Thirty Five Years Free

(Updated version of a previous post)

When I was fourteen years old I had a teacher who inspired me, by her happy and caring nature, to join her Social Justice lunchtime group at school. I soon became an avid reader of Amnesty newsletters, and began writing letters on behalf of prisoners of conscience. So began an awareness of inequality and injustice.

When I was fifteen I was invited to a Christian youth camp, and realised that I could decide for myself what I believed. I became the only member of my family, apart from my mum, to regularly attend church or profess faith, and although it was a bit of a joke to some of them, it felt like a significant step for me to make a decision for myself about what I believed and who I wanted to be. So began a determination to follow my own path in life.

When I was seventeen I was offered a position as a travelling tutor for the child of a friend going on a musical tour of Europe. It was to be my first big adventure, until then undreamed of. When it fell through near to the last minute, I had a moment of being crushed before realising that just because that plan hadn’t come to fruition, didn’t mean that I couldn’t still go to Europe. So began an understanding that my life is in my own hands, and that if I want something to happen, I have to make it happen.

When I was eighteen I boarded a plane, alone and with tears streaming down my face, excited and terrified. I remember my grandmother predicting I’d be back within a month, and the determination I felt that I wouldn’t let that happen. So began an understanding that the expectation of others do not need to define or limit you.

When I arrived in England, at a loss as to what I should do there, I accepted a job as an aged care worker. At some point, in the midst of wiping another bottom, brushing another set of old dentures, lifting another hoist and watching another pair of eyes echoing loneliness, I realised that at some point, when all physical dignity is seemingly stripped from you, you can maintain your dignity through acceptance and humility. And as a worker, I came to understand the importance of allowing that dignity, and of giving respect, to those to whom little else remains.

When I was nineteen I remembered that I was young, and that although aged care work felt rewarding, there are some things you should do when you are young. Working in a London pub I learned the importance sometimes of having attitude, of taking no bull, and that work can be fun!

Towards the end of that year, on a whim I moved to Israel where I spent three months on a kibbutz milking cows. There I learned to embrace being smelly and dirty and physically exhausted. In Israel I also took the opportunity to make a personal pilgrimage of the sacred places of my religion, and found that they moved me not at all. Thus began a process of understanding the importance of questioning our beliefs and finding what truly resonates with us, and that this can be within or outside of the traditional structures of spirituality.

When I was twenty-two I took time out of university to backpack around South-East Asia and work for four months in orphanages in Vietnam. Although I loved my experience there, I ended my time feeling disillusioned with volunteer programs, feeling that perhaps we did more damage than good, despite our good intentions. And so began my realisation that our critical faculties, and the ability to make informed and well-thought judgements for ourselves, is not just a blessing, but their use a duty and a responsibility.

When I was twenty-three I moved into a hippy drumming community and found a new family and social scene. There, over many years of coming and going, I have learned to value the rich assortment of people around me, and learned that everybody, no matter their age, gender, background and interests, has something valuable they can contribute to our lives and society, and that we can find a common ground with anyone we try to connect with.

When I was twenty-four, undertaking my honours year at university, I travelled to Indonesia to do a field study of traditional music and dance in Aceh. Afterwards I stopped for what was meant to be a couple of days in Jakarta, but after discovering a vibrant Rasta and Reggae scene and befriending a crazy assortment of musicians, sorcerers, and oddballs in various states of intoxication, two days turned into a week, and finally a month, unable as I was to tear myself away from the weird and unfamiliar world I had uncovered. Running out of money I resorted to living under a city bridge with a family of homeless street-musicians rather than leave the dirty, smelly city I had come to love. And so began my deep love for the rough, ungroomed side of life, and an understanding that there can be intense beauty in rawness and grime.

When I was twenty-five I went to the Australian island of Christmas Island to spend a couple of months volunteering in the Immigration Detention Centre, where new Asylum Seeker arrivals in Australia are detained while awaiting processing of their claims. And there, in my own first world country, I learned much more clearly than I ever had in any poor and developing country, just how unjust and unfair life can be. And so began a recognition that we cannot continue to ignore what is uncomfortable, but that we must allow ourselves to truly see the world, both in its light and dark, and find our place in it with an honest understanding of what is in the shadows.

When I was twenty-six I worked in a school in a remote indigenous community in Arnhem Land, Northern Australia. In a world that is like mine, and yet so utterly not, in a world of spirits and magic and wisdom and destruction, I realised that reality is not only what I know it as. And so began a deep appreciation for Australia’s indigenous cultures, and recognition of how little I still understand all the elements of my world.

Later that year I travelled to Turkey to teach English, and in a hard work environment I learned to stand up for myself and say no to what was unacceptable. Leaving, I went to work with nomadic shepherds in the Austrian Alps and learned to listen to the natural world, and walked eleven hundred kilometers on the Camino de Santiago in France and Spain, where I found inner peace (and then lost it again, ‘cause that’s what inner peace is all about I think, a never ending series of steps leading bumpily up and up, towards I’m not sure what). And so I learned that learning is a constant process, never completed and never final in any of its forms.

At twenty-seven I travelled to India and fulfilled a dream seven years in the making, attending the largest religious gathering on earth, the Kumbh Mela. And patience was understood, and rewarded. There, disillusioned with what I saw as a world peopled with phony gurus and egotistical yogis, I learned to look beyond names and forms, and to seek the true heart at the centre.

At twenty-eight I completed a masters degree, finally committing to a career as a teacher, hitchhiked five thousand kilometres with a dear friend and explored freedoms that scared and expanded me, and found that both highs and lows in life are often so inter-tangled that it is impossible to see to which category some experiences belong. And so began the process of ending the categorisation of life.

