Rains in the Distance

For as long as I can remember,I have longed for far-away places. As a child, my friends played with Barbies while I read War and Peace. This yearning has been both a blessing and curse. It has led me to hire boatmen and travel rivers where I was accompanied by the cries of macaques, entertained by proboscis monkeys and awed by wild organgutans building their nests in the trees. It has driven me to dance and drink tuak with longhouse dwellers in the jungles of Kalimantan, hike the mountains of Vietnam in the company of the "blue" Mung and live in a cave in Crete. It has prevented me from working 9 to 5 in the same place for 20 years... if you only get two weeks off a year, it's hard to make it to Bali for Galangun. It has changed me and turned me inside out, ripped out my heart and stuffed it back in again,leaving me not quite the same, never the same. But always eager for the next awakening.

But this same yearning too many times has hindered me from living in the now, from establishing the roots my friends have put down. For always I have one eye cast to the horizon, on the rains in the distance. When I can, I follow the rains, golden rain dripping from lush tropical foliage to the forest floors of Borneo. Blue rain sweeping across the mesa from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, lightening splitting the sky. And the green, life-giving rain falling on the rice fields and villages of Bali, the mystical island where I will never quite belong, but where I will always return.