Skywalker

“ I’m restless.Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again” Anais Nin.

I have been absent from here a while, increasing my carbon footprint by taking to the skies to visit the old country for a family ceremony and (too brief by a million years) beach interlude in the barefoot capital of the world.

Getting there was an arduous, three day, sleep deprived experience beginning with a two hour drive before abandoning Red Pony to a park and fly parking lot to take on four flights, some of astounding length, crossing continents confined to a cramped airline seat, gobbling up timelines with multiple sonambulent layovers in airports various around the world, as I essentially journeyed back to the future.

Finally my last flight on a little local puddlejumper with the beautiful sunbird logo put me down on the earth of my birth where I had to very quickly remember how to drive on the other side of the road in a tiny fragile toy car, my rented wheels for the next two weeks. What I gained in fuel economy I lost in power but after all that jetting around in the skies, a little less gratuitous consumption on earth wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It did take me a full week to work out how to open the windows, so economical were the designers of this low budget tjorrie with conventional material world bells and whistles. Half way through our relationship the key fob auto locking and alarm arming device for the vehicle stopped working. Perhaps after it was inadvertently dropped it in a bowl of water.

Sunbirds, those iridescent jewels of the Old World passerine bird family, couldn’t have been a better image and symbol of homecoming for me, my hair well and truly yanked on by the stars.

Take-home truth from my back to the future journeying, especially for all those currently made distraught by an imploding world of greed and hubris: “I have seen the future and it works…” Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) the “muckraking” American journalist who famously took on USA government corruption. Back then. You know. When America was the G word. No I don’t mean gone. That’s now.

Caveat: it might require a paradigm shift. A working future, I mean