The Wanderer Returns: Finding My Place in the World Again

Six months into recovery from chronic back pain, I journey to Edinburgh, like its native son Robert Louis Stevenson, "to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly."

At twenty I had the first taste of the life of the wanderer, studying for a semester in England, and roaming around Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Arriving in Edinburgh on my twenty-first birthday on a bank holiday in 1981 nary a drop of liquor could be found to celebrate my legal drinking age, although my American roommates tried their best to scout out a suitable elixir. I recall toasting with a warm beer from a tiny supermarket.

More than four decades later I returned last week to that handsome city, to its haunting castle on the rock, the lamp-lit streets of its medieval Old Town and the classical Georgian and Neoclassical New Town. As I soaked up the architecture and the comedy, theatre and music of the annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival, I was at home in the world once more, the Seeker and the Wanderer doing what she loves best: discovering what the world has on offer when we step foot out of the familiar landscapes of home.

View of Edinburgh Castle at night. Photo by Amy Brown

Home is a fluid concept for me. There were three childhood homes, all on Long Island, and my parents sold the last one while I was still in college. Post-college graduation in Boston, I lived in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, following the next best newspaper reporting job, before falling in love and moving to Sweden when I was 28. In 2007, our family of four lived in Malta for four years and then I moved back to the U.S. for the next 14 years, in Maryland and Florida at multiple addresses. I traded houses and apartments with barely a sentimental pause, including the one I left behind in February to move to Barcelona. That’s nearly 20 different residences across these past 65 years.

As a wanderer, I wonder what is it about me that I can so easily pick up stakes and with hardly a backwards glance, move on to the next place.

Home for me is not the four walls that house me, nor the possessions that surround me (aside from books, journals and family photographs) but rather the people around me. I am at home where I feel the love, in all its myriad forms:

The love of the people dearest to me living close by (like here in Barcelona, with one daughter a short stroll away and the other a quick flight to Paris).

The love of friends and family I feel from a distance, like a lucky charm guiding my safe passage.

The love I feel for strangers on unfamiliar streets.

The love of a place that has yet to reveal itself to me.

When home is rooted within myself, I am never lost.

In this way, one of Edinburgh’s literary sons, Robert Louis Stevenson, is a kindred soul. He wrote:

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.”

—Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey "Cheylard and Luc" (1879)

Getting my Fringe on

This trip to Scotland was not in the cards for me six months ago, when a sudden low back injury laid me low and took me on a long, slow path of recovery that challenged me physically and emotionally at an entirely new level. My whole life I had taken for granted my ability to pick up and go, to travel and move as I wished. One twist of my back in early February and that mirage vanished, at least for a time.

But now, through a variety of mind-body approaches, which I’ve written about here, I felt healed enough to make the journey. My main motivation was to meet in person Michelle, my Australian “sister” who is among my six soul sisters, a friendship forged in 2021 through an online sobriety program. Now our bond goes much deeper than that. We share everything about our lives daily via the video app Marco Polo. Five of the six of us have met many times; we’re family now. There was no way I would miss the chance to hug my Brisbane sister.

Meeting Michelle, my Brisbane sister, at long last

But first, I would get on my Fringe. Edinburgh was invaded by wanderers the week I was there, during its annual Fringe Festival, described as “the world’s largest platform for creative freedom.” For three weeks in August, Edinburgh hosts an explosion of creative energy from artists and performers around the world with a dazzling (and dizzying) array of 556 shows that any mere mortal can only hope to sample at best, from cabaret, comedy, and theatre to music, dance, and opera with parallel events like the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where we listened to the incisive commentary of Ta-Nehisi Coates on his latest book of essays, The Message.

I managed to do six Fringe shows, most of them enjoyed in the company of my dear friend Fran van Dijk, Edinburgh resident, my host, and a generous and knowledgeable local guide to the city that has been her adopted home for 17 years. The night I arrived we were treated to whimsy punctuated by pathos in the one-woman comedy show of Abby Wambaugh, an American living in Denmark, in “The First Three Minutes of 17 Shows”.

Given our careers in sustainability consulting and communications, and our shared concern about the worsening climate crisis, Fran and I also watched “The Beautiful Future is Coming,” examining climate change across 250 years of real and imagined history through the eyes of three couples. While Flora Wilson Brown's play is ambitious and riveting, it lands on a somber note—long on doom, short on hope, and we certainly need the latter to continue the fight.

My next three shows could not have been more different.

On Sunday afternoon I was mesmerized by the Australian band K-Mak at Summerhall’s Planetarium, with electrifying soundscapes that ushered us through the cosmos in a fusion of live cello, violin, synths, beats and vocals and hynoptic visuals from jellyfish to flowers to floating planets.

