journeys

The Text of Roland Barthes’ “From Work to Text” is an entity that exists to be consumed, to be reveled in, and to be learned from. Travel, as an abstract, serves a very similar purpose as the Text. We travel for the sake of journey, for the experiences and lessons to be found along the way. We travel for the fun of it, for the pleasure of new vistas and faces. It costs money to travel; no matter how far you go, you will pay a fee, grand or small, for this multifaceted and beneficial undertaking. 

Journeys can be read like texts, both in the present and looking back, heady with hindsight and newly created and stored information. We can read the landscapes - the land, the buildings, the weather - everything silent can say just as much or even more about the places than anything clamorous. The people will tell you their part of the story, and so will the food, the clothes, etcetera, but nature shaped those things into existence before those stories could be crafted. Coal mines, creek baptisms, and bluegrass all play into popular culture with their roots deeply buried in the land.

home

Home is a tricky thing to define. It's where you live, but it's more than just your physical location. It's not only a place for your body to rest, but it's a place for your mind to be set at ease and for your heart to be filled. The Smokies have always felt like my home away from home, even though I only get to see them once every few years at most. I can imagine myself physically living there for the rest of my life - but only if I have people with me that ease my mind and fill my heart. "Home" requires complex ingredients.

The mountains have long been a place that people sought solace in. Higher to heaven, closer to nature and clean air. If one meditated long enough there, could you begin to strip away the more complicated trappings of "home"? Could you get down to the bare basics, and simply enjoy the place you are in? We tend to construct our own ideal versions of things, and let that perfection get in the way of appreciating what is real. But what if you're unsatisfied with that reality, what if you have a Nadja moment? When the closer you look at what you do have, the more you come to dislike it.

Change it.