I suppose it is in the nature of every traveller to explain herself, why she does what she does, from what impetus she packs her bags and moves on again and again. And so I am not unique in wanting also to speak of it. But as I do, I realize that it is more for the sake of my own understanding than yours that I write.

Most people in Indonesia and many in northern Thailand eat with their fingers. They take a bit of sticky rice with their fingers, roll it into balls, scoop up the curries or salads or whatever they are eating, tilt their heads and fit it all neatly inside of their open mouths. Juices sometimes drip down their hands, and they lick those up with quick tongues. In both Indonesia and Thailand, people sleep in the one main room of their wooden houses, on the floor atop thin straw mats which they roll up in the morning and put away. The houses are built on stilts for fear of tigers and floods. In Indonesia, women wear tight gauze-like blouses through which you can see, in the front, the tiny flowers that decorate the swollen cups of their bras and, in the back, the silver hooks and eyes. In both countries, people buy their food from markets where flies chase each other in the hot shadows and lick the bloody gristled bodies of slaughtered pigs, and eggs sit in the sun all day. In Indonesia, drivers ignore the painted lines between traffic lanes and fit in wherever they can. In Thailand, they ride four to a motorbike--child, father, child, mother, in respective order. Here also, boys of fifteen pledge their lives to monkhood, some of them spending the rest of their lives in orange robes, carrying silver alms bowls and eating only two meals a day.

People here have a different way to life. Before I came, it was separate from what I knew or what I could imagine. Being here, I get to see it in motion. I get to wade through it, feeling it brush between my legs and along my fingertips. I get to live for a while in a new world with new rules.

In all of this newness there is very little that I will take back with me save some pictures and souvenirs. There is most likely nothing that I'll be able to utilize in my world because it will make no sense there. But knowing that another way exists, knowing that another way is living and breathing, moving and working to sustain itself for many of the same reasons I do, this knowing is wonderful. Because in it belongs a kernel of truth that I've always known but rarely felt: that my world--its values, its customs, its traditions, its definitions of success and beauty and power, its rules, its inventions-- is not the only answer.

In this way, travelling is a kind of relief for the person who does not feel "at home" in her own world. For one who knocks up against the stone walls of her society constantly, it feels good to roll around among a different maze of walls for a while. But really in these new places, she feels very little of the restriction that she feels at home. She feels, rather, free and rolly, because as a traveller she does not belong to a place or a people. She is one who travels, one who comes and goes, one who leaves places to go places where she will leave soon. The walls of a place can't catch up with her. She is out of their reach always, free to be herself with no boundaries except those which she accepts.

She can't live like this always, she knows. But for a short while it is good, for it is only outside of those blinding stone walls of her world that she can see and determine more of what is true. Travelling opens her up to the beauty of different ways of life, and in these she see a bigger picture of the God who created them all.