Life at home.

Home

One of the many reasons I'm a terrible travel blogger is because I have trouble summoning enthusiasm for retelling exciting stories of my travels. It occurs to me that wanting to tell and then telling these stories may actually be the only requirement for having a blog. But I only want to tell about certain things:

How I saw a Georgian man on the metro the other day and thought it was my grandpa - before remembering that my grandpa is no longer alive and that when he was, he was never a silver-haired Georgian man on a metro in Tbilisi. How nothing in the world right now is making me happier than the fruit trees and the hammock under the tin roof outside my host family's house. How I'm terribly happy here right now - yet also how its tinged with a bit of sadness, homesickness, some guilt.

I've never really been homesick before. This blog address - "to have no home" - comes from a quote by the writer Andrew Harvey: "To have no home can be to be at home with all things." So it doesn't mean what it sounds initially. It's not being without a home. It's finding home everywhere, in corners of foreign countries and in people, especially those people, whom you recognize as home. For me, right now, it's being part of the collective life of my host family here. I like it when we sit out under the tin roof, laughing together. I enjoy being part of their family - I like their playfulness, I recognize their disagreements, even though I don't always understand the reason for them, and I appreciate their love for one another.

I've had many different homes: the house in the small town I grew up in, the place my parents still live - what I think of right now as my real home; the home with the guy and the two cats, which became the home I left behind; the home with the little kid I love, where I was home as a nanny; the home that was a tent on a mountain in New Mexico, among many other homes.

Also, my less literal homes: at home in words, stories and books; at home in nature, on mountains, because I love love love being at home on mountains.

Both of my grandparents on my mom's side have died within the last year and this summer we went through boxes of their things - their lives all packed up in too-small boxes. I received a few items: a marathon medal; a troll doll; a map of Norway; my grandma's socks; a picture my grandpa took in Vietnam; just a few of my grandma's paintings; many, many books. What a strange thing. It's not enough, and yet it's what we have. I brought some of it with me to Georgia. The books, mostly, which I'm reading slowly. It's comforting and yet sad. Both at once. Two things simultaneously.

On my first day back in Tbilisi, I walked the streets alone, thinking how familiar the scene had become to me - "Oh look, there's that place where they're doing construction!" and "There's that park and the place where I buy bananas and the stray dogs and the dirt and the unsmiling woman who once gave me a free piece of cake" and "Oh good, more construction!"

It's not quite home, but it's become a piece of my life, a thing that I will carry with me wherever I choose to go from here. It's foreign and - for the next few months - it's home. Two things at once.

Often the best choice you can make is to step away from home. It's part of growing up and it's part of the hero's journey, that call to adventure (I'm thinking of Joseph Campbell here; I love him). And sometimes, home calls you back. I don't yet know what my next step will be, but I'm sensing it may soon become time to start building a more permanent home for myself, although I don't yet know what that might look like.

Still, there are times you can't be home, can't possibly get close enough to those you love, and it is then that you must carry home within you, wherever you go.

Which may be the most important lesson of all: to carry whatever it is you love and hold dear within you like the sacred thing that it is, guarding it as though it's the most important thing in the world, which for all you know it might be.

-Beth

Petty Little Unsexy Blog Update

Sometimes I glide down the steps of my Soviet style apartment, past the graffiti - fuck rap - past the cows and the squatting Georgian men who eye me squarely, and I stand at Didi Dighomi's circle of grass where I wait for Marshrutka 192, and I think, most days, "You know, this aint so bad." It aint so bad, but what's more is that it's ordinary. Adventure desires renewal and dies with repetition. So what once seemed near exotic has become anything but: it's a case of the strange, blonde foreign girl waiting at the circle of grass, not realizing she's either strange or foreign because she's just freakin' waiting for work you guys, so why are you staring?

But I also like to think that we can choose what we pay attention to - that our appreciation for the small and the ordinary doesn't have to subside even with life's seemingly purposeful attempt to numb and harden us.

It's like this quote from David Foster Wallace - "The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom." - which I believe. And I have to admit that I often love the myriad petty little unsexy parts of life - and, on certain good days, of people, of countries.

We travel, in part, to seek new experiences, but it's often the ordinary which remains, reminding us that no matter where we go there are things we can't escape: everywhere people waking up in the morning and going to work, grumpy or satisfied; everywhere people making mistakes, wanting love and doing extraordinarily stupid things for it.

There's a big story here, but I'm not really interested in telling it right now. Georgia has a big story, a long history. And of course I have many stories to tell. We all have a history and stories are tremendously important. But I want to talk about the ordinary. Because the long stories are too complex and because I'm too lazy for them. But also because the ordinary may be overlooked, especially by me.

So here's to the ordinary:

to the marshrutka driver who insists on paying my way; to the 3rd grade student who doesn't speak in class but pretends his pen is a rocket, that his hand is a spider, that the entire classroom is a jungle - to that tremendous, and often misunderstood creativity; to the consumption of too much bread & cheese & oil; to the men carrying loaves of bread in one hand; to saying "Let's just meet on Rustaveli"; to the mispronunciation of my name: Betany, Basy, Betsy; to my mispronunciation of nearly every Georgian word I know; to the sudden hatred I feel for people on marshruktras; to the Georgian man with his daughter in the park, who, despite himself, couldn't help but break into an enormous smile when she giggled; to the surprise supra, to street drinking; to all the petty little unsexy moments I've shared with the people I've met here and to the ordinary way these people will come and go from our lives, which is sad but necessary and worthwhile; to stray dogs and Nescafe and chacha and kinkhali. To kinkhali especially. Because I really do like kinkhali. I really do.

Packing: this is as organized as it gets

Last day with Mr. Man and Monster