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Explorers

explorers
Oskar Schlemmer:
Three Figures with Furniture-like Forms
[Drei Figuren mit Möbelformen] (1929)


"That wanderlust has largely left us since we returned from Exile."


Exploring became one sure way to distract ourselves from often depressing realities after being Exiled. We could go discover something. Though earlier explorers had already discovered every possible thing, our surroundings were new to us; strange customs always surrounded us. We were looking for roads less traveled since traffic seemed to be the most significant barrier to going anywhere. We learned when to avoid the freeways and when they might be okay. We'd often chart a course around the most direct route since they frequently proved to be the most significant hassle. If everyone's discovered a shortcut, it takes longer. We ached to discover our own secret passages.

We kept our navigating systems offline when Exploring because we didn't want The Cloud to learn and then advertise our secret shortcuts to anybody else.
Explorers are jealous discoverers. We do not seek to share or to gain notoriety. We mainly sought the freedom our Exile otherwise denied us. We were never more at home than when we were half lost on a quest to discover something. When we lived in DC, we navigated down the Blue Ridge clear into North Carolina and even found some ancestor graves from the early eighteen hundreds there. We slipped up through Pennsylvania, too, and found more evidence of ancestors settling in New York and Connecticut. We found some hint of our forebears passage everywhere we went, for we were apparently from Exploring families.

The Muse would download a map of the area to her phone so we could find our way back when we got lost outside of cell coverage. We'd often get lost if only to get found again. Exploring's inherently disorienting. I suspect we were attracted to it because it disoriented us. It left us feeling as if we were up to something more than merely serving our Exile time. We were never happier than when heading off in some fresh direction. As the Exile extended, we exhausted many compass points. We eventually became oriented, at which point we might have successfully overcome Exile's primary hold over us. We were no longer prisoners there once we had seen what lay beyond every horizon. We'd discovered enough territory then to imagine beyond the formerly imprisoning edges. Before we'd explored, we had been surrounded by nothing more substantial than rumors.

Near the end of our Exile, we had been running out of fresh destinations to Explore. We undertook much longer excursions in the final months of our tenures in both DC and Colorado. We made trips to New Orleans, a place we'd been to plenty in the past, but it was a different place when approached in The Schooner rather than by airplane. The long roads between our temporary homes were enlightening, each helping to round out our claims of having visited all the lower forty-eight states. The excursion through Alabama proved amply convincing that we'd never feel compelled to return. The traffic "Down South" was eminently well worth missing. The return to Colorado from Louisiana proved equally enlightening, passing through hundreds of miles of the most boring scenery imaginable, also known as Texas. By the time we'd returned, we felt more secure where we were Exiled, safe in the understanding that we could have ended up in much worse places. We rarely saw better in all of our travels.

Wherever one lives informs one's worldview. In the most real possible sense, we each inhabit the center of a universe, with the rest of geography spreading outward from there. We quickly became "centric" to whatever place we adopted as home. That fact alone seemed most disorienting. We saw geography shifting as we changed our centricities. This lent credence to the concept of living relatively. We lived in formerly unimaginable places and learned that we didn't necessarily need to believe in a place to feel temporarily at home. We never stopped exploring. When The Damned Pandemic hit, we'd just returned from a long Southwestern trip that had directly connected us to Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. The old adage that insists every road leads everywhere proved credible while we were Exiled. The only road not taken through those years was the one heading permanently back home. All others seemed more wide open and welcoming, perhaps because we were spiritually homeless then.

That wanderlust has largely left us since we returned from Exile.

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