At twenty nine I found myself in Pakistan, where I fell completely head over heels in love with four hundred children and made a home for myself in a rough mountain village that, until then, I had never known existed. In the two years I lived and taught in a school there, I learned that soul connections can appear in your life at the most unexpected times and with the most unexpected people, and that even small children in conservative Muslim villages can be a “best friend” if you allow your souls to truly connect. I learned to leave aside my age, gender, nationality and religious beliefs, and to see that the spark that unites one being with another is so intrinsically human that we can truly find it anywhere.

At thirty a friend of mine died in very tragic circumstances. The same age as me, and possessing a similar wandering soul, I learned from her death that life is unpredictable, and should not be squandered. At her memorial, her mother read a quote that stuck with me: “Do not cry that it’s over. Smile because it happened”, and from this I learned that death and grief do not need to be feared, but rather life to be celebrated and cherished.

At thirty-one, as if to hammer home the lesson on grief, I lost my father suddenly and unexpectedly. While I have never experienced pain and grief like that before or since, it did teach me a valuable lesson about family, love and connection, and the importance of valuing those closest to you. I learned also that there is beauty even in the most searing pain, and that the totality of the human experience, in all its shades of darkness and light, is a glorious and wondrous gift.

At thirty-one I also returned home and committed to my first ever ‘proper job’, determined to learn how to be content with a ‘normal life’. I spent four years living the conventional ‘5-day-work-week’ life at home, believing others when they said that my incessant desire to travel was a sign of some deep inner-discontent, and that it was a weakness that I should try to overcome, to stop looking ‘out there’ for something that could be found within. However at thirty-four I found the new inner confidence to fully claim the wandering soul that I possess, to fully embrace my desire to roam, and to be confident in knowing that I travel because I LOVE to travel, not because I am somehow lost.

So here I am, at thirty-five, spending what might have gone towards a sensible home deposit instead on new adventures, and happy with the decision to do so. I know that my life is mine, to live as fully and uniquely as I choose to, with many mistakes waiting for me to make them, but also many memories and friends. Life is only what we make it, after all.

“How long? How far? How hard? How fine?
How heavy or light the load?
If it’s half as good as the half I’ve known,
Here’s Hail! to the rest of the road.”
– Don Blanding

Desert Dreaming

Far away from everywhere, there is an island that’s not really an island, yet somehow feels like one; where the mountains, the desert and the sea meet; where the winds of three countries merge, and where the wandering souls of both Bedouin and new-world nomads dance an, at times uneasy, dance of a world that could be.

On this island-that’s-not, on a little stretch of beach where pebbles roll with the ebb and flow of the tide, sits a little thatched shelter, beneath which can be found an assortment of colourful rugs and cushions, painted shells and dream-catchers, six dogs and two cats, and a community that’s a kind of family.

That’s where I live. For now. ‘For now’ is as much of an address as I can give at the moment, and feels like enough of one. For now, in this current reality, I am learning to sit with the silence of the desert, to feel the abstract nature of time when you have no timetable, and to simplify myself in all things.

Without any access to running water, I live in a seasalt-encrusted state of semi-disarray. My clothes and hair are filthy, I eat and drink from chipped and salty utensils, giving everything a unique taste that I call ‘desert flavour’, and shoes are, thankfully and finally, hidden in the bottom of my backpack, rarely needed and more rarely worn. Without a clock and very rarely with any kind of electricity, I am learning to tell the time by the shifting shadows, and when the mountains of Saudi Arabia, just across the sea before me, turn a dusky pink, I know it is nearing the time to light the candles in the appropriated water-cannister lanterns, and gather in the kitchen, the only solid structure in this makeshift camp, to prepare the evening meal.

At night I retire to my date palm thatched hut, and fall asleep to the sound of the sea and the wind, curiously tired from a day of doing somehow nothing and a lot at the same time. At times, if sleep eludes me, I wander out behind my hut into the desert and toward the mountains, listening to the stories that they whisper.

At times I feel disjointed, confused, not sure why I’m here or what I’m doing. But if there’s one place that’s good for a confused mind it’s the desert, brutally truthful in all things. In the desert you can’t hide from yourself, and you see more clearly who you are and what stories are playing in your mind.

In the desert, even the new moon gives light.

So for now, here I sit. I cook, I clean (somehow, with salty water and dirty sponges), I think, I talk, I write, and I walk. There’s nothing else to do, nor anything else I want to be doing. With my ‘one wild and precious life’ I choose this, for now. This nothingness that I feel can teach me everything, if I only let it.

On Grief (or ‘A New Normal’)

“You left ground and sky weeping, mind and soul full of grief. No one can take your place in existence, or in absence. Both mourn, the angels, the prophets, and this sadness I feel has taken from me the taste of language, so that I cannot say the flavor of my being apart.” – Rumi

 Trying to convey in words an experience of grief is a difficult, if not impossible thing. What is the substance of grief? Is it simply the absence of someone? The loss of someone? Is it a deep sadness?

For me it is all of these, and yet it is also something else entirely, something that words cannot capture. It is a disconnect, a new reality, an altered world in which new patterns must be learnt (and old patterns unlearnt). It is a realising, or rather constant re-realising, that what was ‘normal’ is no longer so, and that the fabric of reality has fundamentally shifted.

This realising would, I imagine, be difficult at the best of times, but is made much more so by the fact that, culturally, we have very few guidelines and little allowance for grief to be adequately experienced. Where many cultures have a prescribed period of mourning, be they 3, 7, 30, 40 or more days, in my culture these rules have been laid by the way many years ago, and mourners are left to decide for themselves what is “appropriate”.

