I've traveled a lot in my life.
In fact, you could say I was born on the hop.
My mother relates the story that the morning I was born on May 19, 1954. She was in the maternity ward of a tiny miner's hospital in Southern Cross, a desert town in Western Australia. She was lying in a squeaky bed next to another woman waiting to give birth - an aboriginal woman who seemed very relaxed as she waited for nature to have its way with her.
My mother was terrified. She'd never given birth before and had no idea what to do, so she asked this woman what to do.
The woman giggled and said, "Push love, just push."
So when the time came, my mother having the heart of a lion did exactly that. She pushed as hard as she could. So hard did she push that there was no crowning and gentle slip into the world for me. I shot out of her like a shell from a cannon such that the doctor almost dropped me.
She says I was born with my eyes wide open, looking a little bit dazed.
"And you've been in shock ever since," she'll say with a chuckle not knowing how accurately that describes how I felt throughout most of my early life.
I often wonder if it was this primary event in my life, in which I was launched into the world with such momentum, that caused the rest of my life to be the continuation of that same momentum. Because I have a profound restlessness in which, though I enjoy periods of stability and comfort, I always come to crave the opposite, for fear of a strange kind of dying. This dying is not cellular, but more a kind of atrophy, in which the habits and routines of stability begin to put the rest of my mind to sleep. And I get this irritable need to smash it all - a craving for the new; the unseen, the unsmelt and unfelt.
So many places I've lived and moved on from - first with my restless family, who until I was 13, traveled constantly, then with my band who toured constantly, then in all the travels since. Throughout my life the packing cases have never been thrown away - always stored each time, in the knowledge that they would be needed once again.
And so it is once more - only this time I'll be travelling with my girlfriend Kristen, who has never travelled before. So it should be interesting.
So we've had the party to say goodbye - (early because Kristen has to go to Peru) then the packing up of the house when she gets back(in December), then we fly away on January the 7th, to Sri Lanka
The plan is to carry the bare minimum - a small pack and a small case, and my new little netbook, on which I'm going to write this blog, finish a novel, and do the 1st draft of a new novel, set in Sri Lanka.
Aaah, the quickening I anticipate, when we walk through the departure doors at Tullamarine. And they will close behind us, snipping the cord between old life and the unknown new. And 13 hours later we'll be born again in Sri Lanka, the teardrop falling from India's face.
It should be interesting, because the last time I was in Sri Lanka was in 1985, when the Tamil uprising was just beginning.
But that's another story. Another post.
And this is just a beginning. Stay in touch
