taking up space

on packing

I have a goal for this sabbatical - that each member of my family will travel with one carry-on bag and one personal backpack for the 2.5 months (3 months for me) we’ll be out of the country. I’ve been obsessed with these daunting logistics. In part, there’s the adrenaline of a good challenge. We’ll be in three regions with different cultures, modesty standards, and temperatures. I’m packing three kids for covered legs and 3/4 sleeves in Palestine where the weather happens to stretch into the 90s. Then we’re off to Belfast where the highs are 60, the lows in the 50s, and there are 18 hours of daylight in July. Finally we’ll end up in France where the temperature swells again to the 90s, with a pit stop to see the Alps, where the Aiguelle di Midi will take us to the top of Mont Blanc and its perpetual snow.

There are practical reasons for this arrangement. Checked luggage slows down travel. It can get lost. We need to be able to fit luggage into car trunks and trains.

But there’s something else nagging at me. I am thinking of space, the kind I take up, the space required for the things that help me to feel whole and good. I take up a lot of space, like most people in the Northern hemisphere.

This extended time away, a gracious and unexpected gift by way of a Lilly grant, allows me to open up spaces I don’t usually have time to attend to. Being lost. Fumbling over words. Misunderstanding. Not knowing how I will get somewhere. Depending on hospitality and kindness. I don’t have time for any of that in the well-structured, time-keeping that makes up the days of shepherding children and a church through this world.

So I’m making space, seeing how lightly I can travel, learning what can be left behind and what cannot. I’ll find some of that out along the way.

And as I am solving the rubics cube of these logistics, I’m returning to this poem about packing by Sampurna Chattarji:

I put in a butterfly, first.
Shake its purple noondust air
into the furthest corner where
it will be safe.

Then, I put in the snake
that he bit a mouthful out of,
silenced with a stone.
What else was there room for,
after that?

What, dear reader, is there room for after that?

Melissa