"Still, despite all this, traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby--I just don't care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to--I just don't care." - Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)

As you can see above, I am reading Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. It was sent to me by Brianna in Pennsylvania (thank you, Brianna!) and has been sitting on my shelf, waiting for a more pensive, non-fiction mood to come upon me. A mood which struck directly after reading Poisonwood Bible, which always feels very real to me, though it is fiction. I then moved on to An Ordinary Man, Paul Rusesabagina's autobiography about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. And now I have slipped into Eat, Pray, Love, the next step in feeding this wanderlust that has me in its clutches. The next step until I can go to Spain and Morrocco that is.

The book is the story of Elizabeth Gilbert's trip of self-exploration through Italy, India and Indonesia. After a series of thoroughly discouraging and painful events, she spends a year abroad in those three places. A year, living in three vastly different countries, attempting to learn what she could.

I am still in Italy--in the book, that is--so I cannot say how deeply any impact on my life from it will go. But I can say what it has inspired in me in my already potent taithchwant state: dreams. I am dreaming about travel. Reliving the moments I spent in Italy, which were filled with both the good and the bad, but I love with the passion she so very well described in the quote above. And dreaming about my next trips. Next steps. And the happy what ifs. What if I had a book deal and a year? What if I could choose three countries to inhabit, take in, dig my fingernails into and invite into that place underneath my skin that already houses Botswana and Peru and Chiang Mai and Cinque Terre?

First, I would choose Israel. I would take a long drawn-out class on the history of the levant. In particular, of the Jewish people, who have always had a strong draw for me. Ever since I was a pre-teen, laying on my floor reading the Torah and the Writings and so forth. King Solomon was the first Jewish person I ever fell in love with and many others followed in suit. David, Paul, Hosea, Jesus. I loved Solomon for his wisdom and prayed every day for some time that I would be wise. Wise like Solomon, which mostly connotes discernment and understanding, I think.

So I would walk the streets of what used to be Salem, close my eyes and let the Hebrew words wash over me, sit in the synagogue and listen if they would let me.

Then I would go to Nepal. I tried to go once, in the summer of 2001. That was the summer that Crown Prince Dipendra killed his entire family less-one. It happened only a week and a half before I was slotted to leave. We went to Thailand instead.

Since then, or perhaps before then, Nepal has been on some list kept in the back of my mind. I tried to go again in 2002; I even learned some Nepali. But every plan fell through, the country was still in turmoil and I was only seventeen. I went to Costa Rica instead.

I would still like to go. Mostly because of pictures I have seen. They stick out in my mind moreso than photographs of any other country that I haven't yet traversed. Fill me with some curiosity, longing, love. I want to live in the mountains and work the fields, probably with a translator or a fluent missionary, as my Nepali language software mostly failed me--and what was learned is now forgotten. I want to fall in love with the quiet people and be humbled by a humble, simple life.

Both of the above places have been long time dreams of mine, thus it seems only fitting that the third choice be a thought out longing as well. And, so, the third place would be Romania.

In Texas one year, while training with other exuberant world-traveling teenagers, I heard some talk from a group who had gone to Romania and worked in the orphanages. I visited an orphanage in Peru once. And I would like to go someplace like that again. I don't know that I could do much. But I can hold children. And I can run around outside. And I can love.

In college, my best friend, who I called Springtime, said: "what I like best about you is that, when you see water, you have to be in it." She didn't mean water, of course, but rather that, when I make up my mind to do something I do it. And if I feel that something is right or should be done: I do it. I don't wait around and bother with worrying and think about how it should be done or what the consequences might be (this can also get me in trouble, as well as being endearing). I just go. I just move to New York or move to Denver or kayak between cities or buy the poor woman's groceries. I've never felt that this was a detriment to me, but rather a blessing. That I believe being generous begets generosity. Being brave begets bravery. Taking chances in your life often allows people to take chances with you or on you.

All this to say that making this list is more dangerous than it seems. Because I am just as likely to run off to Israel as look at you. I don't have the money or means for something like this at the present moment. And maybe these will all be shorter trips, spread out across many vacation times from my "real" (read: less real) life as a workaholic slug.

But for now I will dream. And read the rest of that book. And then move on to Three Cups of Tea, which may feed even more into this fantastical dreaming that I do.