Masaya

On the road, one of the most common questions the traveler is asked is “Where are you from?”  It is a fair question, but if you hear it daily for months in a row you may begin to wonder what it really means, just as you wonder what it really means when you answer “the United States.”  Your reply helps someone place you on a map, but it tells them nothing about what you believe, what you’d die for, why you’re at this very moment sitting at a table so far from your answer.  It simply tells them what culture you’re most familiar with, which usually is also the place where your parents brought you into the world and raised you (something in which you exercised no choice).  That is, though your reply locates you in the world, it says nothing about what you are choosing to do in the world.

Encounters that don’t progress beyond this question are transitory and quickly forgotten.  Ones that probe deeper—asking not just where fate delivered you onto the map but what you are trying to there—are the ones you most remember.  These encounters are part of what make a mountainside in Vietnam, an old city wall in Colombia, or a living room in Palestine a kind of “holy ground,” for here encounters happened that affirmed, challenged, or strengthened you.  Here encounters transcended the map and issues of nationality were absolutely peripheral.

Thomas Merton, the 20th century Trappist monk and writer who enjoyed getting to know people such as the Dalai Lama and Vietnam’s Thich Nhat Hanh, met an untimely death in a Bangkok bathroom in 1968.  While he didn’t have the chance to flesh out his Asia travel experiences in a book, we do learn through his journal how enriching were his encounters with the men and women he met.  The accounts are sometimes captivating.  And I suppose they're not all that surprising, given that Merton once wrote the following:

If you want to identify me, ask not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I’m living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.

Photo note:  This picture was taken while walking in Nicaragua's Masaya Volcano National Park

Half an hour from Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, sits Masaya Volcano National Park.  The vultures love it here, catching the warm sulfur-scented air that billows out of its crater.  A sixteenth-century Spanish friar once called the place "La Boca del Infierno” (The Mouth of Hell).  The birds, however, if they spoke Spanish or English, would probably just call it a fun ride.

Or, if the birds knew Russian, they would perhaps sit in trees and read Dostoyevsky, conversing with one another about the wisdom latent in passages such as the following, from The Brothers Karamazov:

My brother, a dying youth, asked the birds to forgive him.  That may sound absurd, but when you think of it, it makes sense.  For everything is like the ocean, all things flow and are indirectly linked together, and if you push here, something will move at the other end of the world.  It may be madness to beg the birds for forgiveness, but things would be easier for the birds, for the child, and for every animal if you were nobler than you are—yes, they would be easier, even if only by a little.  Understand that everything is like the ocean.  Then, consumed by eternal love, you will pray to the birds, too.  In a state of fervor you will pray them to forgive you your sins.  And you must treasure that fervor, absurd though it may seem to others.