The next night, Fran and I were entertained by the captivating, funny reading of the play “Mercurial” at the new Fringe venue, Shedinburgh, which lived up to its premise: “A twisted dark comedy that pays homage to our most memorable one-night stands. It asks the question: How far will we go for love?”

Amy and Fran, getting our Fringe on

And on my last full day in the city, at the elegant hotel Le Monde, singer and writer Angela Jackson sang to us in her warm aching voice of the highs and lows of love, through the songs of Julie London, sharing the wisdom of philosophers and the wit of Nora Ephron in “When Harry Met Sally Met Julie Met Jazz Met Kierkegaard Met Jung Met The Stoics, et al.”

The unforgettable finale to my inaugural Fringe week was a performance by Pussy Riot at Summerhall. Three women from the feminist protest and performance art group based in Moscow performed their provocative punk rock music with a multimedia presentation flashing their courageous acts of defiance. The enthusiastic crowd were on their feet, raising their fists in solidarity. When group member Maria "Masha" Vladimirovna Alyokhina, warned, “Don’t let your country become like this. Riot!,” a chill went down my spine.

A city that could break your heart

When I wasn’t immersed in the Fringe, I was wandering, as is my wont, from Old Town to New Town, taking in the gorgeous views over the slate rooftops and church steeples to the Firth of Forth, an inlet of the North Sea. I walked along the river Leith, with its secluded countryside feel, and after making my way through the crowds on the Royal Mile, I stretched out on the grass of Princes Street Gardens to rest, watching as, true to form, three men in kilts strolled right by.

I also soaked in the art on offer, including the spectacular 50-year retrospective of the work of artist Andy Goldsworthy at the National Galleries of Scotland. Goldsworthy turns natural materials into works of reverence and meaning. Using the found materials of tree branches and ferns, sheep-created mud plots, barbed wire, graveyard pebbles and prickly thorns, and hare blood amid snow, Goldsworthy’s depiction of rural life is raw, unsentimental and strikingly beautiful.

This snake-like creation is made entirely of ferns. “Ferns” by Andy Goldsworthy at The Scottish National Gallery

Where ever I wandered, I was astounded by this city’s well-preserved beauty. The Zimbabwean-born author Alexander McCall Smith who has made his home in Edinburgh for most of his adult life, writes:

“This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again".

Travel within and without

We are all creatures of place. The places that have shaped us into who we are and who we will become. For some, that is one singular place, a childhood town or home that still feels like the center of one’s being, decades later. For others, it might be one or two places—the childhood home and then, as adults, the place in which we plant the roots of our own family. And then there are those for whom place is a constant search, never settling for long in any one place. That might appear an aimless way to live, unsatisfying to those who crave one place to call home, but it needn’t be.

At least, it hasn’t been that way for me. Somehow, despite being born to parents who had never strayed far from the states in which they were born—New York and Massachusetts—and didn’t travel abroad until I married and moved to Sweden, I had the adventurer’s seed within me. This curiosity about the world would not and could not be contained, fed by a lifetime as an avid reader and my identity as a writer. I had a deep need to expand my world beyond the places in which I was born and raised. Having explored over 40 countries and making my home in four of them, you’d think at 65, I’d be inclined to settle down, and certainly Barcelona is the base I intend to maintain for the next several years.

But this Wanderer can’t seem to settle down, not for long. I am certain that more adventures await, both the travel within my own inner landscapes—through my writing—and the travel out into the world. The difference now, in my 60s unlike my 20s, is that the search is less for self than for wonder, beauty, resonance and the reminder of my inviolable place within the human family.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

—From “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver

LET’S CHAT!

This is a safe place to share your thoughts and connect with like-minded people. Engaging with readers is my favorite part of publishing this newsletter. You may find these questions also work wonderfully as journal prompts.

Are you a wanderer and if so, what is the motivation behind that identity?

Is your sense of home fluid or are there one or two places that define who you are and your sense of belonging in the world?

Can you relate to the idea of inward and outward travel? Sometimes we needn’t go anywhere to make the most profound discoveries about ourselves.

Here’s a playlist for your next trip from my eldest daughter

Marielle Velander

who has caught her mother’s traveling fever. Enjoy!

If you enjoyed this essay, you may like to read this earlier reflection on the life of a vagabond:

If you like what you read, I’d be so grateful if you would ❤️ this post (and share or restack it).Thank you for being a subscriber to Living in 3D. Writing for you is such a joy. Paid subscribers—HUGE HUG for the extra support that helps sustain this publication. Our next community video call for paid subscribers is as always the first Tuesday of the month: Tuesday, Sept 2, 12 pm EST/6pm CET. Call details forthcoming but do put it on your calendar. Can’t wait to meet with you soon! We’ll explore the prompts above or anything else on our minds.

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