Read + Write + Report
Home | Start a blog | About Orble | FAQ | Sites | Writers | Advertise | My Orble | Login

Travel Brave - by Michelle

Travel Brave - September 2007

Lasting the distance

September 25th 2007 01:16
The effects of travel on a relationship can be positive and devastating. I know. Right now, I'm living the post-travel life. A life where I am settled in one city for an indefinite amount of time. For once in my life, I'm not thinking about the next trip, the next flight, the next...the next...I have arrived. I'm home. I've found a city that I love and when I wake up in the morning, it talks to me. And I was falling in love with someone, also living a post-travel life and together, for a while, we were going well. But now, the effects of all of those years of running are catching up with me. And even as I'm unsure if this relationship will make it and come out the other side and become, like myself right now, a new creation, better and stronger and more vibrant, I am still happy to be here. And the city is still talking to me.

And she's telling me to stay.

[ Click here to read more ]
37
Vote
Shared on
Read MoreRead More Add CommentsAdd Comments
[ Link ]
Posted By: Michelle - Category: No Category
   


The pirates of Cinque Terre

September 22nd 2007 17:00
For my friend Helen, the break up occured on the Amalfi Coast, two months into their European tour. She met another man and was tired of '(Peter's) constant nagging to go home'. For Hassan, he arrived in Moscow with his long term girlfriend and wanted to stay a day longer. she didn't and continued on her journey alone.
A day apart but they never saw each other again.
So minute can be the final division between lovers, so small that whisper of the ending.
[ Click here to read more ]
23
Vote
Shared on
Read MoreRead More Add CommentsAdd Comments
[ Link ]
Posted By: Michelle - Category: No Category
   


The five villages

September 21st 2007 00:50
Despite stories of partnerships strengthened by the trials of travel, they are exceptional. For every tale of a happy ending, I have many others of relationships that bend and eventually snap under the pressures or temptations of a new world realised.
What causes a relationship to dim and eventually flicker out? Is it really the temptations on the road? Or is it the desire for independence that forces a shift in priorities?

[ Click here to read more ]
31
Vote
Shared on
Read MoreRead More Add CommentsAdd Comments
[ Link ]
Posted By: Michelle - Category: No Category
   


Cinque Terre

September 19th 2007 01:36
There are those couples that travel together. Successfully too. I know of those brave travellers that set out in tune with the road before them and with the person beside them. They are able to share their experiences openly with each other and in doing so, enrich their relationship. They learn inter-dependancy and forego the co-dependancy, they learn sensivity and most importantly, the art of picking one's battles. They may return home one day with a best friend and build a life with that person, decorating the walls of their home with shared memories.

CInque Terre is isolated. Despite the fact that it's hard to get to, Americans flock to this area in the summer time and rightly so. It's a beautiful part of Italy and despite the business of getting there, I went twice and want to go back for a third time


[ Click here to read more ]
66
Vote
Shared on
Read MoreRead More Comments (3)Comments (3) Add CommentsAdd Comments
[ Link ]
Posted By: Michelle - Category: No Category
   


Ugly buildings

September 17th 2007 09:50
A friend recently admitted that she had always dreamed of travelling solo, leaving the city she’d grown up in and seeing the world from the road for a year or more. What stopped her?
She fell in love during College and was engaged by the time she’d graduated from University.
Does love encumber our desires or simply redirect them?
[ Click here to read more ]
32
Vote
Shared on
Read MoreRead More Add CommentsAdd Comments
[ Link ]
Posted By: Michelle - Category: No Category
   


Duality in Italy

September 15th 2007 11:44
I don’t know who must have found him out there, but when he gets home he settles down and tells his family what happened. His family were probably scared, worried for him so he tells them about his night. But…what’s he feeling? Was he unfazed by his choice to stay in the boat? Was he shamed by his own timidity to climb out that night?
Despite the reassurances of his family does he wonder what it would have felt like to take that step…and feel the ice beneath his feet?
I don’t know what I would have done. I can only say that if the wind had been whispering anything to me, it would have been to get out of that boat.
[ Click here to read more ]
34
Vote
Read MoreRead More Add CommentsAdd Comments
[ Link ]
Posted By: Michelle - Category: No Category
   


The Duomo

September 13th 2007 11:42
That story stayed with me, not only because I could see that man in the middle of that pond, all alone but because I understood him too. In the situations of gravest doubt, we want to stay in our boats and just wait it out and sometimes that’s ok. Sometimes that’s best in fact. But sometimes life calls us to be braver than that. Sometimes life prods us to rise and take a nervous step outside of that boat and test the ice.
And that’s what the brave traveller understands…that of all the times we could stay in that boat, the most exciting, most cherished moments are created when we move and do something, when we stand up in the dark and take it on.

