Being Here

John Steinbeck began his book “Travels with Charlie” with the words: “When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was upon me”...
He went on to write, with insight, humor, and I think poignancy, about wanderlust, about his occasional need to go someplace and to see things.

I am not John Steinbeck, but I can certainly relate.

One of my friends is in Costa Rica now on a bird photography adventure. Two other friends went to India in January, each on a very different kind of trip: One went to the north of the country to attend a 10-day teaching by the Dalai Lama in Bodh Gaya; the other spent a month traveling that vast continent by train, then ended her journey by taking in the beach scene in the south. Two other friends spent Christmas in South America, hiking in Patagonia.

“The world is big and life is short,” one of my friends says.

Ah, the urge to see things...to be someplace else...

***

Perhaps as tonic to my own, currently-going-nowhere-existence -- I have photographic commitments on my calendar and thus I must stay close to home -- I headed out the door this week with specific intentions to see what I could see, right here at home....and, by the way, to be content with that.

Here are notes from my experiences this week at non-travel:

--There is an old blue golf umbrella on our front porch (I am not a golfer, but I do have a couple of clubs that my dad gave me, and of course the umbrella.) For some reason, come springtime, little frogs seem to crawl up inside the umbrella and hang out there (I found a frog in the umbrella last year too.)

--Just down the lane, my friend Rusty the Horse comes running across his pasture when he sees me coming, knowing I almost always have treats in my pocket. I produce the goods, and then Rusty and I visit. Rusty has amazing blue eyes, and on a pretty, blue-sky spring day, I realize that even if I can’t be someplace exotic, my mood is anything but blue.

--Back at home after my visit with Rusty, I spend some time, laying on my back under our magnolia tree, looking up at the blossoms. They remind me of fireworks.

I point my lens right toward the sun and shoot pictures of the blossoms, and the blinding sunburst. For several minutes thereafter, my eyes water and everything I look at is tinged in a weird yellow color.