Wandering

Psychiatrists, politicians, tyrants are forever assuring us that the wandering life is an aberrant form of behaviour; a neurosis; a sickness which, in the interests of civilisation, must be suppressed.
Yet in the East, they still preserve the once universal concept: that wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.
The Songlines
Bruce Chatwin.

It is so difficult to understand that I can't just wander into a country at will ... I had never considered it until now but the concept of ownership by different groups within the same human tribe is quite odd when you're on the outside looking in.

I understand ... it's about civil society, taxes and an avoidance of chaos but still, I wonder how the world would be if we were all free to learn that we're not so different under the facade of societal, cultural and religious 'difference'...

Riverbend in Iraq wrote of an imaginary Iraqi Oscar ceremony in a way that made me want to offer applause for the courage it must take to keep blogging as Baghdad Burns in her blog. Wandermuse paints and writes her mind in ways that inspire me. Erkan is a Turk who gathers news and views that make me return to his site for his daily offerings. Shashikiran is a businessman, a marathon runner in training, and a man who writes of his world in beautiful prose. Doberman is a Finn who writes of a world that seems like New Zealand, one that I read in my 'own', accent and I could go on listing so many more blogs in which I recognise a common humanity ...

That is the blog world but I have friends in New Zealand, Turkey, America, the Netherlands, Italy,Australia, England ... I'm curious about the world and its people. And the best of learning Nederlands is surely the cultural mix of class ... Chechen, Iranian, African, Iraqi, Indian, Romanian, Polish, Portugese, Spanish, Greek, Moroccan, Turkish, etc ... we're people 'in process'. We're like cats meeting on neutral ground in a land that isn't our own. They make Dutch grammar bearable. I've lived and worked amongst Turks who welcomed me and showed me of the immense value of family, and then I met this Belgian, moved to his country and finally ... after so long, began learning of the construct of difference; a construct that creates barriers and boundaries which in turn create illegal aliens, identity soups and extreme right political groups ...

"Dorothy ..., said the Bear, "you're not in Kansas anymore and you're an alien."