Going home

Home Alone is a comedy film of a large family heading for a Christmas vacation in Paris when the parents realized that they were missing one of the brood, an 8-year-old played delightfully by Macaulay Culkin when he was still cute. This reflection is, however, not about the movie. It is about my return to China from an extended visit and farewell to North America.

Just to be clear, the “going home” metaphor is emotive more than geographic. Since the image explosion of the “earthrise” in 1968 in human consciousness, my “home” had become the planet and my citizenship has become global. But as a colleague in North Carolina commented, we are at an age when resources have become scarce and a long haul across the planet takes considerable effort, so she and her husband, colleagues across the miles, understood my farewell.

It shall have been 50 years this August when I took a 20-day sail from Manila to San Francisco, and our farewell is essentially a completion of that journey. It had been a roller-coaster ride, from crisscrossing North America save Vermont, Price Edward Island, Newfoundland, Labrador, New Brunswick, the Northwest and Nunavut territories, to puffing ganja the prolific grass of the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, trekking through Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Venezuela. We drove on the left side of the road in both Islands of Kiwi land, but left the driving to friends in Oz.

The salty mists of Micronesia with Nauru ‘cept islands north of Saipan became nasal familiar; the aloha sway of Hawai’i, Samoa, and Tonga got us to the shore short of becoming a whale rider. Mosquitoes delivered malaria in Nigeria curtailing plans for the Victoria Falls in the Zambezi and Mt. Kilimanjaro in the highlands of Kenya. We had our fill of Om in Maharashtra but our countenance would not hold train rides to Gujarat and Calcutta or to Kerala and Bangalore.

A nodding salute to London’s Westminster and fish-and-chips by Piccadilly Circus, Paris’ crepes by Montmartre after losing all my francs at the Latin Quarters, sangria by Madrid’s plaza mayor and plaza de españa, and sidewalk tables for pasta at Roma’s piazzas including Pietro’s across the Basilica, acknowledged my inheritance of Europe’s meta-brain. Mainland and maritime Southeast Asia, however, was my stomping ground, and now, Far East Asia, particularly in Dong Bei China.

This recent farewell trip saw us elbowing with colleagues in the Realistic Living Institute whose covenant attended to our spirit discipline for 30 years. Two daughters shared their family hospitality and the precocity of their children (two each); also, the elder facilitating the revisit with heartbreaks of Ohio. In the Bay Area of SF, Ilocano classmates from INHS60 shook with Iloko mirth, and a colleague of Visayan hospitality left us with a treasured afterglow.

David Thompson who opened resorts in Banff and Jasper capped the head feathers when we joined DCHS’59ers (Davao City) in a wondrous tramp through the lower Canadian Rockies. The family of Thompson’s namesake without the “p”, a Donald rather than a David, plus a James of Bekah and feline-eyed 3-year-old Lainey, hosted my visit to the province of tar sand of the global fossil fuel market. I watched buckaroos perform ranch skills as cowhands raced chuck wagons, twirled ropes, and rode bucking broncos, and the cowgirls impressed in turning the attire of boots and hat into a fashion statement. On a bus trip to Edmonton, “To Dee I sing” became my theme song of gratitude for my host’s warmth in Calgary.

INHS60 friends expressed hope that they had not seen the last of my shadow, and one who lives in Walnut Creek will keep tickling our class’ bones with her regular posting of jokes and other interesting cyberspace forwards. Boni’s Airlines and his Adele of South SF promised to bring the cap I left behind to the next class gathering in Pea Eye 2015. Objective statistical probability, extremely limited resource, and personal intention closes out my door to Amerigo Vespucci’s continent, and I will now tend to my garden in Manchuria’s Plain ’til I complete breathing my allotted oxygen on this planet.

I am not being melodramatic. I am simply being objective about my continuing journey. The world has become too small for its 7-billion-some homo sapiens. The selfhood and consciousness of each is invaluable not only for the enrichment of the specie but also the survival of a stressed planet. Consciousness trumps decay any day! I invite readers to write of their own reflection as well. 

As I bid adieu to America, I remember a foothill in the Rockies bellowing smoke. I now see on TV hundreds of fires raging across the Northwest. Nature’s wilderness is aflame. I know of friends in California eking a living in the 3-year-old drought of its inland valley noted for fragrant orchards and verdant farms, now gone dry, while many poor souls in Canada and China bob their heads above flooding waters. A major climate change is happening to the planet. A major tectonic shift is shaking the firm foundations of mine.

How’s your life journey coming along?