Altered Trajectories

It has been over 4 years since the day that shattered my world and the journey I was on when it happened. Travel is sometimes part of our story in unexpected ways but is woven into the threads of ours days exactly as it is intended whether we can acknowledge its place at that time or not. My husband had never been to Europe so I had spent a year planning what was supposed to be a trip to the quintessential romance cities, 4 countries, 6 cities, 3 weeks. Less than 2 weeks before our scheduled flight to Paris, I found out my father had been diagnosed with what the days to come would reveal was stage 4 pancreatic cancer that had spread extensively throughout his body.  I flew to PA immediately and spent valuable time with him. As the day of my flight approached, my family insisted that I go and try to enjoy myself despite everything that was happening. So with a heavy heart and many tears we landed in the dawn of a new day in the city of Lights.  Almost immediately the news on ...

  Overlooking the charred remains of the once-mighty cathedral of Notre Dame from my tiny balcony I sat long and pondered its fate which I have always felt very tied to my own. I had come to bear witness, to see for myself with my own tear-filled eyes, the devastation in the wake of its darkest hours. A year earlier, in the days before my father’s death, I had lit a candle for him during Sunday mass while the mighty organ intermingled its notes with the smoke from the flame of my candle and lifted them toward the heavens. I had always considered myself more spiritual than religious, but inside the walls of that cathedral, I felt whatever in my heart I believed God to be. It was a powerful place for me, a seemingly solid bastion impenetrable to the forces of the weary world around it. There was truly no place in my wildest imagination where its mighty presence was diminished. But the unthinkable and unimaginable often catch us off guard. Watching the cathedral burn, even thousan...

We are changed by our journeys, both the large and small ones. We are moved, changed, grown, amended.  Sometimes we think we are just traveling but are unaware of the actual journey life has in store for us.  Stepping outside of the ordinary, going beyond the walls of our daily existence we find what is hidden away in the depths of our lost souls. Sometimes we seek it.  Sometimes it is given by chance in the random exchanges and experiences we could not have planned for.   The most poignant moments of my life have occurred in the unfamiliar places where the heart and mind gently open, in the alien spaces where the universe infuses its lessons in unexpected ways leaving us reawakened, reimagined, reborn.  Like a planet bumped off its axis, left seeking a new path our trajectory is forever altered. Sometimes in seemingly small ways and sometimes in earth-shattering large ways.  These are the stories of those moments when travel was an usher, a guide, a ...