A Season of Wonderlust: I'm still here (and there)! But...where am I, and am I connected to you?

Have I mentioned how difficult it has proven to regularly chronicle my journey here? Reasons have varied. Here is my favorite: my ratio of living to reflecting biases itself heavily toward living lately, and I do not regret that this eats into my navel-gazing time (I had this thought on 5/30).

Here are a couple of other, less-favored reasons for my dearth of posts in the last week
:

1.
I wonder whether I say anything that people don't already know, or that they want/need to hear. I have a long, private journal entry reflecting on the embarrassing limits of my ability to extend my perspective into other people's experience. To empathize, to truly feel compassion.

For about a week, while I was still in Spain, I chewed on a very distasteful discovery that my mind automatically relegates anything I do not personally comprehend as stupid.

I put this bluntly on purpose. It is an uncomfortable realization and needs to be stated in a properly uncomfortable way. My mind doesn't say, "I don't understand this." When my ears hear a foreign language, when I "listen" to someone talk from a position I'm unfamiliar with, something almost imperceptible happens in my brain: a little switch is pulled and the train on which that information approaches my station is instead diverted off a cliff into a canyon of inattention, to crash (and maybe explode) cartoon style, miles below. Instinctively I try to soften it by saying "inattention," but really it is worse than that...subconsciously my mind reduces to insignificance what I do not immediately comprehend.

Another angle permits access to this realization. When I talk passionately (as in this blog!), I instinctively speak as if I am the first person who ever had an idea, who ever experienced the phenomenon. I explain, I lecture, I preach.

Am I uniquely broken or offensive? Is this a tragicomic commonplace that binds us together? I have been working very hard to undo this impulse in my brain. Why, though, has it been a revelation to experience, a challenge to retain, the knowledge that every human being's interior is just as complex, reasoned, articulated as mine (and I do not here refer to vocabulary - I mean the texture and depth of human spirits and guts - lived consciousness)?

The serendipitous gift of staying in people's homes instead of hotels, which started as an economic decision but has become an experiential delight, has simultaneously brought this shortcoming to my attention and helped me to begin to heal it. To spend intimate day after day in the inner space of other people with lives that are at the same time very different and much the same as mine has begun to shatter and reassemble (hopefully into a lovely mosaic) some of my baser instincts.

Now, I know you are not just here for my navel-gazing, so here are some overdue pictures of La Alhambra. I will post about Milano soon...maybe I'll get to Barcelona eventually because it was nice - I don't want to disrespect it. :)