At Home in the World

by Tsh Oxenreider

  “You live in a world of noise,” Nora says. “Your work is noisy. Your home life with three kids is noisy. God speaks to us best in silence, in nooks and crannies when we’re willing to ignore the cacophony.”

  I take the brochure with me, walk out of the living-room-cum-lobby with a tired grin on my face, get in the passenger side of the car where Kyle and the kids wait for me, and thrust the paper in front of him. “Look what I get to do,” I say. I wipe the tear smudges from my face and he backs out of the gravel driveway.

  Kyle meets weekly with a counselor at the same center, so seven years removed from our Turkey respite, this place becomes, again, a home away from home, a resting place. Selah. I work with the kids on their schooling at a nearby café during his appointment, reading aloud and correcting handwriting and playing math card games while we sip pineapple juice and watch birds in the garden. Then Kyle and I tag each other, relay-style, and I meet with Nora while Kyle teaches fractions and tectonic plates and how to sketch birds.

  Our routine in Chiang Mai becomes a pleasant revolving cycle of parenting, working, teaching, and spiritual direction appointments. We predict proceeding months will once more resemble the chaos of backpacking through China, a nomadic liturgy of packing, unpacking, and checking school notebooks on airplane tray tables, so this otherwise humdrum routine is welcome. The kids enjoy this slower pace of life, and they feel more like temporary residents than nomads.

  This morning, I arrive at the monastery armed with supplies for a day of silence—water bottle, snacks, pencil, journal. There will be meals offered in the dining hall at set times, silent, so I need little else. I check in at the front desk and they nod me through the open-air entrance hall and out into the gardens. Paths twist this way and that, through bamboo enclaves, interspersed by an occasional bench or tree stump for sitting. In the center are six gazebos, each with a simple wood-hewn table and bench. Dormitories outline the monastery. In the far distance lies the labyrinth.

  It is astonishingly hard to sit in silence right now. Bamboo creaks; wind rushes through banana leaves; car horns honk on the highway beyond the garden. I wander the grounds, claim a gazebo, and arrange my provisions in organized piles around the table. For an hour, I stare at them. I have thoughts, but none worthy of journaling.

  I wonder what my brother is doing at work in Austin today.

  These pants need washing.

  We need to make travel plans for France.

  I could use a latte.

  I sit. I listen to traffic in the distance, nod at the other spiritual pilgrims meandering by on the paths, and fidget on the hard bench. The apple on the table, instead of leading me to prolific contemplation, stays an apple, stares back at me. I start to formulate a thought about the morning breeze and its symbolism, wonder if there is a poem there, but then an airplane thrusts overhead and, like a toddler, I shift my attention to the shiny object in the sky. The first hour ekes by.

  I go on another walk around the path, return to my base camp, open my journal, and turn to the next blank page. Nora has given me homework—write a lamentation during my monastic day, a poem of mourning in order to fully flesh out a grieving process that needs skin and bones. So far, though, my thoughts are little more than a swirling mental distraction of annoyances and a vague inkling that something muddy wants out.

  I know this: I am weary of playing games, of the games I am asked to play in order to succeed as a writer. These travels for a year are admittedly part escapism, a desperate plea for a sabbatical from expectations, pressure, noise. I want to get lost in myself, I want to stop thinking so much of myself, and I want to see in the flesh how many people there are in the world and how many don’t know me or, really, care about me. I want to remember my smallness. I want to be a prophet in the wilderness, shouting from jungles and deserts and foreign cities that we are all small, and to remember what a tiny place we each take up in the world. Small might be insignificant, but it does not mean unimportant.

  In Chiang Mai, I have already passed by millions of street vendors—all of whom I will never know—and I think of how many more there are in the world. Their daily lives matter, but how am I any different, any more important, than an old woman selling key rings and water bottles at the kung fu show? I long for God to show me where I belong, where my home is in the world, and my smallness in it.

