Travelling

I once owned Brian Eno's record Ambient 1: Music For Airports. I lived in a 28ft tipi with Mike in the early 80s and that particular album was perfect to play whilst redoing the tipi lining - one of those slow meditative processes. Poetry and music were the most important things in our life, so we managed to stretch an electrical cord into the tipi just to play the record player. Apart from that record player, we lived simply, cooking on the fire and reading by candlelight. Now as I begin that journey of departure and arrival through airports I am reminded of that music. Somehow Brian Eno had captured through sound the extraordinary human process of becoming neutral in a crowd.

When I was a child I spent a lot of time watching nature. Living in an old house we had many ants and I would watch them curiously. They would venture into new trails looking for food sources and then when they came back along their trail they would bump their antennae gently together with another ant and then move on. There was a combination of communication and neutrality with this process that I loved, there was nothing to linger about, and it was highly functional. I think back to that image and reflect that airports are ant-like hubs of humanity, this seething funnelling process before all the individuals eventually line up, touch antennae with authority, and disperse into their individual journeys.

Sometimes in the darkness of the plane lying upright in the economy class, I think about this unusual situation where we, as strangers, are all lined up next to each other. There is an intimacy in falling asleep where an arm or leg inadvertently touches another. We eat bland food together, all this we do as dispassionately and naturally as those ants touching antennae and moving on, equalised in this movement across the sky.

When we emerge from these long flights we are not just temporarily dislocated but we have been traversing through the air deliberately allowing our individuality to covertly lie neutral. How odd that our identity in the form of a passport is crucial and yet to survive well through airports is to lose our identity.

I thought about the group of essences that best support travelling, and it was the weed essences that stood out. They are nomads, travelling and making themselves at home all over the world. The three that stood out for me on the plane were cleavers, cress and plantain.

Cleavers, for its ability to grow to the light through a crowd of other plants. By taking cleavers we remain clear of the intermingling of energies and yet are at ease with the intermingling. Cress, for supporting the clarity of the mind, with a restful, playful quality. And plantain, its essential quality is about balance and the ability to integrate feelings of displacement and a sense of where we are in linear time. Having a mix of these three remedies through a flight enables us to arrive at our destination a little more alert and clear. The next two remedies help to create a pathway of connection to the new place. These are Chickweed and Dandelion. Both of these help the realignment and grounding necessary for ease in travelling to new places.