A journey extends your life
We often talk about the trip changing our lives but, is it a recurring and pleonastic phrase, or, really such an experience can change our destiny.
As in every human affair the wisest answer is : it depends . we know very well that different human beings have different sensitivities and the occasions of life are not linear or calculable a priori.
A more likely answer might also be: the more you travel, the more opportunities to change your life you will have. Just connecting with that last sentence, an article about Paul Stoller’s experience jumped out at me, very beautiful in its descriptive poetics and in the possibility of dreaming of a life spent in one’s passion in a place one did not know before . Find the full article, in the language of Albion, at this link
Paul Stoller … a loaned shaman
Once, in a thatched-roof spirit hut in the Nigerian village of Tillaberi, Songhay master sorcerer Adamu Jenitongo told American anthropologist Paul Stoller that the savannah was angry. “People who speak with two mouths and hear with two hearts make the savannah spirits angry,” Adamu Jenitongo said. “When the bush is angry, it doesn’t rain enough. When the bush is angry there is too much rain. When the bush is angry, locusts eat our crops. When the bush is angry, disease kills our people.”
Today Stoller is a professor of anthropology at West Chester University, a permanent fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the author of 15 books.
His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the Anders Retzius Gold Medal in Anthropology, awarded every three years by the King of Sweden. He is also what the Songhays call a Sohanci benya, a healer who did not inherit his powers but was taught them-often by a prisoner or enslaved person or, in Stoller’s case, by a cultural anthropologist in the United States who studied the medicinal properties of plants used in Songhay ethnomedicine.
Stoller ended up apprenticing with Adamu Jenitongo for 17 years. He explained his teacher’s comment to me this way, “His thought was that when things are out of balance, when there is no balance, when there is a lack of harmony in social relations, then we suffer as human beings.” Who could deny the lack of harmony in social relations today? I felt it was time to ask Stoller, whose 16th book, Wisdom from the Edge of the Village: Writing Ethnography in Troubled Times, due out next spring, about what he has learned in his long career, about the phenomenon of “spirit possession,” and what wisdom we can glean from the villages and people he has studied.
From the above we can understand the power of an experience , no any experience I give you credit for, a changed and changing life.
In this case , one has the feeling that there was a conjunction of planets with an extremely low statistical chance, but, let us reason calmly. Professor Stoller, in fact, before his meeting with the holy man was already a trained man with a very high propensity for knowledge. Many of Us could identify with the same type of person. A journey is the sum of many factors or the result of one superficial factor.
The difference between being a “tourist” , or, a “traveler.”
I chose this story because it combined several elements with which to recognize and share. To be a traveler is to mingle with a place that you did not know before, because you share its values or, more simply, there is no rational reason.
The heart has hyperscrutable eyes, and reason prepares half-logical paths for it to follow; we might call them, in many cases, real jokes.
We should be ready for these jokes and help Destiny by traveling more and more, to tune what we are with what we could be and persist in doing so.
We at A.I.LoveTourism define this spirit of knowledge in travel: becoming Geek Tourists ; we will talk more and more about similar experiences to Professor Stoller .
If you have a similar story to tell or want to build your own vacation Traveler who wants to know : WRITE TO: info@ailovetourism.com
