Silence Beckons
Homeless by Choice, Day 113
I’ve been officially homeless since August 1st of this year and couldn’t be happier, though I’m still getting used to saying it out loud, and realizing again every time I say it that it’s true. It’s a common question among travelers, “When are you going home?” and I answer honestly: “I don’t know, and I don’t technically have a home to go back to.” It feels awkward, like a dirty thing to confess, and the reactions vary from suspicious to envious to aggressively curious. Last night I had a chat with a Dutch girl in my hostel who was in a puddle of tears — traveling alone for the first time in her life. “No one told me how lonely it was going to be!” she wept. That’s the other side of it — the pictures are great but the every day reality is challenging, emotionally exhausting, and also endlessly rewarding if you stick with it. IF you stick with it.
Today I go into a 10-day silent meditation retreat about an hour and a half east of Cape Town. I had booked this before I ever booked my trip to Nepal but, as most of this adventure has turned out to be the last few months, there was impossibly good fortune in the juxtaposition of these legs. The other day I was catching up with one of my best friends on FaceTime. “Tell me about Nepal,” he said. I took a deep breath and realized I’m not yet in a place where I can tell anyone about Nepal. While in the mountains I read Peter Matthiessen’s Snow Leopard — a Himalayan classic. “What words are there to seize such ringing splendor?” the protagonist muses. There are words, there are always words, I think — they just haven’t yet come to me.
What the Himalayas afforded me was a chance to actively disconnect from noise and to actively connect with other humans. They afforded me an opportunity to move, to remember that my body is a machine that is meant to be purposeful — a walking, living, looking, scrambling, breathing machine. There’s nothing like trekking at altitude and laboring for every breath to awaken you to the preciousness of oxygen, to the fragility of our lives. At Everest Base Camp I sat in awe in front of the Khumbu Icefall, which has taken the lives of so many, and was overwhelmed with admiration for the power of nature not only to kill, but to entrance human beings enough to draw them into its absolute deadliest parts in a quest for growth. I understood the mountain and all who’ve climbed it in a way I never expected to, and for that I am eternally grateful.
There is so much more to say about Nepal. The stars at night, the dancing monks, the travelers who should and who shouldn’t be on the mountain, the fabulous rudimentary mountain kitchens, the shade of blue that towers over the snow-capped peaks and doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, the fabulous traveling females and the catty ones too, and the countless wonderful men you meet as a single female traveler… From the fatherly types who look after you to the big brothers who push you to exert yourself, the ones who visit astrologers with you, walk you down mountains and make you laugh, and that one with the dimples who kissed you under the stars… a whole essay could, and will, be written about them, too.
When my plane landed in Cape Town I checked into my hostel and immediately fell into a group hike to Lion’s Head, a mountain between the city and the sea and the best place to watch the sunset. With 16 days of hiking and two long flights under my belt I felt insane for joining but also relieved to be doing the thing that my legs were meant to do. The sun, the warmth, the sea air, all of it lifted me up and reassured me that this was indeed the place to be after Nepal, the place to decompress, to sleep the cold I’d carried with me for the last few weeks away, to stroll through shops, to drink coffee and read books and eat colorful, spicy food to my heart’s content. At the top of Lion’s Head I met a German girl from Munich and told her my favourite thing about her city — frühstück, the elaborate bread and cheese and cured meat breakfast I remember savouring daily when I visited her city — and we laughed and chatted about Cape Town and she took my picture just when I felt the pulse of this city in my veins for the first time, with the sun’s warm rays on my shoulders and cool breeze on my skin.
That night I slept, that next day I slept, and in the days since I’ve explored on my own, been given tours and a touch of home by some friends I made in Nepal, I put my feet in the Indian Ocean for the first time, chased thunderstorms and penguins, strolled through the Company’s Gardens in the rain with a big stupid grin on my face, I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, then laughed again. I’ve caught up with some loved ones back “home” but I’ve not missed “home” for a minute because, as my friend I was FaceTime chatting with the other day pointed out: this adventure, this lifestyle I’ve adopted, is teaching me first and foremost to find the home that exists within myself, the place of simple self-knowledge, of love and pure joy that no circumstance can diminish and no challenge can break. It’s a beautiful thought to be carrying into my first 10-day silent meditation retreat, as I prepare to work hard on my mind, to be challenged in ways I have never before opened myself up to.
I am nervous and excited, but more than anything I am willing to surrender to whatever happens in the coming days because, as The Snow Leopard’s protagonist points out, “To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon — the homegoing that needs no home…”
