A friend of mine, who lives on Whidbey Island, Washington, sent this article to me. She likes to travel and since I had been and was going again on a very special journey, she thought it would interest me, which it did. When I started my research again on my genealogy (which is just a journey) it opened up even for understanding our ancestors who took the journey that led to us, and we are continuing what they started. I hope you enjoy the article The Seattle Times, Travel Page, Sunday, Jan. 21, 1996: THOUGHTFUL TRAVELER: The traveler as hero: a meditation on the art of journeying: By Jim Molnar, Seattle Times travel staff. Travelers, I think, are born, not made. In "The Songlines," his last major novel before his deat in 1989, Bruce Chatwin celebrates the notion of humans as travelers by nature - nomads, roamers forever heading toward greener pastures. The compulsion to move infuses our history and mythology; the journey transcends culture and tradition, as Chatwin's notes illustrate with quotations such as this, from a Caribou Inuit: "What can we do? We were born with the Great Unrest". And this from a 19th-century British essayist: "When I rest my feet, my mind also ceases to function". And the Buddha's final words: "Walk on!". Chatwin's fiction and non-fiction represent some of the finest travel writing of the 20th centruy. It's not so much "literature of place", as contemporary critics tend - wrongly - to label travel writing. The place, the destination, really doesn't matter so much. Whether composed as essay ("What Am I Doing Here") or travel narrative ("In Patagonia"), or crafted as novel ("On the Black Hill"), Chatwin's writing explores the idea that our essentional condition is one of passage 'between' place, of motion, of close observation and discovery, of goings and returnings. For many of us who travel, as for many of us who write (and read), it's not a particularly sartling perspective. It's just that Chatwin and other good writers help make conscious what we accept implicitly. We respong to their work because we've come to realize, too, how destinations are less ending points than excuses or rationales for our journeys, just as the final sentence in a book or story is little more that a practical demarcation point in the literary process. We end one tale just to head into the next. THE TALES WE TELL In a sense, then, all good writing is a similarly creative act - the process of making a story in which we ourselves participate as characters. As the writer is always engaged in discovering stories, travelers are (or should be) engaged in discovering and understanding the stories that their journeys tell, and their roles in them. Think of it this way: As travelers we become heroes of a sort. Little heroes, maybe. But our heroism-or potential for it-is no less real than that of the gods, goddesses, brave little tailors and peasant maidens who range through our dreams and myths. We, as they, undertake our journeys, overcoming obstacles and fears; we struggle, observe, and learn, seeking the truth in ourselves in order to come to some understanding of our place in the world and what it means to be human. HEROIC JOURNEYS Odysseus, Jason, Theseus, the Knights of the Round Table, Robin Hood, Jack the Giant-Killer... Those of us who sail through childhood on the mainstream of American culture learn mostly about heroes - usually strapping white guys - who hail from a relatively narow base: Greek, British and German, with a smattering of French and Scandinavian. We dont' cuddle on the couch with the tale of the Sumerian goddess Inanna who bravely descended to the nether world and survied death. We don't fall asleep to the story of Parvati, the daughter of the mountain king Himalaya, who went to a mountaintop and equaled the Hindu god Shiva in the rogors of meditation. Few preschool reading hours include the great deeds of the Maid of the North in the Finnish saga the "Kalevala). For many of us, it's only in adulthood, maybe after a tourist luau at a Hawaiian resort, that we hear about Maui, the Polynesian hero who, like the West's Prometheus, tricked the gods in order to obtain fire for humans' use. If we had a more rounded knowledge of the wider world's myths, legends and folktales, maybe we'd more readily appreciate Chatwin's notions about our nomadic nature. We'd probably also understand bettwe why traveling is so important to many of us; why travel writing is such a popular genre; not to mention why travel is such a common, important metaphor throughout literature. Joseph Campbell, the well-known mythographer, addressed the subject in his study of the stories and symbols through which we humans express our most basic beliefs about ourselves and our world. In "The Hero With a Thousand Faces", Campbell contends that 'all' hero myths, from all over the world, from all history, from all cultures, share certain elements. Central is The Journey. It can be a physical one, an intellectual one or a spiritual one; but, he says, all heroes are travelers. Male and female, white and black and brown, noble or peasant, divine or mortal, the heroes who populate humanity's most elemental tales begin in one place or situation or state of mind and go to another. There they undergo trials that test wisdom, fortitude, courage, compassion, love, devotion to others or to an idea or ideal. If they succeed - sometimes with the help of a guide or protector - they return fundamentally changed and share what they've learned. And beneath all the mythic metaphors and symbols, what they all learn, Campbell says, is something about the way the world works and about humans' relationship with a deeper, transcendent reality. THE CHOICE The scale may be different, but the process is the same on each trip any traveler takes. All the elements are there: the journey, the trials, the potential for enlightenment and for returning a better person, fundamentally changed. (Writers, whether or not their subject is specifically travel, also can see, like Chatwin, how the heroic protocal applies to their craft. Good writing of any sort leaves neither writer nor reader unchanged.) It may be that travelers are born, not made. But clearly, heroes are made, not born. We travelers have the same choice as mythic heroes: we can use our journeys to enlighten and ennoble ourselves - to become little heroes. Or we can shrug them off and return empty-handed, unchanged - still the knave, the unworthy brother, the selfish sister. We can approach traveling as a heroic journey, or as a fool's errand.