My solo travel adventure has officially begun, and I figured I should commemorate this moment with a blog post so you all know I am alive, but it won’t be very fancy or have any drawings because I’m typing this as fast as I can in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way at my hostel in Bangkok before I move accommodations where there may or may not be wifi. But it will be free! Thanks to a kind local I met yesterday who spontaneously offered their couch to me.
I’ve been in Southeast Asia for two days, and it’s hard to believe that I have sixty more ahead of me. And that for the next sixty days, I won’t see anyone I know. And that I will only don six-ish outfits, and that I won’t wear any makeup, and that I basically have no idea how things are going to turn out.
I’m excited, yeah, of course. But I think I’m more intrigued than anything else. Because this isn’t going to be a mindlessly fun tourist vacation like every other trip abroad I’ve taken thus far. It’s more intentional than that. It’s about building upon a thread I started two months ago when I suddenly didn’t have a job anymore.
For the past two months, I’ve tried to hone in on the things that give me the most energy, the things that I intuitively know I love, and the things that will make me a better person, and practice those things as much as possible. I traded Facebook newsfeed and Instagram browsing in for meditation and reading books about spirituality. I camped in the mountains of LA and Santa Barbara and ran through Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver forests and hung out a lot in parks and generally tried to be closer to nature. I went to art museums, I journaled, I road tripped with my best friends and saw a lot of my family.
And throughout the whole process, I started to gain some clarity about the person I am and the person I want to be. I’ve tried to come to terms with my flaws. How I tend to judge people quickly and harshly – strangers and loved ones alike. How I’m often more interested in talking than I am in listening. How I’m not naturally good at empathizing with others’ pain. How I say and think mean things sometimes. How I act from a place of fear and/or anger more than I want to.
After engaging in politics for the past several years, I’m finally starting to realize that creating the kind of beautiful world we want to live in isn’t just about fighting bad policy and electing good leaders. It’s also about reckoning with the culture we have built, a culture based on accumulating wealth and exploiting people and destroying the planet, and identifying and creating a better culture of compassion and community and sustainability. And realizing that that starts with our own personal transformation.
So my goal for these next two months is to become better at love – loving myself, loving others, and loving our natural planet.
That’s why I decided to make my first stop of the trip a mindfulness camp in rural northeast Thailand. It’s a sort of experimental living community in the forest built by volunteers from all over the world. I’m heading out on a bus tomorrow to stay there for two weeks and practice meditation, yoga, permaculture gardening/building, and non-violent communication with thirty other people whom I have never met before. There most definitely won’t be wifi. I don’t know if there will be electricity. There will undoubtedly be a shit ton of mosquitoes. But guess how much it costs? $6.00 a day! So I’m down.
As anyone who knows me can tell you, I fantasize a lot about ditching my smartphone to be in nature and eat food I’ve grown and live in a close-knit community and generally exist completely off the capitalist grid. The tiny bit of outdoor adventuring and meditating and healthy living I’ve done has made me super happy, so I figured it would be cool to jump in the deep end and see what that does for me – do I have a limit? Is this a phase I can get out of my system? Or will I love it so much that I’ll never come back?
We will all find out what happens in two weeks. Stay tuned!
Me, too! I am with you 100% on the insight that it all begins with personal transformation– as expressed so beautifully here. . . “After engaging in politics for the past several years, I’m finally starting to realize that creating the kind of beautiful world we want to live in isn’t just about fighting bad policy and electing good leaders. It’s also about reckoning with the culture we have built, a culture based on accumulating wealth and exploiting people and destroying the planet, and identifying and creating a better culture of compassion and community and sustainability. And realizing that that starts with our own personal transformation.
So my goal for these next two months is to become better at love – loving myself, loving others, and loving our natural planet.”