Island Update: After having visited eight islands in the Great Lakes Basin in the last three and a half weeks, which–when added to the three I’d visited after deciding to take on this project but before July 7th, plus the one or two I plan to visit in the next week or so, before I head for a non-island destination to visit my dear daughters–adds up to a dozen of specimens already in my island collection. (Or possibly a “baker’s dozen,” depending on how soon I can tear myself away from writing about islands to go visit some more.)
Most of these first island adventures have yet to be shared in posts, and I admit I’ve been experiencing a bit of Thoreau’s regret, “My life has been the poem I would have writ,/But I could not both live and utter it.” Which is not to say my island adventures will not be shared. However, my growing island collection has been brought with it a flood of questions, most of which are specific and deal with individual islands, but some of which are larger in scope, like the “why” of this project.
Serendipity, seemingly heightened around a project such as this, had me stumble across one answer that immediately resonated:
“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. . . . And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again–to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.“
Stay tuned. I’ve been slowed down, am getting taken in. And falling in love once more? To be considered another day. In the meanwhile, the next question might well be: Why islands?
