By Erin Byrne
This is the adventure of travel: We see, we feel, we perceive. Receptors reach out from our depths toward what we need, and we have the potential to be transformed by the incredible treasures of the world.
This is the theme of Wings: Gifts of Art, Life, and Travel in France, and it is offered in this exhibit of travel vignettes and images reminiscent of postcards. Our experiences differ from yours as you smell the smoke of faraway fires and hear words of foreign tongues roll off your own, but we connect in our search for meaning.
There are moments on our journeys when we meet a person—alive or long vanished from the earth—and time and distance morph, bringing characters of place and past close enough to look us in the eye, and touch us with fingers that pulse with life, as when I ‘met’ Paul Cézanne in Aix-en-Provence. My Vignettes & Postcards series contains stories of such connections, and this exhibit is an extension of these books about Paris and Morocco, and, forthcoming, Spain.
Our lives are interlaced with jewel-toned links between people, red bonds of love, resilient fishing lines of family, spools of memory, and black threads that weave in our heartaches and dark sides. Often, a hunger for something, we know not what, gnaws its way through us. If we seek to be nourished, we can encounter on our travels that for which we yearn, as Kimberley Lovato does in Nepal, and Lavinia Spalding in Cuba.
Travel removes us from numbing routines—at home, we swish through our daily lives, heedless of omens. But when we find ourselves lost and rustle a map or peer at a screen to acclimate, we acquire a new alertness and decipher meaning in things otherwise overlooked: A signpost here, a crowd gathered there, this park, that corner, these steps, those doors. We reflect from a fresh vantage point and see new patterns in our own lives, as Don George does in Ryoanji.
When we honor the tales that come to us, gifts of compassion, forgiveness, understanding, and peace return to us in a cycle, causing an inner alchemy. This happens in The Storykeeper film I made with Dutch filmmaker Rogier Van Beeck Calkoen, about a boy in occupied Paris whose trauma from a B-17G crash in his neighborhood was healed decades later by his assembling and offering of the stories of the American crew.
This inner change is also the focus of our current film, Siesta, which shows Spanish culture working its magic on an uptight American stockbroker. Here, Jayme Moye gains insight in Afghanistan, and Tim Cahill grasps the effects of time on our earth in Alaska.
I urge you to excavate your own travel stories, stir them up, and shake them like rocks in a pan, for I believe they hold glinting flecks that can change the world, and the telling of them can create a luminous, glittering alcove of pure gold inside of you.
Layers exist underneath the persistent memories of places, and treasure is buried under these images we cannot forget. We pull them back, taking the same curiosity we extend to a new place and directing it within like a spotlight. This is how I have taught writers, years ago at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and now in the Bay Area, and on Deep Travel trips around the globe. The photographs of Omar Chennafi and Sivani Babu illuminate hidden aspects of Morocco, Antarctica, Patagonia, and Yukon in just this way…
When we land in a new place, our eyes are sometimes weary or wary, often confused or astonished or stunned. Rare are the times we simply see, but this is the moment we seize. I invite writers, filmmakers and photographers to share their own visions in the LitWings event series in Sausalito and Paris. In this exhibit, Marcia DeSanctis sees with startling clarity in Rwanda, as does Jeff Greenwald in Marrakech, and Robert Holmes shines his lens on Myanmar, Vietnam, and Trinidad.
The beauty of perpetual motion, the wonder of wanderlust, like wine, seeps into our blood and teaches us how to respond to what pilgrims refer to as “the call” of places near and far. May the travel vignettes and postcards in The Creative Process exhibit mingle with images and scenes and people from your own travels.
May they resonate with you, tempt you to venture out, and tap into your dreams.
