Life Is a Trip, Even When You Trip

One of the best reasons to read travel essays is to visit somewhere without ever leaving home.  One of the best reasons to read Judith Fein's new book, "Life Is a Trip:  The transformative magic of travel," is to visit your own mind without having to pay a hundred bucks to a shrink.  Never before have I read a book that so clearly connects the outer journey as the path to the inner way. 

Each of Fein's essays led me away from Washington State into an exotic location, then back into my own brain...which turns out to be the most exotic location of all. 

I gained so much insight from this book on how to use travel as a spiritual practice.  Instead of focusing on the known tourist attractions, the author proposes that we go on a hunt for life events such as marriages and birth ceremonies.  Only then, through sharing major life passages, can we really know a people. 

Ms. Fein describes a funeral she attended in Mog Mog Micronesia during which the mourners share not only fond memories of the deceased, but their angers and regrets.  She writes, "During a Mog Mog funeral, people are expected to air all of their feelings about the deceased person publicly, so the negative emotions don't fester...The bad feelings are expressed, rather than repressed, and then they are buried along with the body...And it is forbidden to bad-mouth the dead person once he is lying in his final resting place."

The Mog Mog funeral got me thinking: how often do we bury bad feelings and then they come back to haunt us?  And, conversely, during those times we actually air our hurts and perceived slights, do we actually let them rest?  If we don't, then they can become ghosts rising from the dead to torment us.  The satisfaction in life seems directly correlated to how we handle our emotions, in particular, the less pleasant ones.  Instead of wash, rinse, repeat, I propose feel, express, release.  Then, and only then, can we skip the repeat cycle.

So here I sit in upstate Washington, after finishing Fein's book, having experienced a foot massage next to Communist party members in Vietnam, journaled with a poet living in a Mexican prison, and shaken a healing stick that was a Sorceress's in Mexico.  Travel, whether I've left my couch or not, has become a prayer.  And my life has become a trip to decorate the room inside my head with not only artifacts--move that pinata a little to the right, no the left--but with the bright lights of new ideas.  May I always throw open the windows of my mind, even at my own funeral, and may I leave behind only love.

Well, mostly love.  I wouldn't want to deprive my loved ones the opportunity to feel, express, and release, therefore burying any bad feelings alongside me.  May that be my last kindness on earth.

Amen.

Posted by Bliss at 9/7/2010 7:28 AM
Categories: wisdom, travel, books
Tags: wisdom Judith Fein Life Is a Trip travel books
 
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