the other hand, had been traveling the globe since the age of 10.  I was tentatively throwing out ideas like, you know, Canada.  Or maaaaybe somewhere in Europe.  Like England.  Or France.

Jason’s pick was Vietnam.   I had never been on a plane ride longer than 5 hours and the mere thought of the 15 hour flight to Saigon made my claustrophobic head spin.  Needless to say, it was a LONG conversation.   We finally settled on Costa Rica and I’ve logged several more stamps in my passport since then.

Jason’s job is currently pretty chill.  He works from home, starts at 9 and ends at 5.   So long as he has a computer and high speed internet, he can work from anywhere and lately I’ve been feeling the itch to give it a go.  I recently found the Design Mom blog started by Gabrielle Blair who, finding herself and her husband in a similar job situation as ours, moved her family to France for 3 years (they’re back now).  Doesn’t that sound kind of dreamy?  Living in France and bashing around Paris, seeing the sites and eating croissants all the live long day?

When I shake some of the romanticized fluff out of my head, though, and consider just two tiny logistics, the likelihood of packing our bags and booking our flights with Air France gets smaller by the second.  First, I speak absolutely ZERO French.  Second, Jason would still be working all day.  That would leave me, friendless and alone, with the boys all day, everyday, in a city where I don’t speak the language and nothing but croissants to keep us company.  All the butter in the world can’t make that sound appealing.

So… scratch that.  I don’t care if Design Mom did pull it off with her 6 kids (for real – the woman is amazing) and I did just spend an hour and a half searching for Parisian house swaps.  I am hankering to go back to Paris for a longer visit at some point.  We spent 3 days there in 2007, packed between several other cities, and that’s just not enough. I hope someday we’ll go back but that’s not actually what I’m craving right now.

I’m not in any way unhappy with our house or our neighborhood or our city.  I’m always deeply content at home and in Seattle but last Summer’s camping trips suddenly feel a million miles away and I’m antsy to get out of the city.  I don’t want to go to Paris or London or Beijing.  I don’t want to be around people (no surprise there).  I want to get away; away from the hustle and bustle of city life, away from my phone and swim lessons and menu planning and Facebook.  I want to go to the woods or to a lake, to hear a rushing river and morning birdsong.

I read this excerpt from a poem by Patrick Kavanaugh again last night in My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman and suddenly it all felt quite urgent.

—–
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me
In a web of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a

    beech.
Feed the gaping need of my senses.  Give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honored with a new dress

    woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
—–

I know that I will miss my espresso machine in a hot minute and the boys will perhaps be slightly less enraptured by those eternal voices by a beech.  But still.  It would only be for a week or two and then we’d be back, hopefully refreshed and ready to make the final push toward summer and all the magic that our camping trips have to offer (you know, spraying ourselves with Bear Spray notwithstanding).