This is something I have been struggling with lately. For how long is it “acceptable” for me to mourn, or at least to mourn to the extent that it affects my external life? How many days can I be away from work before it is ‘too much’? For how long can I cry before people say “she is not handling it very well”, or for how long can I feel introverted and quiet before people will start to question whether it’s time to ‘move on’? With no prescribed rules around this, I am muddling along, at times feeling the need to hold on to my introversion and quiet grief for longer, at other times feeling that a return to “normal life” is what’s best. Sometimes I feel like I have compromised my own grief by returning to work too soon, by smiling and laughing with my friends too soon, by being too quick to make plans or live life. Often the question comes into my mind “will people think I don’t love my Dad if I laugh so soon after his death? Am I betraying him if I continue to enjoy life so soon?”

At other times I feel that there’s no other option.

Dad once told me a story that has always had a profound affect on me. His own father passed away when he was 17, and he soon adopted an alternative lifestyle of yoga and meditation, travel, and other “hippy” interests. At some point in his early 20’s he took part in a séance where a spirit, supposedly that of his father, spoke to him. After affirming to himself the spirit’s identity through some tricky questions, he asked the spirit “Am I on the right path in life, with this yoga and spiritual searching?” To which the spirit replied him “Just enjoy life”. Pressed to explain more, the spirit continued to repeat “Just enjoy life. Just enjoy life”.

I don’t know what to make of this story. I don’t think Dad did either to be honest. There was, I’m sure, a part of him that was sceptical of such things, yet another part that was convinced of the authenticity of that experience. He definitely altered his life path anyway, and I believe that many of his later decisions were influenced largely by the experience he had had.

I don’t really know the point of telling this story, other than perhaps to open a discussion of my own confusion about the spirit world, and about the whereabouts and howabouts of Dad now. Where is he? What is he? Does he hear me, see me? Does he exist as he was on earth, with all the same emotions he had here, or is he in some more enlightened form? Is he with his parents, and if so, how do they see each other, and see us? I start to see why people are drawn to spiritualism after experiencing grief, and although I remain sceptical of paranormal experiences, there is definitely a part of me that would love to experience what Dad believes he experienced with his own father. There would be a lot of comfort in just the knowledge, for complete certain, that he was still around here somewhere…

Before Dad died he spent five days in a coma in hospital. During this time, the doctors tell us, his brain cortex had ceased to function due to oxygen deprivation caused by the asthma attack that ultimately killed him. This means that to all intents and purposes his conscious had already left him, and what continued to power him for those five days was simply bodily function. “He” in any intellectual, mental sense, was no longer present. He who had lived all his life with pride in his astounding intellectual abilities, who was ‘brain focussed’ in so many aspects of life.

And yet he was still there in that hospital room with us. I never had any doubt about that. He was there, and then he wasn’t there, and the passage between the two was unmistakable. I held his hand as he passed. I watched his last breath leave and his next breath never arrive, and I felt his hand clench around mine in the final moment; a muscular reflex that was at once a simple physical symptom but also an emotional action that came from somewhere that was not his absent mind. If I ever had any doubt about the existence of a soul it was left behind in that hospital, somewhere in those five days spent with a Dad who was so very present and yet without any cortex brain function at all.

So here I am, grieving and yet not really knowing how to. I cry, I smile, I laugh, I dance, I work, I talk about things that are not my Dad or my grief, and yet are all a part of it. I don’t think the grief is something you work through and then are done with. I think it is something that comes to stay, that becomes a part of your being, so that you live like normal, only normal has a whole other meaning now.

My Dad

Just over a week ago I wrote a eulogy for a funeral, and was disappointed because I felt unable to write in a way that really did justice to the task. Normally when I write the words flow out of me, and the more passionately I feel about a subject, the more graceful my words become. And yet, when it came to the one thing I have felt most passionately about in my entire life, the words stuck in my fingertips and refused to escape from my brain to any outer realm.

Writing a eulogy for your father though is not a normal activity. It’s an act of writing when what you really want to be doing is saying those words directly to the one person who will never hear them. It is a goodbye when it is already too late. No wonder the words got stuck.

Something got written however, and from the responses I received afterwards, I realised that few people outside of my immediate family really knew my Dad well at all. Not the dad that we knew. And he is someone who deserved to be known, who enriched the lives of us who knew him, and who gave so much to the world. He is someone who was so unique and yet humbly so, so determinedly true to himself, and yet without aspirations or awareness of such uniqueness.

Is? Was? My present and past tenses have become very confused of late, and I am yet to figure out where the line between what was and what is should lie.

Many kids are embarrassed by their parents. I know I was. My dad was often the ultimate in embarrassment. And yet it was the very things that I found embarrassing that I also loved and admired in him the most, and it was the same qualities that I cringed at that I also wanted to emulate in my own life. Every time he pulled out his piano accordion/guitar/ukulele/recorder/whatever instrument he was currently obsessed with learning, I would be torn between wanting to hide, and wanting to sit at his feet with pride at his bravery. He was not a good musician, but he was a passionate one, and his enthusiasm was more beautiful than any musical talent could ever be. Many people are born with a talent, but my dad had something that less people have; a commitment to his own education in all areas, a commitment to bettering himself, expanding himself, extending his range and broadening his comfort zone. Not believing himself to be naturally artistic, he nevertheless spent many years studying pottery, painting, creative writing, vegetarian cooking, yoga, spiritual philosophy, and many types of musical instruments (one of my favourite memories is of the evenings we spent together studying harmonica when I was in highschool). And what’s more, some of the creations that he brought home were so unbelievably beautiful that we were left confused as to what this aspect of him was that we had never seen before. Where had this talent come from, unknown to himself and to us? So much of my dad existed beneath the surface, and it was the glimpses of hidden parts of him that made me admire and love him so much.

