escaping america.

I learned a new word two days ago, a word that I think has known me all along.  The word is insularity.  Synonyms include detachment and narrow-mindedness.  My mind was a mass of grooves and ruts, all along the same stretch of highway.  There was no turning.  No open sky overhead.  No signs in a language other than my own.  Insularity, “the ignorance of or lack of interest in cultures, ideas, or peoples outside one's own experience.”  My father’s head was bowed that day. 

           

“We regret never exposing you to a world outside of this one.”

I do not blame you father.  I must look back and say you did the very best you could with the knowledge given.  Someday, I will believe the same about myself.  But now that insularity has been/is being blessedly peeled from my skin, what do I do?  I saw Benin’s poverty, Thailand’s smoke rise as reverent prayers, Bosnia’s political rancor, and God—their joy and tolerance in the midst of it!  I learned je suis américain and ja sam iz amerike translate to I am favored, selfish, rich and sick with apathy and I did not know it.  I hated saying those sentences.  I hated that I was an American.  Mine, a country of opportunity and wealth.  But me, a person poor, poor, poor in spirit (and not the kind of poor jesus extols).

           

Now, what do I do ?

I’m back in this country of mine, past that initial, terrible malaise of cultural re-entry, but surrounded by same.  Same colored skin.  Same clothes.  Same religious affiliation.  Same income.  Same experiences.  Same language.  That last one is most of all shocking.  How I miss the tingle in my skin when I recognized a single foreign sentence spoken by my taxi driver !  The cases and letters and spitfire syllables of the Bosnian language.  I’m slipping back into insularity and I hate it.  I’m blending in and they’re blending in and we’re like one giant batch of singular, tasteless dough.

I don’t know what this means for my life.  My life can be more than American now, I know that.  I can bend and break and shock my cultural sensibilities and be all the better for it.  I can be more than about me.  Now, today, I am recovering from my ten year spiritual disease of thinking the drink and my fourteen year spiritual disease of obsession.  I am, finally, finally, becoming free of myself.  I am becoming.  I am not regressing.  I am not stagnating.  I am becoming.  And fortifying, too.  It was when I saw that ad for teaching English in China. 

I could do that.  I could escape the insularity I am slipping back into.  I could escape, yes.  I just want to make sure I’m still not trying to escape from me.  So I will pray into the void, I’ll pray only this : help me, wherever i end up living, to live inside of this body.  help me to know you are always part of me and so, if outwardly i am mobile, inwardly i am still, stationary, anchored.