How is it, I ask, that Fifth Avenue and the Herring Cove Road share the planet? Just back from three days in New York, and as always, the shift between a magical city and the crisp, hair-shirted simplicity of home never ceases to amaze me. To be in Manhattan and then just a few hours later in the Spryfield Sobeys (not quite the sublime to the ridiculous, but close) causes a psychic earthquake. What you thought you knew (for instance: that NYC would be big and grimy and chaotic and the people rude and impersonal)turns out to be the opposite.
No better way on earth to learn about multi-hued possibility and perspectives than travel. Alas, I started relatively late.
The "problem" is that magical big cities are so highly, outrageously addictive--so much so that I'm already checking out Expedia. The world in all its glory: so much to see, so little time and disposable income. If I won a lottery I would become self-indulgently homeless: a walking, flying nomad--a global butterfly.
But but but...if that were the case I know what I'd miss: such things as potted geraniums, cut dahlias on the sill, the threat of frost, Thanksgiving turkey soup, my own bed, the reliably ordinary route of my morning walks, a favourite teacup....All these little worldly things that pin us down, locate and soothe us.
Visiting the sublime has that power: to illuminate the quotidian, to help us live in a kind of humility, the kind that equals gratitude.
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