To Sleep in the Coolest Tree Ever

I've always prided myself on being a good tree-climber.  I had a climbing tree when I was little and I would scramble my way to the most spindly branches and just sit and sway in the breeze.  I felt very accomplished to have climbed so many trees in my yard and never broken a bone.  So in high school, when I heard about organizations like Tree Climbers International or the New England Tree Climber's Association, I thought it was the coolest thing ever!  I contemplated becoming a professional tree climber (they do exist), but that dream eventually went the way of most dreams.

But yesterday I was watching the BBC program Planet Earth and saw some of the coolest trees ever.

 This is a Madagascar Baobab tree.   

Don't you think it would be entirely comfortable to sleep up on top of that thick trunk, in the middle of that spread of branches?  It would have the most marvelous view.  And, in the rainy season, these huge pink and yellow flowers bloom at night, opening fully in just a minute or so.  Wouldn't that be so cool to see first-hand?  Then you could sit among swarms of moths and lemurs and watch them feast on the nectar.  So it would be a little wet and buggy, but it would be awesome, too!

I guess I'm not done

I had a thought.  It was a crazy thought.  But this is a blog about a crazy thought, so I figured I could just add another one to the list.

I want to explore Oily Rocks, Azerbaijan.  Its a ginormous oil rig/manmade island that is largely falling apart.  It sounds amazingly decrepit, and I would love to see it.

Here is an interesting article about it, and here is a picture:

It might actually be boring to see, with all those roads and oil rig after oil rig..  or there could be adventurous forays into abandoned dormitories to see the relics of past people's lives..  i could sail it or bike it or hike it.  but i bet it there would be a lot of red tape to get permission to go out there.  worth it?  maybe i'll never know.

The Dissipation of a Dream, the Dissection of the Dreaming

I don't think I will do this.  I believe it will be prohibitively expensive.  When I was under the impression that there would be a lot of camping, it seemed more possible.  But with 2 or 3 months of nights in hostels, buying food as we go, ferries, plane tickets...  I don't think it would work with my teeny tiny grad student budget.  And I don't feel like looking for someone else's money.  I think I'm already tired of the idea.  I'm tired of insisting I can do it.  Well, people, believe in me or not, I don't care.  I have nothing to prove.  Not to you.

No more plotting, no more blog updates, no more saving money just to pour it into a black hole.  What was my dream for, then, if it wasn't meant to be fulfilled?  Distraction?  Gaining admiration for my audacity?  To focus on something in the future, a future that stretches out full of unfulfillment before me?  What are any of my dreams for anyway?

My grandmother was schizophrenic.  I've always feared waking up one day with voices in my head--it skips generations, after all.  Now, in my mid-20's, I'm past the danger point and will probably never develop schizophrenia, but I have warring factions in my head anyway.  They both speak with my own voice, but they pull me in different directions.  The battle is gaining momentum as I get older, and I don't know how to create peace inside.  One side is my "real" life.  The other side is the dreaming.   

My "real" life includes school, church, career, friends, family, all the things I do on a daily basis.  The dreaming is the other side of me.  When I go LARPing or to SCA events, when I read my fantasy books, when I listen to my music, when I dress up, when I make crazy plans for the future, these things are all part of my "dreaming" life.  These things don't seem to touch reality.  Sometimes they serve to distract me from it, in good ways and in bad ways, both.  But in the end, they are just dreams.  I can leave them behind and still live real life, but when I focus too much on the dreaming, I start to lose touch with the real.  The real is outside of myself and connects me with other people, the dreaming is inside, sometimes very deep inside.  Sometimes I run to it and throw myself into its embrace.  And sometimes the dreaming pulls on me and scares me.  It scares me, like a nightmare that won't shake off with the dawn.

You know what I want for next summer?  I want something real.  I want a life.  I don't want dreams and trips and fantasies that don't add up to anything.  I want to get started with the things that really matter.

It's like I was born in the air, and now I'm grasping for the solid ground.  How backwards is that?

