Tomorrow will be one week before I leave. I've done my shopping (dressing down my wardrobe, so to speak), picked my essential electronics and books to bring, and now I'm just combatting the worries that arise when friends and family members offer suggestions like, "don't be the girls from Taken." Noted, thanks! I'll be in Tanzania nine weeks, eight of which will be spend in a program working for Bridge Nursery School, teaching children aged 2 1/2 to 7, a time when I hopefully won't be abducted and forcefully addicted to drugs, all while trying to maintain my virtue and innocence before my dad rescues me and takes me back home to meet a pop-singer.
Last night, Alex came over to ask my mom, who apparently contains psychic abilities according to a raspy Atlantian fortune-teller, to read her tarot cards. Skeptical though I was, I was intrigued. This summer, I've been reading Michael Shermer's "comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished": The Believing Brain. (Amazon) Look it up--a great read. Anyway, with a skeptic's voice in my head, I wanted to know what Tarot card I would be.
There, on our worn and rustic kitchen table, sitting on patterned seat cushions with fruit cleared to make way for our reading, it was revealed, by divine coincidence or a stroke of luck, that I am the traveling fool, haphazardly bumbling through places, and young enough to continue to metamorphose.
I asked of love, of course, and I am bound to the king, continually rejecting the pages that will not suffice.
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move. -- Robert Louis Stevenson
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