Journey Without Maps

Yesterday morning, I was taxiing from the gate out to the runway in Vancouver, British Columbia. For those of you who have been to Vancouver, it will come as no surprise that this is one of the world's greatest cities. Beautiful. Cosmopolitan. Amazing waterways and mountains surround it and the cool Pacific air breezes through. You can definitely spend a fair amount of time here and enjoy every minute of it. And occasionally I find myself lost in thought. About life, my connection to it, the earth, grasses, mountains, water. And trees. Trees are one of my most favorite things attached to this earth. I was looking out of my jumpseat porthole as we moved along the taxi way yesterday early morning and looking at the tall green grasses. And wondering what it would be like to live in those grasses. Be in them. Lie down in them. I wonder what it would be like to be naked and lie down in them...especially if they were wet. To feel the dirt of the Canadian earth on my back while the wet strands of green grass taunted my face and legs. And just to stare up at the sky. I considered what a vastly different experience it would be to be outside of the airplane looking at us move along the concrete taxi way versus being inside looking out.

And you wouldn't believe what happened shortly afterwards -- I was glancing through my copy of Whole Living magazine and ran across an article by Susanna Sonnenberg titled Journey Without Maps. In spite of the fact that I'm very much a map lover and can't hardly walk by one without stopping to ponder and gaze, I am also a big fan of being a free spirit and navigating throughout life without a map sometimes. I learn a lot that way. Sonnenberg relates the story of moving from New York City to Montana and all that goes along with that.

But not everyone has that built-in compass that permits them to traverse the ways of this world without an internal map. They just plain old don't know how. I am thankful that I am relatively stable, educated, have an innate perception of common sense, and can typically get from Point A to Point B in life without much trouble. Many cannot. I was taught. Some were not. I was shown the way. Not everyone was. And I'm thankful that I have the desire to sit in a Starbucks with a fancy coffee on a busy urban street just as much as I have the want to lie naked in a field of wet grass. Both appeal to me. Both teach different lessons. Both are different journeys with entirely different maps.