[ Click here to read more ]
44
Vote
Read MoreRead More Comments (1)Comments (1) Add CommentsAdd Comments
[ Link ]
Posted By: Michelle - Category: No Category
   


Milan's language

September 11th 2007 11:38
After my friend told me that story, I found it hard not to imagine him out there at night. Skating over the ice, I listened to the whistling of the wind in my ears and thought of him and how he sat and waited for dawn to come. I asked my friend why he didn’t just get out and walk across the ice but she said that in the dark, anything beyond his own boat had become dangerous and unknown. It was safer for him to stay in the boat and endure the darkness than get up and out and take that risk.
Funny. We row away from home, from one type of security, only to get stuck in another version of safety. Another version of that which we strove to escape from.

[ Click here to read more ]
23
Vote
Read MoreRead More Add CommentsAdd Comments
[ Link ]
Posted By: Michelle - Category: No Category
   


Italian Spring

September 10th 2007 11:31
When I was growing up in Switzerland, I remember a story a friend once told me. We used to play on a pond that froze over in the winter, dancing over the ice like clumsy Princesses and she told me of a man who had rowed out one night, pushing through the cold water with old oars. When he’d reached the middle of that pond, he heard what sounded like the earth opening up under him, a groaning of indescribable pain and tenderness. He froze in fear and looked down to see the water had frozen, suddenly and him, alone in the middle of a lake that had locked him in. He sat alone that whole night, out in that stillness with only the echo of that cry to stay with him. Even as a child, I wondered what he must have thought to himself, what fears whispered to him, what hope must have looked like to him during that long, cold night.

Maybe it’s the weather here in Sydney but with the change of guard, the tentative steps of Spring coming to my front door, I can’t help thinking of Italy


[ Click here to read more ]
36
Vote
Read MoreRead More Comments (1)Comments (1) Add CommentsAdd Comments
[ Link ]
Posted By: Michelle - Category: No Category
   


Wellington's Top 10 Part 2

September 7th 2007 05:59
If life is the great adventure, what are the pit stops? It's raining today in Sydney and after a long week, I am grateful for the coming weekend. APEC may cause headaches and irate train travellers but we get an extra day to take a stop...a breather and chance to pause, glance behind or look ahead and feel out the road ahead. Where is it taking us? Is it where we want to be? I was in class yesterday and my students were describing their home city. Since most of my students are from Korea, we discussed Seoul. In a lull in conversation, I felt that moment when I stood in the midst of foreigners in the middle of Seoul. I remembered what it felt to be no one and yet be different...the Seoul air in Spring...the taste of Korean BBQ in the open...It would be nice to go back. Maybe this road will allow me a side trip to Asia soon.

Wellington's Top 10 things to do...here are the next 5 on my list


[ Click here to read more ]
28
Vote
Read MoreRead More Add CommentsAdd Comments
[ Link ]
Posted By: Michelle - Category: No Category
   


Wellington's Top 10

September 4th 2007 07:53
Time is a good guide and along with Truman's own inner conviction, we all realised as we watched the life of this burgeoning brave traveller that the questions within Truman would not be silenced. Truman, as with many of us, would have to act.

His calling would be to not only tear down the gilded cage around his life but to destroy it so he would never be able to return. Once he did, he was free.
[ Click here to read more ]
41
Vote
Read MoreRead More Add CommentsAdd Comments
[ Link ]
Posted By: Michelle - Category: No Category
   


The Massey Memorial

September 2nd 2007 08:47
Despite Truman's curiosity and desire for the outside world, the producers of the show had successfully impregnated Truman with the fears that many brave travellers are forced to face in order to become their true selves. The fear of water, of heights, of the unknown, of failure and of being wrong. What if there's nothing worthwhile beyond my comfortable life? What if everyone is right and the world is too big for me to conquer, too sinister a place for me to survive? What if I'll regret stepping out? What if? What if?

Driving around the bay toward Shelly Bay, is a favourite spot of mine. I discovered it one night, stumbled across it and the night has stayed with me after all these years. A teenager, I was with a group of friends. Those friends have since dissipated and I couldn't tell you who I was with but we walked up a track on the Miramar Peninsula and come out at the top. The moon was high and it was so close...and this memorial, made completely of marble dominated that rise. It shone under the moon and walking around it, I'll never forget how it felt to touch it, like touching the moon itself. Many years later when I visited the Taj Mahal, I would remember that memorial and only when I got back from my trip to India did I search who that memorial was dedicated to. A politician, a past Prime Minister. How unromantic


[ Click here to read more ]
35
Vote
Read MoreRead More Add CommentsAdd Comments
[ Link ]
Posted By: Michelle - Category: No Category
   


More Posts
February 2008
1 Posts
December 2007
2 Posts
November 2007
2 Posts
Older Posts
28 Posts dating from August 2007
Email Subscription
Receive e-mail notifications of new posts on this blog:
[ View Blog Summary ] [ Create A New Post ]

Michelle's Blogs

I have no other blogs :(
Moderated by Michelle
Copyright © 2006 2007 2008 On Topic Media PTY LTD. All Rights Reserved. Design by Vimu.com.
On Topic Media ZPages: Sydney |  Melbourne |  Brisbane |  London |  Birmingham |  Leeds     [ Advertise ] [ Contact Us ] [ Privacy Policy ]