When I was young I used to boast to my friends that my dad had “been everywhere in the world”. Having travelled extensively myself since then and come to realise exactly how many places are in “everywhere” I realise now that perhaps that was not entirely correct, but he certainly travelled widely, and it was his stories of adventure that planted the seeds that later became my own passion for exploration. Many of my own trips have been directly inspired by his, such as my decision to go to Israel when I was 19 (I booked that plane ticket directly after he suggested it as an interesting place to me during a phone conversation while I was living in England), and more recently my experiment with travelling with minimal luggage through India; an idea inspired by my favourite “dad travel story” of the time he had his bag stolen in India, and how he came to see that as the greatest blessing because travelling without luggage was so much easier. It always seemed to me that he was afraid of nothing and able to do anything he set his mind to, and as a child I dreamed of having the kind of adventures and experiences that he had had.

My dad was an extraordinarily kind and compassionate man, but his kindness was often of an unseen kind. Although he would often take the hard line in political discussions, although his social views could seem harsh and uncompromising at times, and although I often balked at statements he made, I never once in my life saw him be cruel to a living creature, be they human or animal. One distinct memory I have of him is of a time when he shooed a huntsman spider out of our car onto a hot carpark pavement during a trip to Sydney, and then turned around five minutes down the road to go back and rescue it, afraid that he had left it to be squashed. He had no tolerance for teasing that he felt belittled someone, and one of his biggest hatreds was of “bullying”. Unkindness was not something he had any patience with, and generosity was something that came naturally to him.

If I and my siblings are independent now, we owe it to the way we were parented, and in particular to my dad’s attitudes. We were actively encouraged to explore, to spend time outdoors, to have adventures. Our movements were not controlled to any great degree, and in many ways we were given few practical rules, apart from a number of years in which television was forbidden (a rule I, in hindsight, am glad I had imposed on me). I recall my childhood as one spent largely in the bush and out of sight of my parents, and yet the trust I had in them to look after me was, and remains, absolute. As a child, my dad was my hero; he would read us stories every night, cuddle us and play with us, cook with us (pizza nights when mum worked night shifts), teach us (I remember a hairy lesson that began with “now I want to teach you about why you should always watch where you’re walking” and ended two seconds later with me nearly standing on a large brown snake), take us sailing, swimming, and just generally love us. He was tireless in his love and commitment to his family, and my biggest regret now is that I may not have let him know how much we saw and appreciated it.

None of us expected to lose Dad so soon. He was completely full of life and enthusiastic about living it to the fullest. There are many things I didn’t say to him, many “I wish’s” still running through my mind that will never be relieved. But I have comfort in knowing that my dad was someone who understood unspoken love, love in action more than words. And I hope now, I try to trust now, that he felt and still feels the love that is breaking our hearts now.

Just Me and the Mountain

With little to occupy my time here in Kaghan when the final school bell rings and the children go home, I have taken to spending a lot of time sitting on the veranda of my cottage, looking at the mountains before me and listening to the sounds of the valley around me. At times it is the sweet chirping of birds, the whistling of the nomads driving their flocks up the highway and the bleating of the sheep, or the sound of laughing children in surrounding homes. My clock is the five times daily Azan, the call to prayer, and I listen excitedly in the evening to see if I can recognise any of the voices calling. More recently it is the sounds of the threshing machines that fill the air, as they do their rounds of the villages, threshing the wheat for each family in turn. These stacks of golden grain will soon be taken to one of the small water-powered mills in the village to be ground into flour, and I have found a lot of peace in observing the whole process, from the first green stalks in the fields to the swaying fields of gold, waiting to be cut by a scythe-wielding farmer and fed into the thresher, the one time in which modern technology is used in the whole process, from the buffalo-ploughed field to the chapatti on my plate.

The air now is a haze of wheat chaff, and the smells those of freshly cut crops. This is spring as I have never known it, and I feel a deepened understanding of the joy with which this fertile season has been celebrated in cultures around the world. Truly life is abundant and generous right now! The trees are laden with fruit; plums, apricots and peaches, and I am beginning to hear the first tell-tale sign of ripening walnuts, as they fall and crash heavily onto the roof of my cottage in the night, jolting me from my sleep. The sides of the roads throughout the valley are bordered with beehives, with pyramids of fresh honey on display and for sale, and the hennaed hands of the village girls are testimony that wedding season is well underway.

Living here, I am reminded of an experience I had a few years ago in India, when I spent some time staying on a farm and was instructed to “try to do nothing”; something that proved much harder in the practising than the initial concept suggested. At that time I found twitches in my body where I had never noticed twitches before, nervous tappings and shufflings and excuses to do things that simply had to be done. These days though, I feel I am finally beginning to understand the wisdom of what I was then told, and with little else to occupy my time for the past six months I have made and found my peace with stillness. Many, many hours of stillness. Many, many hours of looking at a single view, with neither conscious appreciation nor judgement, but simply an awareness that this is where I am and this is what is before me. Of course life always has its peaks and troughs, and in my lower moments I sometimes feel as if ‘life’ is slipping me by in my stillness and solitude, as if somehow I have become so isolated that life itself has ceased to remember my existence. With raised spirits however I feel peace with my life, accepting of the ‘Thusness’ of where I am and what I am doing. A life is a life is a life, and who is to say by what measures this life can be judged to be inadequate? Alone with my mountains I feel content in the knowledge that as long as I am experiencing, be it the experience of a great romance or a thriving social life, or simply the experience of intimately knowing the vista before me, then life is meaningful.

