<a href="http://lisalindblad.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/764165 have a peek here.jpg”>

I am a traveler.  I am a literal traveler, moving from place to place for work and for pleasure.  I am a habitual traveler, possessing what my father called “the bougeotte”, a wanderlust, a desire to see the world.  Bougeotte is a visceral thing, a deep-in-the-bones disturbance that rises and falls like a temperature depending upon the length of time from, or to, the next trip.

And I am an imaginary traveler, what the 19th c termed armchair traveler, finding pleasure and inspiration in stories that evoke landscape, preferably an intimately described external one that illuminates an even more complex internal one.

I can reach way back and find the seeds of some of my greatest journeys in books. In The Wilder Shores of Love, by Leslie Blanch, I found a tradition and a flock of women I wished to join, and, together, they drew my sight away from my euro-centered world of geography and culture toward Africa.  Her book, Journey Into the Mind’s Eye was another I savored around the same time, and it instilled in me the desire – yet to be realized – for a long solo train journey across empty landscapes surrounded by my books.

When I reached university, it was Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques that inspired me to become an anthropologist. 19th and early 20th century anthropologists studied far flung communities and so, of course, the exotic and the unknown appealed. But it was more than that, and I recognized myself in L-S’s identification of the anthropologist’s quandry: why, when she has a perfectly good society to study at home, does she feel the need to go halfway around the world?  I recognized myself in his answer: “..in his past certain objective factors show him to be ill-adapted to the society in which he was born.”  My first passion flowered.

During the following decade I made friends with the field biologist, George Schaller and his wife, Kay.  Kay sent me a book on the Lascaux Caves which ultimately resulted in the most moving cultural experience of my life – a 23-minute visit to the original cave (no longer open).  On a leisurely visit with George to the Bronx Zoo’s, he spoke to me of his work on the Tibetan Plateau.  And then, because I was intrigued, I read Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard – an account of his journey with Schaller to the area –  and found, therein, not only a carefully and beautifully drawn book of days in the high altitude natural and cultural world of Nepal and Tibet, but also, and even more importantly, a wrenchingly honest and exceedingly wise search for inner truth and acceptance.

I have read all of these aforementioned books many times over in my life and am re-reading now Matthiessen’s because, finally, I am on my way to the Tibetan Plateau.  It has taken all these years to get there, yet I believe there is a time and place when journeys make themselves required.

Journeys start in interesting places deep within our own history.  Not all need to be actualized, but it is fun to credit the sources.  They teach you a  lot and they also tell you a lot about where you have come from.