  Before I write my lamentation, I read this from pastor and writer Eugene Peterson: “We are caught off-guard when divine revelation arrives in such ordinary garb and mistakenly think it’s our job to dress it up in the latest Paris silk gown of theology, or to outfit it in a sturdy three-piece suit of ethics before we can deal with it.”1

  A quiet awareness surfaces, and I sense that it is ordinary. It’s for me. I do not need to make it big, or dress it up by sharing it on social media, or deconstruct it with a three-part explanation. I need to capture it, tackle it to the ground as it flies in the wind through the banana trees. My pen grows pregnant with words. The lamentation flows.

  The first draft pulses with a respectable anger, and I set the pen down. I can barely decipher my own scribbles. But this feels good, freeing, a bit rebellious. Frustration quivers out my fingers and my body begins to strengthen as a poison leaves. Being on the other side of the world is becoming a bloodletting. I am fraught with self-imposed expectations about motherhood and writing that need to be released, and the crowded buses, the holding of my children’s hands through makeshift markets, the sunsets over suburban Thai rooftops are my medicinal leeches.

  I walk to the labyrinth, step into the entrance, and start to methodically pray. Turn right, one step in front of the other; then the narrow path snakes and leads back out, then back in closer to its center. There is a plan, a prescribed path to the middle, but how slowly or quickly I arrive is up to me. I can stop midstep if I want, and pause, admire, adjust. These steps, one in front of another, are an expedition of its own. They mimic this year. First, leave your home, your familiarity. Then board your transport. Traverse through China. Step into Hong Kong. Into Thailand, and next, onward to Singapore, Australia, New Zealand.

  When I arrive in the center at last, I tear out the lamentation in my notebook, crumple it into a ball, and set it on the waist-high rock serving as the labyrinth’s centerpost. I unearth a smaller rock on the ground and paperweight it on top of my offering to keep it from blowing into the banana trees. This rock is an Ebenezer of remembrance. I am free to scream to God my grievances—at least on paper—but when I am done, I must leave them and remember that my Maker knows me, will watch over my offering, and will return with me. I wind back out the labyrinth, faster this time.

  Several weeks after my day of solitude, a few days before we leave Chiang Mai and head to southern Thailand, we go out for pizza at a bricked, side-alley café downtown. It swarms with tourists and the air smells of dough, salty sweat, fire-hot wood. We place our order, and from a distance music begins while we wait for our food. It’s quieter at first, echoing off the brick walls and neighboring shops, but soon the volume increases until its distorted combination of modern pop rhythm with Eastern heterophonic melody throbs in the asphalt beneath us.

  We join the café’s other patrons who have left their seats to witness the commotion, and I hold Finn’s hand and squeeze our way through the crowd. A parade has begun, floats with sequined elephants and belly dancers and papier-mâché water lilies ensconced around thrones of young women dolled up like princesses. They wave at eager little girls on the street. Buddhist monks, in their fluorescent orange and burnt sienna robes, follow with flowers and candles to release onto the river at the turn of the parade’s bend.

  Loy Krathong is Thailand’s annual holiday of gratitude; it is their version of Thanksgiving. We eat our pizza quickly; then the five of us soldier through teeming crowds to find a spot where we can release a paper lantern into the black sky. Tonight, thousands of candlelit lanterns will be offered into the air, humanity’s effort to add flickering pinholes up in the universe
. These lanterns eventually run out of wick and wax, and every year the local municipality spends weeks cleaning up the aftermath, but for one evening, thousands of people gather in one tiny place on the planet to release a token of gratitude. It is a sight to behold.

  We find a young monk-in-training, no older than sixteen, offering a flicker of fire for the paper lanterns. Our family’s lantern, bought a few feet away at a temporary stand, is large enough for all three kids to hold and release together, and so the young monk brings his lighter to our candle in the center, positions the kids’ hands around the lantern’s bottom edge, and when the candle starts to flicker, he lets go. The lantern is made of cheap, white tissue paper, and it holds my gratitude for this year of exploration, along with a prayer for clarity, for release. There is nothing to alter its course once it is liberated, but it will be beautiful as it flies into the night sky. Our offering is one of thousands, tiny like all the others, collectively a flickering symphony against a black backdrop.

  The kids release the lantern and we watch until it disappears from view, intertwining with a thousand minuscule dancing lights.