This newfound peace and contentedness is also related to a loosening of my grasp on a self-identity. As a teenager and early adult I was fascinated with the idea that to “know Thyself” was the greatest wisdom to which one could strive, and in a social world of individuality I celebrated my own uniqueness. These days however, with no social world by which to be measured, I feel a lessening of connection to any idea of who I am. I no longer live by the philosophy that to “remain true to myself” is my aspiration, but rather have difficulty working out who that self should be. And I feel so free in this, so without restraint. Without the borders of ‘me’, without contemplation of my Self, I feel able to respond to each and every moment spontaneously and unselfconsciously. I think I freed myself, for the main part, from social convention years ago, but I see now how much I have remained constrained by the convention of the idea of myself that existed in my mind. But here, with only my mountains for company, my self has become somewhat of a surplus, and with little chance to exercise my individuality in a social context it is beginning to slip through my fingers…

And so the days will continue, and my eyes, that once enjoyed observing the thriving business of life in the city now rest happily on the mountainsides, watching little more than their gradually changing colours, from the browns of winter to the pinks and whites of spring and the vibrant green of summer. And with the solstice on its way and Pakistan preparing itself for the month of fasting and introspection, I know that the days will soon again begin to change, the Azan to sound a little earlier each evening and the greens gradually begin to fade back to their winter hues, all the while as I continue to sit on my porch and watch it all unfold before me.

Kaghan Valley, Pakistan. Home

The seasons change rapidly here in Kaghan Valley, the East of the West of Pakistan. Barely two weeks ago, when I arrived back here after a winter hibernation in the city, the fruit trees were in full blossom, and the rough dull-brown sides of the mountains were softened by an appearance of white and pale pink blossom clouds, nestling like scattered flocks of sheep across the distant mountain flanks. All other trees were still bare from the winter cold, and the starkness of that passing season was still in the crisp, cold air.

Now, in only two weeks, the blossoms are nearly all gone, and the mountains are once again brown. It is a different brown now though, one less melancholy, one full of the anticipation of spring. Young green leaves are beginning to be visible on the trees immediately surrounding me, and the change in the air has already allowed me to pack my warm clothes away for another year.

Below me and beyond, the mighty Kunhar; the lifeline of Kaghan, the river of snow and glacier melt from the distant reaches of the valley; is swelling with each passing day. Its normally clear waters now mirror the brown mountainsides above, flushing the river with the silt collected on its 160-kilometre journey from its source near Bubasar Pass. I feel removed from the ‘Pakistan’ of the world here, far from the tales of attacks and deceits that carry the name of this place back to my home. And yet I know that it is with Kaghan, the ‘ear of the buffalo’, that the North-West Frontier hears the cries of Kashmir to the east, and gazes toward Afghanistan in the west. Straddling a slim border between two war-torn lands, the peace of this valley is precarious. A dip of toes into the treacherous ice-cold Kunhar reminds me that the tranquillity and ease of the valley hides a treacherous undercurrent, linking places where I dare not, and would not be given permission, to go.

As the river continues to wind past me and down, making its way, sometimes in a torrent and sometimes in a calm meandering, towards its final home as a tributary of the even mightier and more ancient Indus River, I turn my head to look above. There, winter is still in evidence, the white crowns of the mountaintops evidence of the season that I mostly avoided. Although I myself am from a mountain area, a childhood in any part of Australia cannot prepare you for the Himalayas, and peaks that are infantile by the standards of this country appear mighty to me. They seem to close in above me, and although the night skies here are bright with the abundance of stars, I often feel as if the sky is invisible, and that only mountain will ever exist in the world again. Unable to look outward, a horizon a figment of some Plato-esque memory that may or may not have been real, I am spending my days learning to look inward, to find vistas within myself to charter with my mind.

At my back as I sit, a forest of pine and walnut trees rises in a steep slope, leading through a series of clusters of houses inhabited by quiet people who traverse the mountainsides as easily as the goats they herd. Gujjars, Sayeds, Swatis, Pathans and a mix of others, the inhabitants of Kaghan are a peculiar people in Pakistan for having little discernible local culture of their own; no music or dances to showcase at a cultural festival, a marked absence of local handicrafts, and few customs that are not common across the whole country. Some see this as perhaps a sign that they are not originally local to this area, but have a forgotten history that saw them settle here from other areas.

Narrow, snaking roads wind up the mountains, navigable only by tough service jeeps that expertly defy the laws of space and traction to pass when it is impassable, and hold where it seems even a foot should slip and fall. Rainfall here is at once a blessing for the crops that terrace the sides of the valley, and a curse in the way they dislodge the loose rubble and large boulders already dislodged ten years ago by the earthquake that devastated this area, and now precariously balanced and ready to regularly tumble and block the roads, cutting off the valley from the outside world.

Although I live alone in my little cottage in the school, the geography of this valley has a strange and comforting way of making me feel connected to the community around me. A child crying on the other side of the valley can be heard clearly from my front porch, and even at the furthest places my eye can reach, I know, by the colourful moving spots in an otherwise uniformly coloured scenery, if someone is out and about on the mountains. Although I am perhaps the only person in this valley who lives, and enjoys living, alone; although I am the “gori”,the white girl, who moves everywhere under armed escort, like an unwilling celebrity; and although my movement is mostly restricted to a small confined strip of this lush valley, I am finally beginning to feel a sense of belonging, slowly and gradually and patiently beginning to feel an understanding of who I am in this world. Things that were once foreign and exotic to me; glaciers, shepherds, hot sweet chai and spicy pakora, shalwar kameez and Azan; are now as familiar as the streets of my own city, and I take infinite pleasure in feeling how the reference points of my life continue to expand and transform, carrying me forward in my becoming; a becoming that has Kaghan woven into its soul. 

