Dream Warriors

This class has had quiet the impact on me over the term of the semester. It was during our walk exercise and journal entries that I found myself slipping back into a feeling of uneasiness and depression- in part of the endless winter and the other being somewhat bored within my major. These daily walks- which I try to squeeze in once a day have been crucial to me dealing with the stress from the semester. It was while taking these walks- sometimes with friends- other times, alone- that I began to discover new places around Pittsburgh and began to feel a bit less stir crazy. I began to get envious of writers like Thoreau, who left everything behind for a certain point, and just be content with living without any specific routine for the day. Along with the walks and reading works from the transcendentalists, the smothering feeling started to fade away and I quickly found myself in complete wanderlust.

Recently, a good friend of mine- who I have not talked to since our senior year in high school, when his mother died- called me when he was spending another night up, catching only and hour or two of sleep in Amsterdam. He told me stories of how he had taken a semester off from Columbia University, sold the majority of his belongings and bought tickets to five different countries. It was on the plane ride to Spain that he met this Botanist who offered him endless travels and adventures in exchange for his labor to discover plants lost in the four corners of the world. With that, he followed the Botanist to Uganda, and later spent some time with a tribe on a small South Pacific Island and discovered a rare cabbage- which he later presented in Amsterdam. It was through the more detailed stories, that I found myself wanting to hear the syllables of foreign tongues cluck against my ear, and made me take out a map of the world and I studied the lines, marking webs of the countries where he had been in the past six months. This phone call, and our conversations that lead up to this moment have had an enormous impact to me over the past two months. He called me three weeks ago when he was waiting at the airport to spend a month in Ethiopia, and then another month or two traveling deep in the dark jungles of the Congo, containers tucked in bags- full of plants whose names my tongue can’t bend to say. Somewhere in our nightly conversation he asked me if I would go traveling with him this summer, possibly throughout India, or perhaps, in certain regions of South America. Without a moment of hesitation I agreed and that night I couldn’t sleep from the excitement of being a traveler again. Three days later I got a phone call from an unknown NY number and was surprised when I picked up and heard my friend’s voice- only 376 miles away. For once both of us in the same time zone. He said he couldn’t travel alone anymore and he was waiting for me to finish school, so we could decide where we would go and travel and write (both of us are writers) for a few months, renting cheap rooms and practicing to roll our R’s without sounding as if we have shards of glass in our mouths, or learn how to meditate- and maybe transcend- quietly in a village in the Northern parts of India. Or we may just walk in the crowded streets, sucking on cocoa leaves and just wander around with no maps tucked in thinned pockets, like dream warriors…leaving a little part of us- a hair strand, a murmur, or an embrace in India or Peru.

The field notes scribbled down in the bitter months of a Pittsburgh Spring for this course has prompted me to extend the project and capture every little moments during this summers travels, which may well continue on throughout different seasons when I come back.