  “Can we get ice cream?” Finn asks. The pizza feels like hours ago, another world away.

  We fly to southern Thailand for our own American Thanksgiving, to the island of Phuket. One of our travel strategies involves creating, as best we can, an endless summer—or at least, enough warm weather so that we can get by with one thin jacket. We will buy sweaters if needed, but we’d like to try to go without. On our country’s day for giving thanks in late November, it is 90°F, a warm, windy breeze rustling through the palm trees. We are on the southern coast of Thailand, on an island mere miles from Malaysia.

  We have never been to Phuket and have little more than an Internet’s inkling of what to expect. The plane lands, and we hail a taxi driver.

  She pulls into traffic and asks in English, “Which hotel?”

  I show her the map on my phone that pinpoints the whereabouts of our guesthouse, but she pushes it away with a “Pfft!” Impossible, because this is a real neighborhood and not a tourist conglomeration of hotels. She does not grasp the concept, understandably enough, of a real home turned into a bona fide guesthouse.

  “Which hotel?” she repeats, louder this time.

  “Not a hotel! House!” Kyle calls out from the backseat, where he is crammed with the three kids. He sounds angry, but he’s not. He’s employing this trick to bridge the dialect disconnect: speak louder; surely they’ll understand.

  The driver finds us incredulous. “Which! Hotel!” she yells.

  We do this for an hour, as she drives through island streets, heading to the destination on the map while shaking her head. I am hot and sticky, and I am not in the mood to negotiate the cross-cultural language barrier.

  Our destination isn’t a guesthouse, which no doubt adds to the cabbie’s confusion. Our instructions are, in complete seriousness, to take a taxi to a local art gallery, walk to the front desk, and ask for soup. We aren’t sure what this means beyond its literal interpretation. Is soup code for guesthouse keys? Will an art curator at the front desk nod knowingly, slide us a new map as though we’re in a spy movie? Will a bowl of soup unlock the code through its ingredients, or perhaps via a bar code on the bottom of the container? It feels very James Bond.

  We are taken down a nameless dirt road and finally, we stop in front of little more than a covered booth, something you might see at an American farmers’ market. Two women are painting on canvas. Kyle walks up and asks for soup as the kids and I watch from the car. One of the women nods and makes a phone call while I sit on the edge of my seat, feeling the plot thicken. A few minutes later, Kyle emerges with a fellow in his twenties, motorcycle helmet tucked underneath his arm. The local straddles the red motorcycle parked out front and heads into traffic, Kyle motioning our driver to follow him.

  “That guy’s name is Soup,” Kyle says as he gets back in the taxi. “He’ll lead us to our guesthouse.”

  Thanksgiving Day, we walk the sleepy streets of our beach village, again in search of good food. We have only a few days left in Thailand, which means our season of delectable cheap food is drawing to a close. We are also homesick, so it feels especially important that we feast like kings, to cobble together a Thanksgiving dinner from local cuisine while our extended family gathers together twelve thousand miles away. Soon we will enter Singapore, where nothing is cheap, and then Australia, where even less is cheap. We spend the afternoon on the beach, sun-kissed and sand-caked like it’s the Fourth of July, and now we are on the prowl for a turkey-and-stuffing equivalent out of yearning for the most quintessential of American holidays.

  It begins to rain and the sun has set, so we need to settle on a spot. We duck into the closest establishment with its lights on, a beacon in the dark pumping John Cougar Mellencamp from the house speakers.

  Kyle asks the owner if we can sit outside on the empty patio, at a table tucked underneath an umbrella big enough for the five of us to escape the rain. She nods and ushers us outside, lights a candle at our table. We take menus and cross our fingers, hoping for a decent-enough Thanksgiving banquet. Instead of more noodles and curry, we read the selections: steak, ribs, mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, and rolls. Chocolate cake. Creme brûlée. The kids squeal with glee.

