The 9190.8km morning hike: HUT HUT HUT

All right, boys and girls; let's leave the gore for a bit and try to focus on today's lesson: Connection across space, over time. Last week, while getting ready for her adventure in Vienna, Mary said that her pre-trip anxiety had more to do with distance than time away from home. If there's an emergency here, she can't get back to help easily or quickly; she worries that I'll not be able to handle Things -- the present family psychodrama while grinding out daily chores -- and I have had some concerns about that as well.

Besides that, she knows that the sudden immersion in a different culture makes for disorientation and a certain sense of having cast oneself away: Where is home? Who am I when I'm not at home? Where are my loved ones, and will they love me still, now while I'm so far away and later when I get home, altered by these strange circumstances?

In 2003, I crossed the Atlantic on a big, fast ocean liner, changing my clock every night when I retired, and so I had time to adjust psychologically and physically as readily as I did chronologically. After five days of clock- and body-resetting, a day in Cherbourg, a night on the English Channel, then a couple of days in London (after a hellish train ride up from Southampton), it all seemed like tourism, "going abroad" as it was probably experienced by the upper classes for several centuries before air travel. I enjoyed the whole thing, and while I missed my home, I felt the connection to it, solid, waiting, welcoming.

Today I rest inside that home and my connection with Mary (who soars at 35,000 feet at the moment) feels more secure than my own feet on my own floor. True, I'm still trying to find my way through some tattered relationships, to get back inside myself, to act initially and continuously as if I'm going to be fine until I truly am fine. (That formula really works, by the way, and if I can just keep it going, it shouldn't take too long to accomplish.) Irrespective of distance, then, connection is sustenance; and we can communicate readily in any number of ways (viz. those poor children on the streets of Tehran, Tweeting as if their lives depended on it, blazing their cell phone videos around the planet). I am sustained, fed, supported, encouraged, loved -- I can feel it. It thrums along some kind of invisible fiber optic channel; it practically catches me in the middle of a stumble, lifts me and sets me squarely on my feet again.

I guess I can go ahead and crash around the house, weep or sleep depending on what needs doing; my healing is not arrested, not even postponed -- it continues regardless. It's heartening, and I thought you all ought to know about it.

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