This poem arrived last week as a poem of the day and it got me thinking as I pack for my change of life: Does it really matter what shirts I take and which ones I leave? Am I practicing discernment, or is it all merely a foolish exercise? Do we really leave anything behind?I'm counting on it. I'm praying change is truly possible. I'm trusting that I'm leaving here in Sacramento at least some of what no longer serves me. I'm leaping, like The Fool in the Tarot, because life, even at nearly 54, deserves that kind of hopefulness and faith and I do too.
Still, I wonder what baggage I'm taking with me on this particular journey. I'm no Victorian, so the starched shirtwaists and long skirts aren't in my valise. I'd like to be a friend of witch-doctors, living on native chop, but only time will tell if that's in my luggage. There is a wildness in me I am only beginning to guess at, and I suspect for all the things I leave behind, there are things within me I am only now discovering, that I will be bringing with me, things I don't remember packing but are part and parcel of my unwieldy baggage that can't be checked.
The Luggage
By Constance Urdang
Travel is a vanishing act
Only to those who are left behind.
What the traveler knows
Is that he accompanies himself,
Unwieldy baggage that can’t be checked,
Stolen, or lost, or mistaken.
So one took, past outposts of empire,
“Calmly as if in the British Museum,”
Not only her Victorian skirts,
Starched shirtwaists, and umbrella, but her faith
In the civilizing mission of women,
Her backaches and insomnia, her innocent valor;
Another, friend of witch-doctors,
Living on native chop,
Trading tobacco and hooks for fish and fetishes,
Heralded her astonishing arrival
Under shivering stars
By calling, “It’s only me!” A third,
Intent on savage customs, and to demonstrate
That a woman could travel as easily as a man,
Carried a handkerchief damp with wifely tears
And only once permitted a tribal chieftain
To stroke her long, golden hair.
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