  We chase meat with mojitos, which tastes nothing like home, but it doesn’t taste quite like Thailand, either. It is an ad hoc meal, food with no particular home, a conglomeration of Western barbecue and Eastern spices, seared and charred. It works well enough. It echoes how I feel right now, one foot in Asia and one out the door. We eat in the dark, in the rain, in flip-flops. Our waitress brings us cake with lit sparklers and sings to us in broken English “Happy Birthday” to pay homage to our national holiday. Tonight, we are satisfied to be together in the world, as a family, on a dot of an island in the Indian Ocean in Southeast Asia.

  “I wonder what our next house will be like?” Tate questions, sighing with a full stomach.

  “I get the top bunk if there’s a bunk bed!” shouts Reed.

  Back at the guesthouse, toothbrushes are packed in our bags, shirts are rolled up next to socks, and we are ready to move on. Thailand has brought me some peace.

  5

  SINGAPORE

  Asia wanes. We have been here three months and the air is constant: hot, sticky, garlicky. I rummage through my pack again and again for my tank tops and shorts, wonder why I’ve bothered packing jeans and a pullover. On our last day in Chiang Mai, we visit a local clinic for yellow fever shots so we can enter Africa in six weeks. I am ready for new sounds, new smells, but Thailand gives way to Singapore, a few more days in Asia.

  It is 90°F in Singapore, year-round. There are two seasons: dry and rainy.

  Part of Singapore’s lure is its airport. Changi Airport is regularly voted the best airport in the world by travelers, a destination on its own. There are free movie theaters, swimming pools, art stations, video game portals, nature paths in outdoor gardens, world-class playgrounds, a butterfly sanctuary, and sleeping rooms. A staff of thirteen gardeners tends to the five hundred species of plants, including seven hundred rare orchids. The airport’s website lists the best places to take a selfie during your layover. Because of the airport—and this is no overstatement—I want to go to Singapore.

  Truth be told, though, I am admittedly weary of Asia’s cacophony, of the crowds and lights clamoring for attention. There are a few blessed pockets of quiet I’ve found throughout the continent, but they’re hard to find, and they’re outnumbered by the resonant masses of people and cities. I miss the monastery.

  The five of us play in the airport for a few hours after we land. The kids zip down slides and Kyle and I sip coffee, share our eagerness with each other—in three days, we will set foot on a new continent.

  Asia lays the groundwork for our year of travel, and it has not been easy. We are Westerners, and certain social mores feel familiar to us: queuing in line, assuming the st
ore hours are the same as those printed on the door’s sign, leaving strangers alone in their parenting choices. It has been good for our sea legs to swim in these waters, but we are ready to float for a little while. I want to catch my breath. I want to be in the West.

  We leave the airport for our weekend home—a hostel—and catch another taxi. I haven’t stayed in a hostel in over a decade, the last of which I slept in a large group bedroom in Dublin, Ireland, where I was witness to unsavory acts best left unsaid. It would have never occurred to me to bring children to a hostel until a friend suggested I try one out if I couldn’t find a guesthouse. We would barely be in Singapore, and it felt lavish to spend money on an entire house when we were about to head to the most expensive country of our trip. There are family-friendly hostels, my friend said.

  Our bare-bones room is listed as “family-style,” which means there are enough beds for six people, most of whom would be strangers if we were traveling solo or as a couple. As a family of five, odds are slim one extra traveler would knock on our door, and we are willing to pay for the extra bed if that were to happen. We rent our blankets and pillows from the front desk, along with towels for our clan, grabbing only three because they’re five dollars apiece per night, and we take the elevator to our floor. Even the hostels are skinny high-rises in Asia.

  Kyle unlocks the door. The room is a brilliant white with naked concrete walls. Air ducts cut through the ceiling, but it is otherwise a cube of minimalism—white beds to match our white linens, white desk and chair, white window frame. There are two sets of bunk beds with curtains around each bed to create individual minirooms. One set is twin and the other is queen, leaving almost no walking space between our sleeping quarters and private bathroom. The room feels more like one giant bed with occasional juts of concrete sliced through to divide sleeping arrangements. The air duct sighs, then exhales cold air with a loud hum that morphs into a noise that matches the white walls. I can no longer hear Asia outside. I look out our window and see the throng of traffic below. These are the most comfortable beds we have had thus far, and I sleep hard and dreamless.