Travel Inspired Musings by Karissa Sjostrom

Travel can be a disorienting experience whether the travel is done for pleasure or involuntarily. This reorientation can enhance the senses and the emotions increasing receptivity to new experiences. This receptivity can help to form novel, memories, or provide previous knowledge with new significance. This can account for many pleasant or strong memories associated with family vacations, road trips with friends, or even the first year away from home in college. Many people feel driven to explore and travel the world because of this possibility addicting sensation. This altered perception can account for a certain ‘magic’ one can feel in a place like Paris.

I often think about the way history leaves remnants which continue to interact with society and shape the future. I am especially intrigued with the idea of ‘sacredness’ as a social and historical construct. Ancient tombs of ‘god-kings’ are meticulously plundered thousands of years after the tombs construction to satisfy academic curiosity, so that humanity can learn secret lost histories. Even so, these items, though little more than common material objects, are treated with great care and ‘sacracy’. Almost as if some ancient ‘magic’ influences the motives of people present and future. In most cases this ‘power’ is not unconditional. Without knowing the history of a common looking object an ignorant person could easily discard it without losing a moment of sleep. While objects retain a very conditional magic, occasionally the magic of location can reverberate across time. Although the significant of that power may have different meanings in different times, a physical place can captivate generations.

This picture was the view from the base of the Basilica the day we visited. I tried to imagine what it would have looked like during the roman era, and even further back. I wondered if I would have been able to see as far or if my view would have been obscured by ancient forests.

This is the Basilica. Its towering grandeur is on the precipice of the hill. This photo shows a continuous stream of ‘pilgrims’ coming to explore the expression of sacredness in this place and worship in their own way.

Traveling provides me ample opportunity to bemuse about the nature of humanity, past, present and future. I was eager to climb the ‘mountain of martyrs’ again because of the timeless beauty of the place. I enjoy bathing in the characteristic ‘magic’ that imagine sustains places like this, the magic which may be an expression of collective belief and appreciation. A magic which can be felt across Paris, (and the world if you’re sensitive to it). As a unique and global community of advanced Hominids search for, express, and share a sense of meaning that perhaps has not yet been unambiguously described by any one person or group of persons. It’s a beautiful thing.