Walking Home

Fumbling through the bookshelves in my mom's office, I came across tthis essay that I wrote for the Passage (Kalamazoo College's study abroad publication) and found it oddly comforting, two years later.

Walking Home

After weeks of rising at the mercy of local roosters, I awoke one morning and found a world reverberating with a rare silence.  Sliding out of my bunk, my eyes met a friend’s and together we tiptoed out of the room of sleeping women into the damp world of rice fields. 

In a trance-like state, we traced our way through the jungle plants we were learning to identify, embracing the familiar banana trees and avoiding the menacing thorny rattan that sliced at our bare limbs.  The emerging sun bathed the forest floor in its restorative light.  We walked for walking’s sake, with no determined course or destination.

Walking was my form of meditation in Thailand, a way to process a foreign world in my own terms.  As we moved forward, I let me mind wander across my first few months abroad and sink into my building sense of guilt.  Everywhere I went, wonderful people had unquestioningly incorporated me into their lives.  Homes were offered, papaya sliced, beds laid out, but I had not felt at home.  In this intricate dance of sharing, I lacked the vital force that made the movement a genuine expression. 

A sorghum leaf swept across my shoulder, transitioning my attention to the jungle path before me.  The path was beat low, scarred by motorcycle tracks.  Farmers, I mused, bringing their fruit to market in Fang.  Or perhaps teenagers out on a joy ride.  Dense trees covered both sides of the trail, their sun-centered shoots creating a shaded tunnel. 

Walking through this metamorphic passage, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I could be anywhere in the world.  The path recalled the simplicity of the woodchip-blanketed Michigan trails of my childhood, the intricacy of Japanese gardens, the rich mystery of an Israeli grove.   Inhaling, I felt these disparate threads of my life twisting together into an elegant knot.  For the first time, I felt at home.

Kelly walking