“There’s no place like home,” lamented Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. But home is not a structure. Just as travel is not a place we go. Home is who we are. And travel is our innate state of being. Home is an internal longing that moves us into the flights of fancy that require no planes. And travel motivates us to question our existential homelessness. We are essentially both always home when travelling and always travelling when we are home. Because there is no such thing as away.

Traveling, in my experience, is never a linear one-dimensional trajectory into the often unknown places I at times choose randomly from a National Geographic map sent as a freebie on subscription. Travel can meet me in places so foreign yet with a familiarity that is not from here or now, but from a thread that has come unplucked from a different story of another me. I see faces in profile—people in streets, on scooters, behind a glass window of a coffee shop—and I catch myself in the motion of bracing to orientate to a Hello or Vannakam or Namaste, before I comprehend fully that I am in a foreign place where everyone has begun to take on the look of a friend from somewhere else. I forget that I am the foreign place because I am also home.

Last year I packed the conventional notion of home in a box and threw it in the recycling bin. And 6 months into my travels, I feel like home for me is that discarded plastic bottle that someone has added to several hundred other plastic bottles and turned into a fleece pullover for Patagonia. It couldn’t be more different yet is has become something useful, beautiful and has created change in its very own changing. Upcycled. It has a unique narrative and plot.

Travel should always be unresolved. Travel should leave you feeling slightly edgy, like you’re missing something … or lost … like there is an existential longing for something and, like the cookie jar, is always just out of reach. For me that missing is like the pieces of myself I leave behind so I have a reason to return one day. Or perhaps they are the pieces that no longer fit; pieces that slowly become unstuck—unhinged—and fall between cracks in the earth. Like a newly extracted tooth, there is at first a sense of loss. And then—one day, with no prior warning or noticing—the tongue no longer seeks out the old but seeks only the testing and tasting of the new.

It’s a puzzle this drive to seek but not to find; the picture never completed. Perhaps there really is no such thing as completion. Our parents lied to us. Like perfection, completion is not a destination on any map; just a fanciful place. Like Neverland.

Translation comes from the Latin, ‘borne across’. I have been borne across oceans, mountains, borders, boundaries, religions. I have lost much in the process of translation—my language, my culture, my capacity to communicate with anything close to my prior vocabulary. But I have found more than I have let go—perspective, detachment, curiosity. Because just as there is no such thing as away with travel, there is also no such thing as lost. I am always here … in perpetual arriving to be where I must be for that which is arriving to meet me too.

I plot routes. The routes plot me. I walk the same paths but they are different. I am different. Same same but different. Through moving my brain triangulates the stability that sneaks through the portal of the not knowing. My plans move like the fascia of the body; tensegrity keeps them bound as well as free.

Movement is my magic.
Curiosity is my freedom.