Kathmandu...

"... I'll soon be seeing you. And your strange bewildering time will keep me home."

So sings Cat Stevens from my new, old record player next to the fire place, now for the 12th time at least this morning. It's morning again, just before dawn. This time it's not for lack of sleep, but excess of coffee.

"Kathmandu, I'll soon be touching you. And your strange bewildering time will hold me down."

There's something in this tune that really catches on to what's been brewing inside me these days and now especially. It speaks of departure and travel, of indefinite journeys to unreachable destinations and of change. And that is all my heart yearns for: travel, departure. departure from here, from this town, from this section of my life and from this all-so-familiar culture. Departure to new horizons, to a new culture, a new chapter. Departure. I am ready for departure, I think.

And as the first birds raise their sweet trilling voices and mingle with Cat Steven's melancholic, but ever-so-inspiring voice, I wish to travel - not all the way to Kathmandu, but again to Syria.
Like the other morning, but different this time.
This time I'll not just travel through my imagination feeding on medieval Arabic texts, but for real. I'll pack my rucksack as ascetic as I can and get on the road, thumb out in the air...
That moment, where I leave my house in Bavaria with just a little backpack filled with a few things and a camera, with a year of uncertainty and adventure ahead of me.... that is what I've been dreaming off for the past few weeks.

It'll be the ultimate moment, the moment that every moment until then is worth. And every moment after that will be new land for me. Completely new. Maybe that's why I'm so impatient for it, because at the moment everything seems all too familiar and it all mirrors an image of ME back to me, that is not much like the ME anymore that NOW lives inside me. Well, of course it still is in many ways, but it was created a few years ago and the experiences that were made through it have changed what it was carrying, which is ... the essence of me, I guess - my soul.
So like a skin that a grasshopper sheds as it grows, I've come to the point where that skin I've been wearing is itching everywhere.
And that itching gets worse the more it gets confronted with what has shaped it into what it now is. So sometimes I almost withdraw so as not to notice the itching so much.

I'm waiting for the moment to shed. To shed the part of my life that is then going to lie behind me, that I am now still in.
Or can I shed now?
Do I just need to find the YKK zip somewhere to take this skin off -- like a boiler-suit?
Or is there a time-lock on it?
I guess I want to shed not only when I am ready, but also when circumstances are right. So that the new skin that will then be exposed to life gets the right influences, the right ideas and experiences to form into something that will hopefully carry me further than this skin has, and for longer.
The moment when I leave the house in Trostberg will be just right, I think. Everything after that, at least for a few months, will be subject to abrupt changes, to many uncertainties and to much adventure. To life at its most basic and challenging, to new people, voices, bodies and faces that will shape me anew.
"The only constant in life is change", the Dalai Lama once said. I want to submerge myself (can you say that?) in CHANGE. I've had a lot of apparent constants in my life lately, but I'm looking forward to seeing that part of them crumble, which lives on inside me even though I shed the skin they shaped.

"Kathmandu - I'll soon be touching you."