I am still reflecting on transition, memory and time. My thinking has been placed into overdrive as I am writing this from Mongolia, my first visit since leaving four months ago. I arrived on a clear night, a full moon shining on the hills – still with a good covering of snow. Memories returned of walking in the countryside in Zavkhan one summer night under a full moon so bright I could see shadows. I was welcomed at the airport by Nymaa, who immediately scolded me for turning off my Mongolian mobile phone while in Australia as she was sending messages to me asking about the girls. I had planned to come back in late January but had to change my plans. I didn’t tell Nymaa, and she had sewn some gifts for the girls and was waiting for me to come to collect them.
Keira wants me to bring back some of the toys that we left behind in her playroom, specifically her toy animal jaguar. Alesia knows that I can’t sleep in our old apartment, but she is not sure where I will sleep – she doesn’t even consider a hotel and is surprised when I tell her that I will be staying in one. I am surprised too. I have never stayed in a hotel in Ulaanbaatar before. I had promised Keira I would ask about the jaguar. Not surprisingly Nymaa knows where it is (she found it behind some furniture when cleaning the apartment when we left) and she has given it to her niece. She says she will bring it to me. It doesn’t really matter, we can buy Keira another one easily, but I feel it would be nice to bring the original one back. Another link. It was clear Nymaa misses Keira as much as Keira misses her. I feel divided, and wished I had packed Keira into my suitcase.
The next day I walk the streets with fondness, skidding on the ice, avoiding the blobs of spit, crossing the crazy traffic. I relish the cold crisp air. I enjoy my knee-high boots and the warmth of my winter coat. After summer in Sydney it feels nice to dress up warm again. These are all things I remember cursing at times when I lived here. I have breakfast at one former favourite cafe, smiling when I have to remind them to take my order after 20 minutes even though I am one of only two customers in the place. I drink hot chocolate at another favourite cafe, smiling smugly when I hear tourists comment that today's temperature of -12 is a personal record for them. Silly tourists, I have walked these streets in at least -30. I have slept in an unheated ger in the countryside in late November. I like milk tea and while traveling in the countryside drank it until my throat was so coated in salt it tainted everything else I ate. Silly tourists. But am I now just another kind of tourist? A tourist in a cafe targeting expatriates who forgot her pen so is poking out these words with a single finger on her iphone.
I walked into the office on Monday and was welcomed as though I had not left. We all greeted each other, shared the news then went straight into work as usual. The only change for me was sitting in a different office, and not having a home to walk to each evening. My week was full of catching up with work issues, interspersed with lovely lunches and dinners to catch up with friends. The week went by far too fast, and I abruptly found myself on Friday morning facing another day of good-byes.
I am still a bit disconnected in Australia, but this week in Mongolia I reconnected with friends and their stories. A friend had lost a baby, another friend found she was having one, another friend is finally living a dream after a lot of hard work, another friend found her child has a life-long learning difficulty, another friend found a new beginning. If you sat them all together around a table, what would we see? Maybe a quiet smile, a slight sigh, a little crease of worry at the corner of an eye. I think when you have no choice but to face a loss you cope, but you carry something with you. I think that to know what you carry can be a burden, but it can also bring awareness of the richness of life. If I know how the people I have met, the places I have lived, are part of my story, I might be wiser. I might remember that we can emerge from an experience bruised and battered, or uplifted, or surprised by love. I might remember that rain will always fall but beauty is everywhere, even when standing in the rain.
Now I am writing while on the plane. There is clear sky as I fly south-east from Ulaanbaatar to South Korea. I watch Ulaanbaatar disappear from my seat window – marking landmarks in the city where my friends live, where I have eaten, where I have walked. Right in this moment I don’t know when I will visit again. Hopefully sooner than later, but I don’t know so I watch this dusty crazy city that has such a hold on my heart until it disappears from my view. The plane passes over the snow-covered mountains, then open steppe occasionally marked with a twisting river. Then a landscape just as winter-brown, but marked by some fields or cultivation – we have crossed the border into China. I look away and when I look back there are long vertical ridges of sand stretching across the landscape. This changes to reasonably rugged mountains, which encircle a lake that is startlingly blue. There is a small city here, with an admirable road system on the outskirts in the dirt that is the shape of a flower from the air. We leave land and fly over the sea, container ships drawing white trails in the blue behind them. I have flown this route before, but the land has usually been covered by cloud, so usually I arrive in Seoul feeling like I have been picked up in Mongolia and then jarringly dumped in Korea. Today I felt the movement through the changes in landscape. This allowed me to leave Mongolia more slowly.
My ears are sore. We have started our descent into Incheon airport, where I have nine hours of wandering tedium. I am usually racing to the next thing, learning, learning, planning, organizing, planning. I can be patiently impatient in following through on my plans. But sometimes I want to stop time. Sometimes I realize the moment I am in is truly good, somewhere I want to stay for a while. But it slips through my fingers and I am back in a mundane stretch of time – like sitting in a plane, looking at container ships on the sea, scribbling words that are inadequate into my notebook.
My soul might be a restless one. These are not my words, but the words of a friend when I was complaining that pieces of my heart are spread over too many places. He then told me that for a restless soul it is a privilege to be able to connect with different people and places, even if it means long periods of time when we don’t see people dear to us. He said this as he returns to Germany, I return to Australia, and we leave our mutual friends in Mongolia. Next time I see him could be in Hawaii. This morning I watched people around me at the airport. What loss do they carry that I can’t see? Are they aware of the stories they carry? The joy, the sadness, the potential, the dreams. Are they restless too?
I know that I should just get up each morning and walk through what each day brings me. Make plans but be open to chance. If we lived forever in perfect moments they would no longer be perfect. Time remains a fact, it is how I feel when it is passing that matters. We all carry our story in us, and every tear that falls or smile that warms us from our memories is precious. I know this, it is just living it is sometimes difficult.
But right now in this moment, I am ready to look forward. To walk into whatever richness awaits me. I know what I carry with me. It is my story. Right now it is not too heavy. And there is a toy jaguar in my bag that is going to make a little girl very happy.
To make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. TS Elliot
