If you’ve started reading Collisions of Earth and Sky, which has now been out for two whole weeks (!), you know that the book starts in Malta. I don’t get too deeply into what living there from January-June in 2001 was like in those few pages of the preface, but I thought it might be fun to give you some snapshots into my time there. (Literal snapshots…the photos that follow were all taken with a point and shoot film camera.)
Here are a few excerpts from the preface, with some visual aids and a little back story.
A college junior, I’d left a series of confusing relationships behind in America, and I had no idea what I wanted to do after graduation. I was in a place of deep uncertainty. It felt like something was missing, but I wasn’t sure what that something was. Going to Malta seemed like part of the answer to the questions I didn’t yet know how to ask.
After growing up surrounded by a sea of grass on the South Dakota prairie, a sea of deep blue saltwater was thrilling. It captured my attention during that unmoored time. I discovered those deep blue waters had many moods, from calm and serene to churning and angry to singing songs of enchantment. My flatmates and I lived in Sliema, an urban, tourist-driven community right on the water’s edge. We could see more concrete than anything else when we threw open our window, but the sea was just down the street and around the corner.
The sheer volume of nearby water somehow kept me grounded—in a different way than the prairie of my youth but grounded nonetheless. The sea reminded me that life needs to be lived with intention to feel true and that feelings need to be felt no matter how much they hurt. It reminded me that I felt more alive when I paid attention to the wild undercurrents of the world.
I went across the ocean and back again, and though I didn’t recognize it while it was happening, that journey expanded my awareness of myself and the world. An elder, the sea, a blood orange, and a rock were all unlikely teachers along the way, but they were part of my becoming. They were partners in the dance of living that helped me find my way, through collisions of earth and sky.
Speaking of Comino, the smallest island….I visited twice during my time living in Malta. The first time I went, it was on a tourist schooner (that looked a great deal like a pirate ship) with a large group. (No one lives on Comino, there’s just the Comino Hotel, San Niklaw Bay (the pick-up and drop-off point for visitors from Malta proper and Gozo), and a lovely beach called the Blue Lagoon.) That first time, we spent the afternoon lounging on the white sand and craggy rocks of the Blue Lagoon, swimming in the pristine cerulean waters that are protected from the larger sea by a few rocky outcroppings. The second time, my friend Heather and I, along with two French-speaking Beligan guys we’d befriended at the local pub, caught a bus1 to one of the fishing ports and somehow got a fisherman to give us a ride to the tiny island. We slept on the sandy beach in our swimwear and shared a watermelon with a couple from Amsterdam who we literally stumbled upon in the dark while looking for firewood.2 The next day, we somehow got back to Malta proper. (If memory serves, we’d asked the fisherman if he’d bring us back the next day, and since it was on his route, he said yes.)
If you haven’t yet gotten a copy of Collisions, you can do so anywhere books are sold. Or at the link provided in this handy button.
I’ll leave you with some questions from the appendix.
When have you gone “there and back again” in your life?
What part of a trip away from home do you tend to enjoy the most? Why?
How do/could/ you integrate what you learn on your travels into everyday life?
What have you learned from past experiences traveling or living somewhere really different than you’re used to?
Every bus I rode in Malta had a little statue of the virgin Mary somewhere on it, and though I never saw a bus collide with another or go careening off the road, it often felt like that was a distinct possibility.
We didn’t share the watermelon right away. After we’d returned to our spot a little ways from them, we heard some voices, and looked up to see the man holding a huge knife walking toward us. After a moment of panic, we realized he was smiling in a friendly way, and the woman was holding a watermelon that they wanted to share.