The Blind Man Society

I’m sitting here this morning thinking about traveling, and what it is to be a traveler. And, its been quite a while since I’ve spieled off about my favorite subject…

In my opinion, many people think that to be a traveler you have to leave the country and go around the world to lands with foreign languages, customs and ways. I think, however that there are all kinds of travelers out there – symbolic, metaphorical, spiritual, cultural, physical, the list goes on. And, thank goodness for these people! And, how can you be a traveler, without physically traveling? Well, I have the below example:

I remember when I was a kid, playing the board game Monopoly with my family, and my dad was always a fan of owning railroads. He also spent an inordinate amount of time in Monopoly jail. Dad, in my opinion, was kind of a blues man.

I express being a white bluesman through my music. Dad expressed this through monopoly, and we all seem to find our mediums to do these things, sometimes totally by accident. F. Scott Fitzgerald said in the Great Gatsby that the bellows of the Earth vented steam through frogs croaking every night. Choosing the right medium to express things really can be a magic thing. So magic in fact, that I’m about to go electrostatic from remembering my favorite line (the above) out of that book.

How can you spot a person who is a traveler, at heart or otherwise? Well, they go by a number of names out there: adventurer, commuter, hiker, migrant, passenger, pilgrim, sailor, and tourist. These people, seem to be…well, according to a list of synonyms I just looked up, powerful, mighty, robust, resilient and a couple other ones I cannot remember because I couldn’t cut copy and paste – and my memory is not quite what it used to be. However, to make up for this, I’m including a work below that covers travel without giving TOO MUCH away – its called the Moon and Six Pence…

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deeprooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

Readers who have been with me a long time, will note that this is the third time, I have referenced this particular writing in these blogs. I’m busting out with the hourglass thing here for those who love hidden meanings and mysteries, because this is, the bottom of an hourglass, and we all know that it doesn’t stop there – you just turn the hourglass over and continue on. I’ll leave this here, and highly interpretive… The question, I’m thinking about as I write this and am supposed to already know – wink – is how long it took for the sand to fall. How many minutes was this particular hourglass? Or hours, days, weeks or months? Hm.

Well, work continues to sharpen up on my blog writing again. This was my swing at the first of three to be fighting fit again after taking weeks off. This makes 147 blogs over two years and I figured I would choose a fun topic for this particular number combination.

Thank you everyone for taking the time to read these blogs, and I hope that you have a fantastic Monday out there, if such a thing there be, wherever you may be, in the world. Please feel free, as always, to leave comments in the box below.