The Miracle of Movement

This pandemic’s stay in place imperative or suggestion is beginning to wear thin with me and others that I know. We are hard-pressed to even get out of the house to run the shortest of errands. We are currently getting three weeks to a gallon of gas. This travel quarantine is not just local but national and global. We’ve had to cancel at least a couple of bucket-list trips abroad that were previously planned. Travelling is one of our passions, and this thing is stifling our human need for galavanting from hither to thither and beyond.

When I was a small boy helping inhabit that little town in Mississippi, I seldom left the county. I don’t remember when, but at some point I began to sneak off to foreign places and became a closet traveller without the knowledge of family and friends. I journeyed to many places with Gulliver and was fascinated by the lands of Lilliput and Brobdingnag. Alice took me to her Wonderland. David Copperfield welcomed me to England. Tom Sawyer stowed me on his raft trip. And on Saturdays, for the cost of a quarter, I would end up in the South Pacific with John Wayne or in the heart of Africa with Tarzan. Those “far away places” in the gazetteer of one’s youthful imagination seemed magical and as alluring as Homer’s Calypso was to Odysseus.

Over the years, different kinds of realities crept into my world. Geography taught me location and distances. History showed me stories of territorial conquests. Vocation put me on planes and in cars to carry me up and down the eastern seaboard, and vacations let me see many of the places that had hammered their nails of influence into the framework of my being. New wars led to our learning the changing atlas all over again.

During the past three decades, Peggy and I have led thirty-two tours abroad with friends and neighbors from this part of the world. We started all this globe-trotting as a way of creating community among all the strangers from far away places who were moving into our town and church. Travel beyond your own little world brings you together as you share the larger worlds of different countries and cultures. As a bonus, Mark Twain said: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of people and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Twain’s take on this human predicament happened to me over and over in those “far away places with strange sounding names”. My camera and I were fascinated by the lovely faces of all those people passing by in such a small and wonderful world after all. Here are a few of my photogenic compatriots from all over this precious planet who only ask that we take the time to just look at each other and notice the family resemblances. This collage is the only snapshot I’ve ever taken of the God in whose image we all happen to be created.