As James Taylor says, “I don’t know when I’ll be back again.”

Some thoughts on wandering:

Packing is too easy now. I just zip up the backpack, put my computer away, and leave.

Sari and I were looking at ceramic pots in a shop in Austin and I was wondering if I would ever again be in a place to own ceramics. Jewelry boxes made out of cinnamon bark. Helicopters carved out of soda cans. And big green ceramic pots with matched lids. Moroccan leather wallets. Blue and white flowered tiles. I have to look at those things, take their beauty in, and just remember them. I don’t get to own them.

I don’t feel like I own anything any more. Even the possessions I thought I treasured don’t matter. I thought I had lost my watch in Los Angeles. This is a watch I bought with the first money I ever made from directing, in Germany, to remind myself that I could make a living at this job. It was expensive, a big black Fossil with an enormous leather strap.

Anyway, I didn’t care one way or the other about it being gone. Before I started all this traveling, before I had to leave behind all my books, and friends and family, I would have been really upset to lose it. But now, the fact that I am traveling around like this is proof of being a working theater artist – and with or without the watch, that can’t be lost.

I found it a few days later, at the bottom of my backpack, in San Antonio.

“Oh,” I said, “there’s my watch.”

I like feeling this way. I like knowing that I can’t really lose anything, or be lost. I like not having any keys on my keyring – just a red Cornell University bottle opener.

LaCona felt bad that I hadn’t unpacked my clothes into drawers the whole time I was there. But if you unpack, you have to pack. If you never unpack, you’re always ready to go.

As I was writing this, Kersti just called me, from her OSF educational tour with Todd – they’re wandering the San Juan islands of the coast of Victoria and Washington State, doing a two-person version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Another wanderer.