We've been discovering the wonders of online house shopping. It's window shopping, because we have nowhere near the down payment, closing costs, and maintenance fund saved up yet. But, it's fun to dream! And certain houses convey the feeling they are set apart from life. A line of trees along the property edge, old windows, gothic arches, and other qualities unidentifiable to me but potent in their appeal. Life is different here, they whisper.
It is the same way traveling to places in exotic locations - not only the chance to get away but also to be immersed in something new, another way of being. And yet, when I travel I so often discover that new places are not so foreign as you'd expect. People are still people: warm and inviting, or raucous, or tender, or bizarre. All city streets have energies all their own. Vistas enchant.
For me, the satisfaction in reaching new lands comes from drawing nearer my fellow man. From seeing his environs, the substrate of his memories and dreams. Tasting if ever so briefly the air that fuels his many days. How perfect to come into his world without making a perturbation. If only it were so. But by passing the stranger on the street and not stopping him to chat, it is my way of saying yes, I need not violate the path you're on. I simply wish to feel the breeze as you rush by.
But then, I would gladly give an afternoon for a chance to peer into his soul and lay out mine. To find our common human experiences, to hold his fears and dreams sweetly in my hands. To laugh together through differing accents and slang. To sit quietly and present, sharing space.
The houses that compel me remind me of people I've known who rest just behind the veil of memory, and what little I knew of their rustic and real lives. And yet, the joy of growing older has been discovering that I have much wider access to a variety of life styles than I'd previously thought. I can enter the community of philosophers and time-bearers, facing waterfalls and chatty with history. I can dance with desert-dwellers through the monsoons of uncertainty and desperately wide valleys. I can build the intimate cave with my favored few for fervent conversations and rich meals.
I know now that any future can still be mine. Any land, any home, offers a new space in which to spin out this existence.
