Nomadism

There is a profound difference between being a nomad and being whatever it is that I am. Nomads, be they traditional - Bedouins, shepherds, Mongols - or contemporary - fruit pickers, snowbirds - measure wealth in what is mobile and how they must move to maintain or increase their wealth. A land in itself is not what they love, but what that land can produce, and most importantly, when. A snowbird does not stay in Arizona when she's got to turn on the air conditioning.

Knowledge of the seasons, the renewal rate of the fallow, and above all ensuring the passage are the values of nomadism. A nomad must move or die, to find wherever the grass or the dollars are. "Land, lots of land and the sky up above. Don't fence me in..." An attack on the journey for any wanderer is an attack on the homeland.The true country is the road.

Abraham left the city of Ur to become a nomad. A winter in Seattle and I can understand his reasons, even without the booming command of a Creator or any attendant promises of fathering nations. I have the good fortune, though, of being nearly fifty years the junior. Old Abe, I believe, had to wait till he was 75 to get the divine green light. All those decades wasted toiling in decadence before he could have his bed of earth and blanket of sky.

But he swapped one routine life for another. The completion of a nomadic cycle (I am aware of no single English word for this act) is a true revolution, so that the nomad ends exactly where he has begun. The snowbird returns to Washington; the mobile bee-keeper to the almond orchards of California, or buckwheat in North Dakota, or wherever the blossoms happen to be. A nomadic life is not a threat to settled society, but a complement to it. In some ways, a reiteration.

The term is sometimes used to mean anyone who travels, but nomads always return to their start to find their beginning at their end. Even a modern-day pilgrimage, to a capital or grave of some influential, is a spiritual nomadic act. It is leaving and returning, and finding ways to leave and return again in small acts of daily devotion - listening to a record, writing a letter, prayer. This is nostalgia, letting one's mind wander around the internal monuments to memories of a worn-out life.

I am not immune to nostalgia. But I am not the prophet either. I am Abraham's son, the one God didn't favor. The one who had to wander the deserts, untethered. The vagabond. The rambler. Call me Ishmael.

I'm no nomad. I'm a dandelion seed blowing around till I find some crack in the sidewalk.