Second in a 4-part series from Shannon, who continues to inspire me to have faith in the creation of my own path!

How ironic. I was up late into the night, needing to write this piece about chasing the exotic, but instead I spent the time reading about (and shopping for) foreign scents that would transport me away from the mundanities….
When I finally stepped away from the computer screen and went outside, I walked right into a night so richly scented with fog, fall, and some spicy floral, that I had to laugh. Shopping for the exotic indeed!

So, yes, I want to write about creating bridges between the Exotic and the Familiar.

When I was younger, I had a fantasy of being a travel agent of sorts. It went like this: I would have a little storefront, with a doorway so tiny you would miss it if you didn’t know what you were looking for. If you were destined to find your way in, you would find that the space was much larger than it seemed from outside, and full of artifacts, from all over the world, from every era. I would be sitting in there somewhere, in a comfortable chair, knitting or reading, waiting for you to come and tell me your story and look into my eyes.

I would then direct you to just the piece you needed to take you where you wanted to go– a old woolen paisley shawl to wrap around you in front of a peat fire, a pair of cool tortoise-shell sunglasses to shade your eyes from the glare of pale stone in the hot hot sun, a collection of battered matchbox cars to drive you right back to empty suburban lots of childhood summer.
I didn’t turn out to be that travel agent (although one could argue that I attempt to open horizons through writing and craft), but I am still hungry for fresh perspectives, new tastes, different light qualities. One way to see things through new eyes is to travel, of course. I have done the tiniest bit of traveling, and enjoyed myself and learned a lot, but it is not something I can afford to do often.

Besides, I find myself a bit frustrated at the concept that we have to go away from our locales to expand our perspectives. This is exacerbated by what I perceive as people’s need to have the Exotic packaged and presented to them in a safe way. It irritates me that we approach experience as consumers.

We have to find some way to travel while standing still.

(at the international folk festival in Prague, May 2005)

That which is Exotic is the opposite of that which is Familiar. When something seems exotic it speaks of our relationship to that thing; we are standing a little apart from it, observing it. This creates an edge between ourselves and the observed, and I think that new ideas and even increase come out of the edge spaces. (If you look at edges from a Permacultural angle, you see that there is a greater diversity of species in the place where two ecosystems meet then in either of the ecosytems by themselves.)

It is possible to stay on that edge and keep experiencing the familiar as Exotic, but that experience comes at a price. That price is this: we may cease to be comfortable in our own skin. The Familiar is, for that moment, alien, and there is the temptation to long for that space and time when we fit in.

Nostalgia is an extremely counter-productive force in my life, addictive even, and I have had to work on finding ways to loosening its grip on my creative energy. One way that works for me is to strive to become comfortable outside of my native surroundings, at ease in the space between. Homeless perhaps but for my ability to tell the stories of my life, the stories that I at home within.