I think it's really starting to hit me that I am leaving very soon. Maddie and I spent the morning buying some bits and pieces for the trip, and a charity just came around to collect some of my furniture. My flat is looking emptier every day, and the cardboard boxes holding my travel bits grow constantly. It's all coming together at a rapid pace. Every day I give away pieces of furniture, paintings, objects, ideas, as well as pieces of myself. Some of these things I've had for years and it feels very peculiar to let go of them. Freeing [View Full Entry]

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The following phrase just landed in my inbox: 'Have you noticed how lacking clarity is clarity itself? How, if you aren't sure about something, that alone, has meaning? Honour uncertainty. It's the seed from which all-knowingness comes. Give it time.' Yikes! I just love it when that type of synchronicity happens. That my life is uncertainty at the moment is an understatement. It really is probably just a case of 'leaving anxiety' and it reflects on some of the decisions I'm having to make right now. Decisiveness is not generally one of my strengths anyway, but it's just particu [View Full Entry]

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Travelling light has always been one of my biggest challenges. As I write, I am nervously glancing at two big cardboard boxes stuffed full with things I am intending to take on my trip. They are big and heavy. And they don't even include clothing yet. When I started planning this trip, I thought everything would be straight-forward: walking boots, two pairs of trousers, two t-shirts, two fleeces, jacket, you get the picture. But no, then you're supposed take a medical kit, homeopathic remedies, mosquito nets, sleeping bag, water bottle, contact lens solution, towels, and all the suddenly neces [View Full Entry]

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Letting go is an interesting process. As I declutter my flat, give away furniture, cancel my BT phone line and broadband, and let go of one bind after another, I am reviewing everything else in my life. It's a wonderful, purifying process that puts everything in perspective, especially what is important and what isn't. Before I moved to Warwickshire three years ago, I lived in a big three-storey house with a cellar and a loft and a garden shed. All of these were full of stuff I had accumulated over the past ten years - furniture, records, books, ornaments, clothes, old [View Full Entry]

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Apart from arranging visas, train tickets, travel insurance and vaccinations, I am currently devouring travel books by the kilo. A book that has really touched me recently in its profundity was Daniel Odier's 'Tantric Quest - An Encounter with Absolute Love'. It is set in the Himalayas and describes the author's quest in the late 1960's to find a tantric master who could help him where texts and intellectual searching could no longer take him. He discovered Shivaic tantrism, a spiritual path that seeks to transcend ego and rediscover the divine by embracing the passions. After many mont [View Full Entry]

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I decided a while ago that I would do this trip without flying. Partially, this is because of environmental issues, but in the last few years I began to dislike flying more and more. I've flown a lot in my life, since I was eleven years old, and it has lost its appeal (if there ever was one...) long ago. Apart from the fact that you can't move on the plane and the tedious check-in procedures, there is something absurd about stepping on a plane in rainy, cold Britain and emerging in a hot, tropical country ten hours later, in a [View Full Entry]

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I've always been a restless person. My heritage determines it. By birth I am half-Sicilian, half German, and to complicate matters, my mother was born in the Czech Republic on the Polish border. All of these wonderfully different, opposing energies mingle inside me and occasionally create conflict! When I was 20, I left my native Germany for England, where I've now lived for the past fifteen years. I always travelled a lot, but primarily in Europe and the USA (i.e. The West). My first visit to a non-Western country was early this year, to Sri Lanka. And that visit set me [View Full Entry]

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At the age of 35, I am finally leaving the illusions of relative safety & security behind to travel the world. This has been a dream of mine for.... oh, probably about twenty years or so. But this is really the first time since I was a teenager that I am pretty much commitment-free. My twenties were marked by responsibility and commitment: I had my own business, property, a long-term relationship, a dog, two cats. Over the last five years, I slowly discarded all of those - I closed down my business; sold my house; split up with my boyfriend; my [View Full Entry]

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