Picture this: climbing Kilimanjaro and a Mayan pyramid, scuba diving in a school of sharks in Tahiti, riding on top of a vintage train in the English countryside. Along with pursuing these adventuresome experiences, Michael Crichton was a medical doctor, a bestselling author, a film and TV director/producer, and inveterate adventurer of the outer and inner realms whose fame and fortune continues to outlive him.
Crichton’s bestsellers have dominated popular culture for decades. He created hybrids of science fiction, techno-thriller, crime, epic disaster and medical drama. Several of his titles became movies and TV shows – The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, Rising Sun, Disclosure, ER, Twister, Westworld, and the gift that keeps on giving to his estate, Jurassic Park.
But of all of Crichton’s books, my favorite is Travels. It chronicles the forays taken in his career, intimate relationships, intellectual and physical pursuits, and to the far reaches of his curiosity.
Perhaps it was because he was a scientist, the tone savors of the healthy sceptic. But his questioning never veered toward cynicism. Although he was sometimes decidedly stubborn and at other times aggravatingly slow on the emotional uptake, he followed his natural inquisitiveness and gave his discoveries a fair appraisal.
When his interests veered toward mysticism, he expanded his world view to accept that although there was much about life he – we – would never understand, that did not diminish its validity.
Reading Travels again has inspired me to reflect on a few of my own singular voyages, material and metaphysical.
First I am compelled to start my query from the dominion of the directions, and some of the inner and outer qualities they represent. They are South, trust and innocence; West, the sacred dream, death and rebirth; North, wisdom and strength; East, illumination; above, the higher self; below, the shadow self; within, the fulcrum, the infinite, the Source. Throughout our lifetimes, we move continuously from one direction to another.
The travels that stand out in my memory are centered on the deaths that started in my teen years – those of my mother, grandmother, husband and father – their graves the paving stones on my path. Their effect on my life remains unyielding.
Being on the radio several times during childhood visits to Guyana (before television arrived in the late 80s), fired my interest in mass communications and the arts that is the substance of a lifetime of work.
I remembered watching myself and a three-year-old Cambodian/Ghanaian child floating in the Gulf of Thailand, miraculously transforming from hopeful yet wary strangers into willing and loving mother and daughter. How I was saved by love!
Then there were some experiences in otherworldly realms: joining thousands of drumming, chanting mourners at the open cremation of a revered monk (Bali trip #1); watching a woman healer’s body, visage and speech transfigured by the spirit of her older, long deceased teacher, while one of the healer’s followers switched into the teacher’s tiger familiar, growling, roaring, sniffing and stalking around the room (Bali trip #2); and the Babalawo and his godson in Havana who, during a reading , told me things about my late husband – a husband they could not know I had.
What a privilege it has been to straddle the line between the known and unknown.
These questions remain: am I who I am because of these experiences? Did I, on some level, choose or attract these experiences to express or reflect more of my Self by having them? How do I continue to grow and change? Have I touched the people in these experiences as profoundly as they have touched me?
Suggested Reading:
- Travels, by Michael Crichton. Nonfiction. Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Available in paperback and audiobook.
