Having walked alone these last three weeks, another shadow moving next to mine made for quite a change. Yet again, the path had gone in a different direction from my expectations – the lesson then, I think, might lay in the space between.
Travel is funny like that sometimes, isn’t it? Giving us these oddly scheduled arrivals and strange pockets of time in which to explore a new country; in-between places that will pass through us as quickly as we pass through them.
I’m overwhelmed by everything I will never understand about Stan’s story – what it means to lose a parent so soon in your life, what it means to hear enemy tanks encircling your city at night – and by the simple yet poignant wisdom he now shares with me.
And so it was that I decided to return to Iž, to circle back to who I was the last time I was here. I wanted to sketch the island again – and to honor the crazy journeys that life delights in sending us on. As I sketched, all I could think was: thank you.
I decided that when Sanel does in fact realize his dream of drinking in an Irish pub, he won’t be disappointed. It was warm, it was human, it was the feeling of many people in a small room. And when you thought about it, you could almost smell the coast.
You have to do this every now and then, don’t you? Give your wonder a chance to breathe and marvel at where life has brought you: to Bosnia, to a family’s back garden, to a table beneath a pomegranate tree.
Travel is always doing this to you, isn’t it? Sending you off in search of one thing – the máta, for instance – only to give you something altogether different to discover. And for this, you will leave Hortobágy grateful.
While “From Prague to Petra” will unfortunately not meet its fitting end in the Wadi Rum desert, I hope you’ll understand the redirections and keep following along this journey. Thank you as always for reading!
Seeking the holy in the everyday is what has kept me in Vienna longer than I expected to be: lingering in café after café, feeding my new addiction to Wiener melanges, and reveling in routines made reverent.
We had come to lose the distance, to seek connections between this side of the family tree and our own. Just as we were able to view a star cluster three million light years away, so will we leave the Czech Republic calling strangers family.