Baring All

(An easy Sunday ramble read.)

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It wasn’t unusual for me to ponder the plausibility, truthfulness and very existence of my spirit animal on my morning run. My mind could wander. Far.

I was a wolf. I’d worked out that much by going to a GCSE art exhibition at the age of 17.

How, you wonder.

We saw a piece of art about the animal inside. It was Obama, compared to a Canadian bear. Beside it was a mirror. It said:

What’s your spiritual animal?

I looked, baring my teeth a little.

Wolf, I thought. “Wolf,” I said.

“Wolf,” my mum agreed.

And so it was that I began to adopt the persona of the wolf. Not that I wasn’t already the wolf in my looks;

• The long pointed nose
• Glowing eyes
• Sharp incisors

Nor in my personality;

• Passionate
• Self-motivated
• Ambitious
• Mildly aggressive/ stubborn

It was more that I owned the person that I was. I came to enjoy the wolf. I enjoyed being the beast.

*

Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m talking about this. Me too. But basically I listened to a podcast this morning from the Guardian about why we fear the dark and how we are hardly ever in darkness.

It went that as children we are told that bad things lurk in the dark. That darkness is to be feared. In a religious sense, the light (whether it be a singular God or multiple or wisdom or truth or enlightenment) came to save us from darkness.

Why did we need saving from the night? Why do we use this metaphorical binary to glorify good?

The night sky always always ALWAYS holds a fascination and a draw towards it. The blackness and the realisation of our insignificance. The knowledge that a life beyond our control exists above our heads.

I remember being in India. It was the most breath-taking sky I had ever seen. Laying on the sandy school playground in the Himalayan foothills and staring at the sky. The fact that you could see satellites was magnificent. It enveloped me. I couldn’t sleep unless I’d had my dosage of the night sky.

There is so much wonder in the night that it does startle me a little that our culture has demonized the night. We are cruel because in the night we know are murderers and rapists and ghosts and shifts between universes. Except they are not. As many crimes happen in the day than in the night. In fact more.

So, why do we fear the night? Why is darkness the bad guy?

It’s strange because I feel more guilt when I miss the morning because they say it’s the best part of the day.

I find days functional; yes. Pretty; yes. But not always overwhelming.

I mean that in the sense of what I see. I prefer how the light looks when it makes shadows slide down mountain faces in the evening. Or when trees take a stretch over the fields at dusk. When the setting sun is like a painter at his easel streaking canvas with oranges and pinks and purples.

That is when the world comes alive; when the human world deems it sleeping.

I’d like to go back to being the wolf in the classic essence of the animal. Think wolf and you think night. Think wolf and you think moon.

It’s impossible to draw the two apart. That is what the wolf is. That is the land where it reigns. Perhaps that’s why we fear the night;

It is not our territory.

We think the night is useless. We decide it can only be for sleep. Lights out, doors closed, curtains drawn. That’s what happens in the night.

If we club until 4am we are crazy. No one stays up that late. How could you be so strange to take advantage of the dark?

What, I suppose we could ask ourselves, is; what can we do with the dark?

Our society is not apt for the dark. The only things that we can do is that which does not depend on other human services. A purpose that depends only on our own solitude. Our own ability to create fun. Our ability to create an aim for ourselves.

Our society makes no function for the darkness. But perhaps the world doesn’t depend upon our society’s value on ‘productivity’. And it doesn’t. The world existed before our societal regulations.

But perhaps we are right. The night has no purpose. Yet, it is not pointless. It is the chance for nothingness. The mandatory break essential to our humanity. Perhaps we don’t have to do anything with our night but that which it does to us. Let us be in the night and we have completed our purpose.

The night demands nothing of us and that, besides the wonder found in a glance at the stars, mysteries in the Milky Way, is the beauty of the darkness.

Travel in the Time of Terror

So I had this post lined up a while ago but I put it off for a lack of motivation because somehow the content of the post seemed:

stupid.

irrelevant.

non-applicable.

And then it became apparent that terror attacks whilst you were holidaying in Europe and other places was actually not as unlikely as it had once been.

Barcelona. The next.

How could I be silly enough to think there would be no more? Or rather, why was I thinking that London would be the next victim – despite its recent terror dosage?

It got me thinking:

How does terrorism affect my travel, if it does at all?

I don’t feel like this is something a lot of travellers really talk about. There is this assumption, I suppose, that one who travels is fearless; willing to risk their health and safety in the pursuit of newfound adventures, cultures and cuisines.

I think it’s like that when you don’t look so deeply at it. When you take the human individual and rename them a traveller. They have been labelled with names that adhere to what a traveller is; ambitious, resilient, adventurous.

In which case, for the most part, I suppose I am ‘The Traveller’.

But I wouldn’t be lying if I said that the threat of terrorism does affect me. Not in so much that I won’t go to places because of it. I feel as though the slight anxiety I feel has less to do with what places I visit and more to do with how I choose to act in those places.

I wouldn’t sacrifice opportunities to travel because I fear those countries may be targets. Hell, I live in a target country! But yet I don’t fear going to London or Manchester.

It’s strange, but like terror attacks that go on in war-torn countries or other where terror is ‘common-place’, the fact that terrorism is happening closer to home has not yet hit me.

It hurts and I can connect with it. This just doesn’t feel like the life that we should be living and there is a slight fear that I will still be on this Earth when nuclear war starts or a savage turn of events makes England much less of the country that it is today.

When I am abroad, I am not blind.

For me, I think naivety is a BIG part of travelling – which may sound strange. You’re in a foreign culture, alone. Probably the last thing you should do is be naive, right? Well, I’m not so convinced. Whilst I am aware of the world, I don’t let those things in.

As well as being naive, I am a serial worrier (although things have got a lot better recently!) Still, I’m not as chilled out as I would like to be. And naivety is my shield. Ignorance keeps the thoughts out.

This doesn’t mean that I am not aware of my surroundings but I choose not to let my mind wander with the what ifs.

I choose to see the good.

I make decisions every time I am abroad to trust. To open up. To be shown. It is no way to explore the world if you keep all your cards to your chest and decide only to mingle with your homies.

I’m still very comfortable travelling around Europe and the world, however, not only because I forget about what has been before but because I do realise that terrorism is something I cannot stop. Like going to Asia and fearing being caught in a volcanic blast, earthquake or monsoon, I can’t prepare myself for being caught in those situations. I have a trust in a power higher than myself which I believe holds me. God has got me. And that helps. A lot.

So, does terrorism affect me? Yes, of course. More than I thought. 

But will I let it dictate the path of my heart and where I decide to travel and who I choose to interact with? No. 

We are at the peril of our decisions. Lord knows that even in the UK I can make a bad decision. I’ve made many, perhaps not life-threatening ones. Perhaps one day my decision to spend a weekend abroad will be a good one because it might save me from something I would have got caught up in, in England. Or perhaps it might be an unlucky decision. Or perhaps it might be a decision of no consequence at all because the future has few predictions that I choose to abide by and where the future is lost, so that shall be where the traveller is found; wandering.