The Traveling Mandolin

I sit beside the fire and think

of all that I have seen,

of meadow-flowers and butterflies

In summers that have been; 

Of yellow leaves and gossamer

in autumns that there were,

with morning mist and silver sun

and wind upon my hair. 

I sit beside the fire and think

of how the world will be

when winter comes without a spring

that I shall ever see. 

For still there are so many things

that I have never seen:

in every wood in every spring

there is a different green. 

I sit beside the fire and think

of people long ago,

and people who will see a world

that I shall never know. 

But all the while I sit and think

of times there were before,

I listen for returning feet

and voices at the door.

~J.R.R. Tolkien

I have seen the sun rise and set over the Grand Canyon. I have stared for hours at the Atlantic to try to describe the molten-metal color of an ocean at midday. I have traveled the harsh Wyoming desert, strolled across the Golden Gate Bridge, slept in a Californian lighthouse, hiked through altitude snow in the Columbia Gorge, gazed at Mount Rainier against the Seattle skyline, touched a million-year-old petrified tree, and explored the Florida Everglades in the zenith of the moon among starlight and green fireflies.

Words are things I use to retell such events. I use words, I describe things, and they show up on my blog.

But how can I find words to describe the moment that someone loved me so much he promised to spend the rest of his life with me?

There are no pictures from that moment; my camera was dead. I couldn’t call anyone to tell them; we had no cell reception. I could only stand in the long grass on the banks of a small lake on a former farm in Bushnell, Illinois, away from the Cornerstone crowds and the blasting music, plastered in grime, sweat running down my legs in rivulets, hair frizzing in the humidity, arms covered in rashes and bug bites and sunburn and mud. I stared at the man on his knees in front of me as he opened the black velvet box and asked if I would be his wife. 

I nodded vigorously because I couldn’t speak. He slipped the rose-gold ring, adorned with a sapphire, onto my finger. A nuthatch honked cheerfully nearby. A great blue heron wheeled through the sky, disappearing over the tree line. Insects buzzed. Dust floated. Cirrus clouds painted the thin summer sky. I didn’t cry because I was in too much shock.

A truck lumbered by: a group of Cornerstone people on their way to a campsite. I turned, splayed my fingers, held them aloft, and screamed, “I’m engaged!” And in that moment, although I didn’t realize it until later, my entire world opened up.

God and I talk a lot. Most of you know this. Some of you think it’s stupid, but I can live with that. God and I had been talking a lot that particular week about a part of my life called travel.

You all know I love to travel. This is a travel blog, after all. I’m going to Europe in less than three weeks and will spend six weeks there and will tell you all about it. After that, I’m coming home. I’ll be staying home. Before I was engaged, no matter how much I fought against this feeling, it seemed a death toll. No more endless horizons, no more spur-of-the-moment trips, no more wandering, and no more people asking me, as an opener to any conversation, “Where are you headed next?”

I was walking along the lake at Cornerstone on the night of July 4th, talking to God about these things by the light of the full moon, wiping sweat off my face, half-distracted by the hardcore music echoing over the lake. I asked him to explain why I felt so torn, why my feet longed to wander when my heart longed for home. (I may have begun singing out my thoughts at this point. Other people do that, right? …Right?) As I sang, I began to realize some things about travel. I will always long to wander and explore. I never want to give up adventures, and I never want to settle down and be boring.

The problem was, I assumed that staying in one place would make me give up the adventure. And something clicked in my head.

This earth, this place we call home, is not. It is not a final resting place, it is not the place where we can truly settle down and grow our roots all the way to the core and experience the relief and joy of knowing that we’re truly Home. It’s a restless place, a place of wandering. I am reminded (as I often am) of a C.S. Lewis quote: “Our Father refreshes us on our journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”

Whether I like it or not, I (and you, and everybody else) am a traveler and will be until the day I die. If you ramble about in a gypsy wagon, you’re a traveler. If you live in Wheat Swamp, North Carolina and never leave your town in your entire life, you’re a traveler. Life is a journey, and this world, no matter what we try to make it, is not home. As with any trip, you can travel thoughtfully and with purpose, or you can blow through it as a tourist. As with any trip, it is good and natural to start longing for home, especially near the closing of the journey. As with any trip, at the end, you go home.

The comfort that this brought me was incredible. I stared at the dim row of trees off in the distance and thought, No matter where you are, every day is a new horizon.

Three days later, Zachary proposed and my world blew wide open. For so long my future has been a doorway, a glimmer of light through a hallway with a pleasant darkness on the other side. Without warning I stumbled through the door, and in that instant I saw that the future was as vast as the night sky: cosmic, star-spun, luminous, eternal. My trip to Europe— and every trip I’ve ever taken— was a soft hillock in the endless rolling landscape, dwarfed by the massive sky but not diminished by it. I stopped seeing my future life as a string of events, and started thinking of it as a whole.

I will never give up adventure, and I will never have to. I will stop taking as many trips, but I will never stop traveling. Within six months, I will have my own inn, to name “home” as a nod to the place I truly belong. I will be the lady of the house, and I just might grow some kale in a window box and decorate my living room. I will go grocery shopping and invite couchsurfers over and do laundry and love my husband. I will live and laugh and explore and encourage, and I will write with fervor and find eternity in a grain of sand.

I will continue to be, until the day I finish my journey,

The Traveling Mandolin