What 30 years on Earth has taught me

When I was 14 I had a teacher who inspired me, by her happy and caring nature, to join her Social Justice lunchtime group. I soon became an avid reader of Amnesty newsletters, and began writing letters on behalf of prisoners of conscience. So began an awareness of inequality and injustice.

 When I was 15 I was invited to a Christian youth camp, and realised that I could decide for myself what I believed. I became the only member of my family, apart from my mum, to regularly attend church or profess faith, and although it was a bit of a joke to some of them, it felt like a significant step for me to make a decision for myself about what I believed and who I wanted to be. So began a determination to follow my own path in life.

 When I was 17 I was offered a position as a travelling tutor for the child of a friend going on a musical tour of Europe. It was to be my first big adventure, until then undreamed of. When it fell through near to the last minute, I had a moment of being crushed before realising that just because that plan hadn’t come to fruition, didn’t mean that I couldn’t still go to Europe. So began an understanding that my life is in my own hands, and that if I want something to happen, I have to make it happen.

 When I was 18 I boarded a plane, alone and with tears streaming down my face, excited and terrified. I remember my grandmother predicting I’d be back within a month, and the determination I felt that I wouldn’t let that happen. So began an understanding that the expectation of others do not need to define or limit you.

 When I arrived in England, at a loss as to what I should do there, I accepted a job as an aged care worker. At some point, in the midst of wiping another bottom, brushing another set of old dentures, lifting another hoist and watching another pair of eyes echoing loneliness, I realised that at some point, when all physical dignity is seemingly stripped from you, you can maintain your dignity through acceptance and humility. And as a worker, I came to understand the importance of allowing that dignity, and of giving respect, to those to whom little else remains.

 When I was 19 I remembered that I was young, and that although aged care work felt rewarding, there are some things you should do when you are young. Working in a London pub I learned the importance sometimes of having attitude, of taking no shit, and that work can be fun!

 Towards the end of that year, on a whim I moved to Israel where I spent three months in a commune milking cows. There I learned to embrace being smelly and dirty and physically exhausted. In Israel I also took the opportunity to make a personal pilgrimage of the sacred places of my religion, and found that they moved me not at all. Thus began a process of understanding the importance of questioning our beliefs and finding what truly resonates with us, and that this can be within or outside of the traditional structures of spirituality.

 When I was 22 I took time out of uni to backpack around South-East Asia and work for 4 months in orphanages in Vietnam. Although I loved my experience there, I ended my time feeling disillusioned with volunteer programs, feeling that perhaps we did more damage than good, despite our good intentions. And so began my realisation that our critical faculties, and the ability to make informed and well-thought judgements for ourselves, is not just a blessing, but their use a duty and a responsibility.

 When I was 23 I moved into a hippy drumming community and found a new family and social scene. There, over many years of coming and going, I have learned to value the rich assortment of people around me, and learned that everybody, no matter their age, gender, background and interests, has something valuable they can contribute to our lives and society, and that we can find a common ground with anyone we try to connect with.

 When I was 24, undertaking my honours year at uni, I travelled to Indonesia to do a field study of traditional music and dance in Aceh. Afterwards I stopped for what was meant to be a couple of days in Jakarta, but after discovering a vibrant Rasta and Reggae scene and befriending a crazy assortment of musicians, sorcerers, and drunk and drugged crazies, two days turned into a week, and finally a month, unable as I was to tear myself away from the weird and unfamiliar world I had uncovered. Running out of money I resorted to living under a city bridge with a family of homeless street-musicians rather than leave the dirty, smelly city I had come to love. And so began my deep love for the rough, ungroomed side of life, and an understanding that there can be intense beauty in rawness and grime.

When I was 25 I went to Christmas Island to spend a couple of months volunteering in the Immigration Detention Centre. And there, in my own first world country, I learned much more clearly than I ever had in any poor and developing country, just how unjust and unfair life can be. And so began a recognition that we cannot continue to ignore what is uncomfortable, but that we must allow ourselves to truly see the world, both in its light and dark, and find our place in it with an honest understanding of what is in the shadows.

 When I was 26 I worked in a school in a remote indigenous community in Arnhem Land. In a world that is like mine, and yet so utterly not, in a world of spirits and magic and wisdom and destruction, I realised that reality is not only what I know it as. And so began a deep appreciation for Australia’s indigenous cultures, and a recognition of how little I still understand all the elements of my world.

 Later that year I travelled to Turkey to teach English, and in a hard work environment I learned to stand up for myself and say no to what was unacceptable. Leaving, I went to work with nomadic shepherds in the Austrian Alps and learned to listen to the natural world, and walked 1100km in France and Spain, where I found inner peace (and then lost it again, ‘cause that’s what inner peace is all about I think, a never ending series of steps leading bumpily up and up, towards I’m not sure what). And so I learned that learning is a constant process, never completed and never final in any of its forms.

At 27 I travelled to India and fulfilled a dream 7 years in the making, attending the largest religious gathering on earth, the Kumbh Mela. And patience was understood, and rewarded. There, disillusioned with what I saw as a world peopled with phony gurus and egotistical yogis, I learned to look beyond names and forms, and to seek the true heart at the centre.

