Departure

Today's breakfast: Chia pudding with vanilla and maple syrup topped with fruit, berries and coconut flakes. And one of our saffron buns (recipe here).

Some people dream of a beautiful house; a home they can call their own, with a garden to garden and rooms to lovingly fill and decorate. Then there are others, who feel the pull of what’s out there, whose gaze is not set on arrival or stay but on departure. These people might feel they have received a kind of invitation, not in the form of an official letter with a seal or anything, but as a secret breath in the ear at night, urging them to break up and move on.

Consider explorers such as Marco Polo, James Cook, and Vasco da Gama. Consider the Vikings. Yes, perhaps their departures were borne not out of curiosity (alone) but of necessity as well. Yet, I am sure there were other possibilities for them. There always are. The world needed shoemakers, bakers, carpenters, and builders back then, too. Thus they probably had a choice.

Sometimes I think of the world as divided between those who stay and those who leave.

When I woke up from my teenagey stupor one day and realized there was a world outside my acne, I felt compelled to visit the house where Joan of Arc had been born over 500 hundred years earlier. Nothing could stop me. The urge to physically see the place could not be stopped. Not even by my mom, who waved good-bye to me, age 17, as the train pulled out of Copenhagen Central. It followed the slight curve in the tracks. I wore a striped sweater in rainbow colors that I had knitted myself. I had no idea how to get to where Joan of Arc was born, only that I had to get there. Somehow. To me, I was chartering as unknown territories as explorers had done in the past. Who cares about rest areas and the comfort of hotels when you’re tracing a dream?

Yesterday I met a friend I hadn’t seen in twenty years. She, too, came from Sweden to New York and for a brief period all those years ago, we shared a dingy apartment in Brooklyn. Yesterday, we talked about the different directions our lives had taken us. We talked about people we had once known and who we no longer knew. And we talked about this: Staying or going? It’s a curious thing that happens with immigrants, the staying or going topic somehow always comes up. So we weighed the pros (as if New York City and surroundings needed to be weighed for pros!) and the cons (the expense, the stress, the pace). We talked about what moving back to Sweden would entail. We luxuriated in the good parts (a functioning health care system, a child-friendly environment, an allover less fierce, less competitive society) and shuddered at the bad (we’d have to conform again – like good Swedes do – and we simply would not be in or have access to the Big Apple). We drew our conclusion in silence: Safety and complacency simply isn’t worth going back to. The thrill of life lies not in the safe harbor of home.

Marco Polo, after all his travels, settled down in Venice with his wife and three daughters. He never again left. James Cook was stabbed to death on the island of Hawaii. Vasco da Gama died from malaria in Kochi, India. And Leif Eriksson most probably died on Greenland. Who knows how they felt about their lives. Perhaps they, too, longed for a home and a garden. Or perhaps the urge to set sail never completely left them.

Dreaming of departure. The Three of Wands in the Tarot Cards means travel, foreign lands, growth, good fortune, freedom, and moving forward.