travel is breaking

In my quest for new about page copy, I intend only navel-gazy blathering from hereon. The studious reader may omit.

Each time I leave for fieldwork & return these days, I am increasingly fractured. In a delirium of jetlag in the bath, the mind wanders back through the cavities of the world.

Travel is a breaking of the self from our established form, people, and spaces, that lets in the new, the wholly other. New cultures, new languages, a word:

جمل / gemel (in Egyptian Arabic), the Camel

From which they also take the word جميل / gemeel, beautiful.

Both meaning “that which has all the attributes of perfection.”

And so, to the Egyptian woman that I loved, on a mountain in the Sinai, I said,

“Enta gemel.”
“You are a camel.”

Making space for the Other requires abandoning the known and pushing beyond fear, out of yourself–to something like love, but for everything that exists. Like an “ultimate concern.”

Any product I’ve built that’s not out of “ultimate concern” has been a waste–and grafted into a product that is.

How to design a virtual travel parallel experience to prompt the same breaking and connection? Out of the known? And to ultimate concern?