Ferry v. Yacht

Ferries are cheaper, Yachts are more flexible.  I might actually (I am almost ashamed to say it) feel slightly odd in period dress on a Ferry, while a Yacht would be quite private, and we could dress however we wanted.   Getting to Tel Aviv (which is the city Jaffa has been subsumed by since 1950) would be a little more difficult by Ferry, but if we take a Yacht (and have lots of money) we could surely dock at one of the luxury marinas, like this one:

(Image taken from the LUXURY YACHT CHARTER & SUPERYACHT NEWS website)

OOOOO, pretty, isn't it?

well, if some millionaire decides to help finance this crazy plan, we could do that.  As it is, I think the Ferry might be the best bet.  *sigh*
(And I WILL wear period clothing and COMPLETELY fascinate the other passengers.  so there.)

I just found the website of a man who has researched and compared pilgrimage itineraries and provided latitude and longitude coordinates for each point!!  woah.  it will take me some time to process all this information!

Thanks, Peter Robins!!

http://pilgrim.peterrobins.co.uk/

GIVE me my scallop-shell of quiet,
      My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
      My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage;
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage.

from The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage
by Sir Walter Ralegh, written c. 1603

Questions, Questions

I have thought of two variants on my pilgrimage. 

A.  Instead of doing a medieval pilgrimage (I was thinking of the heyday of pilgrimage tourism, around 1350-1450), I could do a 17th century pilgrimage.  At this point, there were very few pilgrimages going on.  The Reformation had wreaked havoc on the idea of earning spiritual "points" by works, and the Catholic Church had started encouraging people to take shorter pilgrimages to local shrines (with the Council of Trent, see James Hall's introduction to A Journey to the West by Domenico Laffi, a seventeenth century pilgrim).  Those pilgrims who continued to take pilgrimages seemed to do so mainly from a desire to see the world.  And they were also generally from the southern European states, those that had remained largely Catholic.
Why am I thinking of switching my timing by a few centuries?  My first thought was because I know more about the clothing, and I kind of like the more structured look of early modern dress rather than medieval.  But also because the motivations and circumstances more closely mirror mine--I'm not pilgrimage-ing out of devotional piety, and there are fewer (read: none at all) pilgrims traveling nowadays.  Anyway, it is just a thought.

B.  My other thought is also very tentative.  Instead of pilgrimage-ing to Jerusalem, I could go to Santiago de Compostela.  This was a VERY popular pilgrimage destination throughout the centuries of pilgrimages.  It is the place where, rumor has it, James the son of Zebedee is buried.  This would be a much easier pilgrimage to plan.  There would be no sea to cross, I wouldn't even have to leave the EU!  There are pilgrimage diaries outlining exactly which towns pilgrims stopped in each night and the rivers they crossed to get there.  On the other hand, I'm probably only going to make one real pilgrimage in my lifetime.  Why sell myself short?  Jerusalem is the coolest, biggest, most important pilgrimage destination in history!  I shouldn't hold back.  Apparently Domenico Laffi (that seventeenth century pilgrim from Bologna) made a trip to Jerusalem as well as Compostela, but I don't know if he documented it.  If he did, a translation hasn't been published yet.

Those are my thoughts.  We shall see.

A thought

Why am I planning a pilgrimage?  It certainly isn't for the same reason as the early medieval pilgrims.  I don't think that hiking to Jerusalem will absolve me of any of my sins or release anyone I know from purgatory.  I don't even believe in purgatory!  I do believe in God, however, and I think Jerusalem would be a cool place to go just because Jesus Christ lived there.  But I'm not planning on being overcome with ecstatic visions of paradise like some medieval mystics.  And I don't really care to hear all of the apocryphal stories about where the child Jesus did some miraculous thing or where the Virgin Mary ascended to heaven.  I don't need to see the places to believe in the events.  I almost worry that seeing the places will pop the bubble of history and sully my image of events with their connection to the crass modern world.  I do hope that I will be able to spend some time pondering and feeling and reaffirming my testimony.  I want to feel some joy and peace as well as some sorrow and gratitude. 

But really, if that was all I wanted, I could fly out there like every other self-respecting modern tourist, tour the sites and fly home.  Air conditioned, cozy, normal clothes, never escaping my own self. 

