Vagabonding by Rolf Potts
This is probably THE book for wanderlust in your 20s. At least it was for me:) It has a ton of practical resources that ended up leading me to Supercamp.
What to bring: guidebook, sandals, hygiene items, medicines, earplugs, small gifts for places you stay, a few outfits, pocketknife, flashlight, sunglasses, day pack, inexpensive camera.
“Leaving home is a kind of forgiveness, and when you get among strangers, you’re amazed at how decent they seem. Nobody smirks at you or gossips about you, nobody resents your successes or relishes your defeats. You get to start over, a sort of redemption.” –Garrison Keillor “Leaving Home”
“We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them…how should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.” Rainer Maria Rilke “letters to a young poet”
“Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am…stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.” Micheal Crichton “Travels”
“Wholeness implies closure, and vagabonding is an ongoing process of finding new things. You can, however, recover and discover parts of yourself-psychic and emotional parts you never knew existed—as you travel through the world. And, as you do this, you’ll also leave behind aspects of yourself—habits, prejudices, even pieces of your heart. Striking a balance between finding yourself and losing yourself on the road, of course, requires creativity.”
“Learing about fundamental, and at times unbridgeable cultural and historical gaps between peoples is essential. One must not delude oneself that we are all alike or destined to be members of some sort of global family” Jeffrey Tayler
“Acknowledging differences and avoiding superficial cures is not just a valuable lesson of volunteer work-it’s often the first step in actually solving the problems that you seek to fix.”
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, In our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” Pico Iyer “Why we travel”
“People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.” Joseph Campbell “the power of myth”
“It is not speech which we should want to know; we should want to know the speaker. It is not things seen which we should want to know; we should know the seer. It is not sounds which we should want to know; we should know the hearer. It is not the mind which we should want to know: we should know the thinker.” –From the Kaushitaki Upanishad
“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time –T.S.Eliot
“Your travels, you will discover, have awakened you to parts of the world, and awakened parts of the world within you. Experiences and observations that didn’t quite make sense on the road will suddenly come into perspective as you once again become a part of your home community. International news about the regions you visited will resonate in a personal way—and you’ll come tor realize how the mass media can only offer a patial perspective on other places and cultures. As you continue to read, learn, and think about the places you once visited, you’ll realize that your travels never fully end. Even in times of solitude at home, you’ll feel less like an isolated individual than part of a greater community of people and places, near and far, past and future. As for the practical challenges of “reentry” into your home life, confront them all as new adventures. Rediscover your work, and do it well. Redeploy your simplicity, and make it pay out in free time. Emulate the best of people who themselves were at home when you met them on your travels. Pinpoint what you learned from them and incorporate these things into your own life. Integrate the deliberate pace and fresh perspective that made your travel experience so vivid, and allow for unstructured time in your day to day home schedule. Don’t let the vices you conquered on the road—fear, selfishness, vanity, prejudice, envy—creep back into your daily life. Explore your hometown as if it were a foreign land, and take an interest in your neighbors as if they were exotic tribesmen. Keep things real, and keep on learning. Be creative, and get into adventures. Earn your freedom all over again and don’t set limits. Keep things simple, and let your spirit grow. But most of all, keep livng your life in such a way that allowes your dreams room to breathe. Because you never know when you’ll feel the urge to hit the road again.”
“Allons! The road is before us!
It is safe-I have tried it-my own feet have tried it weel—be not detain’d!
Let the paper remain n the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! Let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! Mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! Let the lawyer pleas in the court, and the judge expound the law.
Comerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?”
--Walt Whitman “song of the open road”