 At 28 I completed a masters degree, finally committing to a career as a teacher, hitchhiked 5000km with a dear friend and explored freedoms that scared and expanded me, and found that both highs and lows in life are often so inter-tangled that it is impossible to see to which category some experiences belong. And so began the process of ending the categorisation of life.

At 29 I found myself in Pakistan, where the learning is ongoing and not entirely clear yet. I still await the final revealing, perhaps years in the future, but know already that it contains words like ‘responsibility’, ‘maturity’, ‘charity’, ‘self-honesty’ and ‘loneliness’.

 In 30 years on this earth I have not found a partner to share my experiences with, I have not created new lives, and I have not built a stable home. There are many experiences I have missed, and many that perhaps I will never have. But if the past 30 is anything to go by, I’m pretty damned excited to see what other experiences and learnings my road will lead me to!

Thanks for being part of my journey to date!

“How long? How far? How hard? How fine?
How heavy or light the load?
If it’s half as good as the half I’ve known,
Here’s Hail! . . .to the rest of the road.”
– Don Blanding

A year on – What I love About Pakistan

A year ago I wrote a blog post describing my favourite things about Pakistan. That was at a point when I had been here less than a month. Reading back on it now, after more than a year here, I find it interesting to reflect on how much or little of this list is similar to my current perceptions of this place. I feel like at that time I was a ‘Pakistan novice’ (as indeed I was), and that what I perceived then as ‘Pakistan’ is so different from what I know this country as now.

I am, moreover, under no illusions that I have now reached some definitive ‘knowing’ about the country that I live in. One year is not nearly enough to know a country, or perhaps to know anything. Knowing is so inextricably linked with time and experience, and as I grow older, one year feels so short, so insignificant…

Recently I was having a conversation with a dear friend about how long exactly it takes before we can ‘feel’ a place, by which I mean that feeling you have about the place where you grew up; that feeling of simply ‘knowing’ what the air in that place is all about. I hypothesised that at least one cycle of seeing the seasons change (in other words, a year) is the minimum you need to really know the rhythms of a space. I’m not completely sure about this now though. Some places I feel like I knew after a few months, and others I don’t think I will ever know, and so maybe its all a bit more mysterious than seeing the seasons change…

A year is still a year though, one thirtieth of my time on earth to date (which can seem like a huge amount or very little, depending on my frame of mind), and there are some things I do know and feel about this beautiful, frustrating country. So here it is, my updated list of ‘favourite things about Pakistan’:

Although this culture is known for its feuds and pride and honour system, I have found people remarkably forgiving. No matter how cranky and short-tempered I get in the course of a working day, the people around me don’t seem to ever hold a grudge, and every day there is a chance to show up fresh.

I have a greater appreciation of the freedom in which I was brought up. Recently, sitting in the sun with some friends during our lunch break, I lay down on the grass to enjoy the warmth and to relax. The two girls I was sitting with were at once horrified and envious, and proclaimed that if they were to do that, as Pakistani women, it would be considered so inappropriate, but at the same time it looked so relaxing that they wished they could. Something I never even thought twice about was such a sign of liberty to them…

The Azan, the Muslim call to prayer, is still perhaps my favourite sound on earth, and the Azan in my village is the most beautiful of all Azans I’ve ever heard. I live in a valley surrounded by mountains on all sides, and as all the mosques on all sides simultaneously call, the sounds of each reach across the valley and bounce off the opposite mountain walls, creating an eerie merging of tones that interact playfully with each other in the space between. In the evening the wolves and jackals in the mountains join in, and the whole valley feels alive with vibrations of sound unlike anything I have ever experienced before.

The changing seasons are marked not only by the ebbing and flowing of colours and by the increasing and decreasing size of the river, but also by the passage of nomadic shepherds who herd their large flocks of sheep up the mountains in spring and back down in autumn. Known as ‘Kuchi’ (travellers, or ‘people who walk’), they originate in Afghanistan, and have a long and fascinating history that I have been trying to learn about. Throughout the summer the roadsides of my valley are marked with the low white tents that they live in, and often women in beautiful brightly coloured dresses, unlike anything the local people wear, can be seen sitting around the tents, cooking and washing and living strangely and beautifully normal domestic lives in an uncannily public way.

    

The children are wonderfully naughty. Before I came to Pakistan I had some idea that, being conservative village children from a culture that has such a strong focus on respect for elders and figures of authority, the children here would be very polite and respectful and obedient. Which, don’t get me wrong, would have been lovely, as a teacher! It turned out to be a completely false premise though, and the children drive me crazy and make my heart glow with their wonderful, hilarious, and awful naughtiness. Although I often have moments of wishing they would all just sit still and quiet and do as I ask them to, I am always aware that if they actually did that I would probably be very disturbed. It’s such an unnatural state for children to be in. But luckily my children here are perfectly childish, and although sometimes I lose my temper with them, I wouldn’t have them any other way.   

   

Right now it is winter here and I am living and working in Islamabad, in the Head Office of the organisation I work for. Next week though I head back to my village home again, and I am so excited to see what new favourite things I will find this year, as the seasons go around once again in Pakistan.

More Than Just a Pin On a Map

As a traveller, meeting other travellers and engaging in conversations about places and experiences we have in common (or dream of having), I very often hear people say “I’ve done such-and-such a place”. My immediate thought is always an alarmed “What have you done to it?!”

I feel like many people see travelling as a list of places that they need to check off their list, so that they can retire contentedly, knowing that they have ‘done’ life properly. I imagine them literally, list in hand, breathing a sigh of a relief as they board the plane home, glad to know that they have done that place and need never return.

