Idle on the Islands

I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but here it goes - I am bored in the Galapagos. That’s right, bored stiff, aching to get a taste of North American cartoons, or house music, or a coffee house, or ANYTHING but this stupid sand and sea.
OK, that’s pushing it.
But here’s the thing, traveling is still living, and part of living is boredom. It is an important part of living at that. The unfortunate (or fortunate, depending on how you look at it) thing about travel is that you no longer have the luxury of doing nothing and feeling OK about it. You must, at all times, take full advantage of your surroundings, of the people around you, of the experience of it all. The consequence of not being on full alert, of not being constantly active in your environment, sucking up every and all cultural experience(s) whenever possible, learning and feeling and touching and meeting and dancing (for a few examples), is a deep seeded feeling of irresponsibility. What if you never come back to this place? Think of all the people who will never have this opportunity! And, in this particular incidence, five words rattle back and forth in my brain, bouncing off the cracks and crevasses of my own presuppositions- YOU ARE IN THE GALAPAGOS! Get real sister, nobody gets to be a downer in Darwin’s paradise!
It’s true, I’ve been traveling a lot. I’m not sure I can say with conviction that I have been traveling too much, as I am very much in the throws of an addiction to wandering at this current stage in my life. However, the amount of movement, the array of environments and cultural contexts I have been exposed to as of late, and the short amount of time these changes have occurred have significantly altered my ability (or the ease in which I am able to) be present in each place. In one year, I have gone from the urbanity of the Korean suburbs teaching affluent toddlers their ABCs, to the Edenesque islands of Indonesia, black and blue eyed on the back of a bike around Yogyakarta and Borobodur, back to the bar in Canada to make a few bucks and on into the Good ol’ US of A; Austin for fun and family time (and, of course, music…and Barton Springs), Nashville and Manchester for North America’s biggest music festival (Bonnaroooo!), up to Idaho BY BUS (and yes, this is a very, very important detail…for, assumedly, obvious reasons) to plant flowers in rich people’s gardens in Sun Valley, and back up to Alberta for the Stampede, for more family time, for catching up with friends, for the mountains and the fresh air and the barbecue, a road trip through the Rockies with a lovely little pit stop in the Okanagan, to Vancouver and everything wonderful Vancouver represents (and time with my brother), to Seattle (yet another place I could live happily), across Washington and back up into BC for….drum roll…Shambhala (an experience that not only transcended every ounce of expectation I had, but also time and space and boundaries and inhibitions and…well, it was an experience to say the least), to San Francisco (in which I could also live, and die, happy)…to Ecuador.
Most of the time, when I say this list to people, I do not feel as if I am relating true details of my life. I feel as if I am weaving a tale of unfathomable possibilities, a tale based in small exaggerated realities that, in combination, form a grand anecdote of what life could be like if one person, for one year, just got her own way. If, once upon a time, a girl closed her eyes and dreamed a long, epic, romantic dream, about beauty and love and exploration and possibility. And when that girl opened her eyes, she realized it had all actually happened- like she had taken a paintbrush and colored everything around her in vivid embroider y, carved sharp the edges of all things lovely around her, drawing into her passionate people, love and friendship and beauty beyond measure- never knowing that, as she dreamed, the brush moved. It’s true, I am very, very fortunate to, not only have had the experiences I have had over the past year, and the ones I continue to have, but also to be surrounded by people that make it possible for these things to happen, for my faith in the goodness of the world and the ability to, at the end of the day, believe that it has all happened.
And so I sit, on the balcony of my University, looking out over the Pacific, as boobies dive into the depths for fish, and sea lions bark and meander on the sand, and the side softens into fluffy pinks and blues as the sun ekes closer to the horizon. I sit, bored, and happy. I’m lucky to be bored. I’m lucky to have been so busy for the past year (or my entire life, for that matter) feeling alive, living on the edge, that watching the sunset peacefully on San Cristobal is somehow tedious in comparison. It’s true, not everything I love is here (especially in light of being a “traveler”, I have fallen in love with things everywhere). It is a beautiful place- one inconceivably different than any other I have seen before. It is a place of dreams, one that most people only know of in story, only visit in textbooks. I know this, and at all times I am aware of it. But I will be here for months to come (at least until the end of December), and I will have many more opportunities to run its trails, to swim in its sea, to play in its sand. Today I am OK with boredom. I am OK with being a “downer”. Because, in the end, I am achingly grateful for all of it. And, traveler or not, I am still human, no matter how much my little heart may ache, at times, to be a boobie.

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