Unpacked: A Walker Returns Home

My wife Chana and I recently returned home to Jerusalem from a five-month walk: through Ireland, Scotland and Western US’s Pacific Crest Trail. (Tor read of our travels, click here.)

Amidst the joy of reuniting with family, friends, a permanent address and indoor-plumbing, city-life bomabrds me daily with a host of new adventures: challenges, delights and eccentricities that have piqued my attention in my current take2 at civilization.

In light of this, I am embarking on a new journey- a new blog, called Unpacked: A Walker Returns Home. Unpacked is a walker’s humble attempt at unpacking; preserving the magic of the backcountry, synthesizing it with coming home and using it to see home through renewed eyes.

On Unpacked, I will share with you both practical information and impractical thoughts. For example: Chana and I wish to create a nicely bound book of photos and memoirs. On Unpacked, I will tell you how we are doing it. We are also terrified of confining our travels to a nicely bound book of photos and memoirs. On Unpacked I will keep you posted on our struggle. We will discuss offsetting our trip’s carbon emissions, Jerusalem’s knack for providing the wildest everyday occurrences, dreams of future excursions and much, much more.

I begin Unpacked with a topic I will return to often: Walking through Challenges of the City. I am sure you can appreciate the shock of replacing wilderness, address: “Some mountain in the middle of nowhere,” with perhaps the most intense city in the world.

In the upcoming posts, I will explore the following three challenges:

1. Words- The sole company of Nature and my best friend left me treasuring both Silence and my words. In the city I find no silence to treasure, and meet so many words that speech no longer is a treasure. I will not submit.

2. Speed- I like the walker I’ve become. How do I continue to walk when everything around me seems only to run?

3. Stuff- I am surrounded by stuff. Mine, yours, everybody’s, nobody’s. I laugh when I recall fitting all my possessions in a backpack. How do I keep track of anything, least of all my sanity?

I can’t wait to unpack, and I invite you to share, explore and commit with me. May we finally do something with that half-unpacked suitcase that sits in the middle of our room. May we recycle the unrelenting wish, “I wish I was back.”

Cheers to you and me: We are turning the act of unpacking into another exciting step of the journey.

Happy Trails,

Yannai

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 11:36 am and is filed under Intro. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.