The International Writers Magazine: Travel Without Destinations

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Border Crossing • Claire Krulikowski Travel, purposefully purposeless travel, helps a person live better than they might have otherwise. That can be a dangerous thing to do. It changes the world around you. People sharing your world start squirming. When you first start traveling, people are excited for you. Continue traveling and, sooner or later, they’ll begin asking you, "Why?"

I’ve gotten the question. I understand I’m making them feel uncomfortable. So why do I continue to travel? Is it just to stretch my legs? Hold encroaching age at bay? Am I still seeking to experience new cultures and learn new things? Am I running so I don’t ever have the regret of moaning, "I should have…?"

Well, maybe, it’s just to get lost for a while and encounter myself and people and places that would otherwise have gone unknown. Yes, that is the real truth; the whole truth. I love losing myself inside places where I'm already standing. Sometimes when I'm traveling, when I'm just wandering and end up getting lost in the breath of some un-tethered now moment-to-moment without stabbing mental hooks into present circumstances and clinging anxiously to future placements - that is to say, when I'm freed and independent of my mind and my known self - it seems as if I trip into a new sphere of living, a whole new placement in space and time that momentarily leaves me reeling. It's a "someplace else" just across some invisible border that looks exactly like where I've been standing, walking or sitting but isn't exactly that one place anymore. A sphere, a life, that's just off-kilter by a hair's breadth, as if all of everything teeming around me are refractions of light and space placed on another surrounding surface entirely, and now I'm living on that surface, too. It’s just a thread's circumference beyond the boundary of the more familiar reality I’ve stepped beyond momentarily, a reality that I can still sense on the other side of the mirror.

I've come to love these moments of haphazard visitation, for that's when I seem to move easier inside a world that thrives with grace. That's when I'm enchanted by the light and energies darting all around me in the form of crowds of people, and the structures, the earth that have come so vibrantly alive to me, been cleansed, clarified and amplified and seem, each and all of them, so...essential. No matter what.

Those lost moments when I’ve crossed borders into some new visceral awareness of the essence of who and why the world really exists, those moments are the ones I gulp great memories of, as vital to my life as oxygen, so that I may live the moments of my life here even better.

© Claire Krulikowski May 2005
author of RAPTURE and MOONLIGHT ON THE GANGA & the forthcoming LIVING A RADICAL PEACE - Founder of AshootingstarZ Production - Services benefiting writers and business owners
 www.clairekrulikowski.com
Talent, Oregon.

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