Re-entry

Re-entry, the following is a passage in my journal as I crossed back into the lower 48 after 3 months in the Great North.

So this is re-entry… the tension the traveler feels when he’s been away from the Real World for awhile… funny, because the traveler now knows the Real World is just a made up term to create comfort in the chaos. The traveler has spent his time with 1,500-pound moose grazing and 200-foot-tall firs dancing… far from manicured pets and boxes built from these firs. But the traveler eventually returns, a jumbled mess of the new and the old inside. He is the same, but bigger somehow… freer… freer in a world that is not free but uses the word in its talking points. Freer from fear and the self-consciousness of connectivity… phones and tweets and the fight to be noticed. The traveler knows he must first notice himself, and only after that, can he notice the world he wants to create. At the borders, where the Real Worlds collide, the traveler knows of both and knows only one to be real.