Perhaps I am being judgmental. I don’t doubt that everyone learns and experiences what they want or need to from travelling, each in their own way and according to their own vision of life. But I have always held the view that language is important, and that the way we communicate about a subject is very indicative of our deep-seated ideas. And I don’t think anyone who has truly travelled and experienced another culture could ever actually believe that we can ever have ‘done’ an environment or culture. ‘Done’ indicates a finished action, a deed completed, or at the very least, something exhausted of use or potential. And so I find it weird, if not downright ignorant and disrespectful, to communicate that in a matter of days, weeks or even months, you could have ‘done’ a place that has a rich and long history, a complex culture, and a diversity hidden to the uninitiated eye (and doesn’t everywhere have that?)

I am aware that in our desires to travel we are not united. We are each powered by a different spirit, each seek different experiences and understandings, and I do not think that the motivations of any of us could be said to be more or less valid or important. And so I write this with the intention of being understanding and open-minded, and I continue to modify my sentences with softening words of non-judgment… but it’s no use. I have to say it. I just don’t get it!! Why travel if all you want to do is be done with it?!

Day by day I am becoming more strongly aware of what a gift it is to be invited into someone else’s home, and to have their lives shared with us. And with this growing appreciation comes an understanding that we must match gratitude with responsibility; we must always carry that awareness with us, and endeavour not to disrespect the generous gift of home and culture. As you wouldn’t proudly treat a lover like a prostitute, we shouldn’t cheapen a place that has given us hospitality.

Everywhere is so much more than just a pin on a map.

Why You Can’t Always Do What You Want

One of the hardest things I am finding about ‘growing up’ is learning the meaning of responsibility. By this I don’t mean just the everyday responsibility that involves providing for yourself and your dependents, but the kind of responsibility that involves facing uncomfortable truths and realising that the world really doesn’t revolve around you. It’s a difficult kind of realisation to have, because sometimes it means you start to see that some things that you feel would be in YOUR best interests are not necessarily in the best interests of others, and that at times this means you have a responsibility to forego certain things.

What I am talking about, more specifically, is a kind of responsibility that comes with being a wanderer of the world. We wanderers are fuelled by a desire to experience life in ways and places far removed from our own world. We are fired up by the sound of foreign names, by the recounts of adventurers past, by faded photographs and stories of diminishing traditions. We are people not content to know the world second-hand, and, inspired by a confidence that the world is there for the knowing, we venture out, each in our own ay, each following impulses that are often not understood by others. The thing I’m realising though, is that all the exoticism, all the foreignness, all the traditions and languages and vistas… all this is ‘home’ to someone, and as a guest in someone else’s home, there are certain things I need to take into account.

For example, do they want me there?

Coming to Pakistan felt like a pretty big move, on the travelling spectrum. I’ve lived in a number of countries, and travelled through many others, but nothing felt very adventurous until I came here. Nowhere else did I feel that I really had to ask myself how big a risk I was willing to take, what price I was willing to pay, how much of myself and my own life I was willing to surrender. But I have found that here, with most things stripped away; my independence, my freedom, my health, my finances, and increasingly my sanity; I am finding the thing that all risk-takers find… that taking risks is addictive! Pakistan begins to feel like not much at all. Afghanistan! Now that’s a place I’d like to go! Iraq, Nigeria… I mean, that would be a ‘real’ adventure!

And within the tumble of these thoughts and desires in my head swirls the knowledge that people DO go there! Journalists under cover, intrepid wanderers, girls who don burqas or disguise themselves as boys to infiltrate some of the riskiest places on earth, and emerge with exciting tales to tell! Oh how my heart yearns for THAT!

And then the grown-up me with a new-found sense of responsibility pipes up uncomfortably. “What if something happened to you?” Not in the sense of ‘What if you are injured or killed’. Obviously I don’t want that, but I must admit it’s not a fear that immediately comes to mind when I think of these places. My responsibility speaks of the bigger ramifications my adventures, if they became misadventures, could have. For while it may be all very well to risk my own life to travel to remote and dangerous places, the truth is, it’s not just my own life I would be risking. For the uncomfortable truth is that we live in a world where, as a westerner, my life is judged to be worth more than the lives of many others, and that means that a sticky situation that I may laughingly get myself into can have political and international ramifications far beyond my small insignificant self.

I am reminded now of a story I heard recently of a European biker who wanted to travel through Pakistan, through tribal areas where bandits and militants reign. He was prepared to take that risk, and when he completed his journey and told his story afterwards, it was greeted with admiration. What bravery! What was not so widely known was that a local policeman, assigned to him as an escort after he refused warnings and requests not to travel through such dangerous areas, was killed protecting him during the journey. He, a westerner whose life was judged to be important and who would obviously be a target in such areas, caused another person to lose their life, and emerged in a shower of glory and triumph. After all, sometimes you have to take risks in life right?

So as much as I would like to travel to distant and dangerous places, as much as I would like to be the crazy girl who goes in disguise to militant hideouts or unchartered tribal areas, I am not willing to take those kind of risks. The longer I spend in Pakistan the more I realise that while I may want to play with my own safety and push my own boundaries, I have no right to play with the safety of others. I am lucky to know I come from a country where my government (much as I despise them most of the time) would try to interfere if my life were at stake, but I am realising now what a cost that could have. From little things big things grow, and that is not always a comforting thought!

The world is so interconnected, and we need to live our lives in a way that acknowledges the ways in which they can affect the world around us. A small action can have a big ramification. When we want to travel somewhere, we need to think about how our presence may affect the security, the environment, or the culture of that place. And we need to ask ourselves, honestly and with responsibility, if our adventure is really in the best interests of that place or not. Everywhere is someone’s home.