Instead, my pilgrimage is about the journey.  It isn't even connected to religious feelings.  I just want to see things I've never seen and do things I've never done.  Maybe even do something that no one has done in at least 400 years!  Now that is worth the lack of air conditioning!

Wandering Women

A few quotes about women on pilgrimages: 

"Whoever builds his house out of willows, and spurs his blind horse over plowed land, and suffers his wife to go seeking shrines, is worthy to be hanged on a gallows!"

The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer

“[It would] provide a certain shield against vice, if your synod and your princes would forbid matrons and veiled women to make these frequent journeys back and forth to Rome.  A great part of them perish and few keep their virtue.  There are very few towns in Lombardy and Frankland or Gaul where there is not a courtesan or harlot of English stock.  It is a scandal and a disgrace to your whole church."

St Boniface to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 8^th century

“[Tolerate] neither broken sword nor wandering woman.”

Spanish proverb

It sounds like my gender is going to have to be one of the anachronistic elements of my journey. 

Clothes

Some of my friends whom I would love to have with me on my pilgrimage do not want to wear medieval clothes. 

I know, it blows my mind.  Not only that, but it tortures my soul and tears at my heart.

I haven't decided on a century to recreate (sometime after 1250 and before 1550), much less a particular fashion, but I feel that clothing is integral to the experience!  The reason I sew clothes is so that I can DO things in them!  Feel what life was like in someone else's skin, or the closest thing to it.  And maybe this is a premature issue, but I think it is important for my party of pilgrims to be dressed for the part.  Please tell me if I am being unreasonable about this (though I will probably ignore you if you say that I am).

Thank you.

from Amsterdam, over the Alps, across the sea, to the Holy City

While GoogleMaps won't show me a walking path from Amsterdam to Jerusalem, it will get me at least to Venice, which is as far as I'm planning on walking.  Apparently it will only take me 9 days and 20 hours to get there!!  wow, Europe is small!  If I drove, it would only take me 12 hours.  So, a total of 236 hours of walking, divided by a minimum of 12 miles a day (we could take it easy) equals just under 20 days.  Easypeasy!

Of course, I don't want to be walking on the edge of the highway the whole way, so I looked up hiking trails in Wiki and found out that there are ELEVEN different Long Distance Walking Trails that crisscross Europe.  I could follow a chunk of E8 out of the Netherlands, pick up E1 to the border of Germany and Austria, and then take E5 over the Alps!  Wiki even says that you don't need to be an experienced hiker to do that section of the mountains, and really, who am I to argue with Wiki? 

The Beginning

I am going to creatively recreate a medieval pilgrimage from Germany to Jerusalem in the summer of 2012.  I have a lot of research to do and a lot of money to raise--clothes to sew, menus to plan, hostels to book, cathedrals to identify, boats to charter.  I first got the idea during one of my undergraduate Art History courses called "The History of the Illustrated Book".  We went through a slew of map illustrations, several of them placing Jerusalem at the center of the known world.  I suddenly got the idea in my head that it would be cool to walk from London to Jerusalem.  Maybe rent a donkey for a stretch of it.  After a few weeks of daydreaming and secretly plotting, the idea got filed away for an unidentified "later", between the idea to hike the Great Wall of China and the dream to take a camel along the ancient and fabled Silk Route.

I didn't really think about it again until... well, I don't remember what triggered it, but it was sometime in the past two months.  And I realized that if there was ever a time to do something crazy and untethered, it was now.  Once I finish my Masters, I'm a free woman.  I have no husband, no kids, no job; why not live out a dream?

There are naysayers.  Some ask where I will get the money.  (dunno)  Others think I'll get mugged.  (maybe)  Crazy is a modifier that often comes up.  But that's me!  Its a label I willingly and gleefully accept.  It just means that I can do anything. 

So, if you have any ideas, thoughts, criticisms, please post them.  I tend to get carried away by my excitement, and I need good down-to-earth people to point out the missing pieces.  Because I do need a way to raise money, and I don't really want to get mugged.  Not really.  And hey, if you love this idea and you want to come, I will be putting together a fellowship to travel with.  Pilgrims rarely traveled alone, you know.