Isle of Pines- New Caledonia-Escape TO Reality
Île des Pins
A foreign land where the old distinction between escape and reality collapses—and where answering the call becomes a permanent way of moving through the world.
Île des Pins, New Caledonia · Papillon
“I always talk in bumper stickers—instant gratification takes too long.”
The island is the setting. The argument is larger: travel is not a retreat from life when it becomes the place where life is most fully examined.
The shared hallucination of reality.
Before the island comes the cultural script that teaches us to distrust fantasy and call resignation maturity.
Loading the cultural dice in favor of “reality” over fantasy, we get the sense of adventure beaten out of us when we ask ourselves the most irritating of the question words: “Why?”
Why do I have to live in the New York suburbs, where the weather sucks and the people are rude, and there is nothing to do? Then we just tune in, turn on the TV, and drop out—watching one of the thousand channels in a shared hallucination called the superstition of materialism—and fall asleep.
Original field image
Preserved from the source post.
Wake up and follow your bliss.
The journey begins at the moment the ordinary world stops feeling inevitable.
Then you get “The Call,” and if you wake up and answer it, you begin the Hero’s Journey that Joseph Campbell talks about in The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers—that PBS video series that is a must for all seekers.
You follow your bliss. In most cases, your bliss follows you.
You follow your bliss. In most cases, your bliss follows you. The Call
I just did it anyway.
The call becomes real only when identity, status, and permission stop controlling the departure.
I started to travel as a pastime, on a shoestring budget, labeled as a drifter and a bum, held in contempt by the uninformed and overeducated who find themselves sinking into the everydayness of their lives.
And I didn’t care. I just did it anyway.
The Calvinists say work is prayer. So is permanent traveling.
Tender Boating
The physical crossing follows the internal decision.
When all you care about is here.
Île des Pins is not background scenery. It is the place where the philosophy becomes visible.
“Addicted to traveling”—or, for that matter, “addicted to all non-working activities”—shouldn’t become a new reason for self-hatred or a diagnosis. It can be a pursuit like the arts and entertainment: something that permits self-exploration and satisfies psycho-social needs.
In general, if a pastime is not classy, those who love it are labeled with the Dr. Phil–Drew–Oprah psycho-babble rhetoric of “addict.” Opera and symphony aficionados, on the other hand, are “passionate” and “driven.”
I always talk in bumper stickers—instant gratification takes too long.
Île des Pins, New Caledonia · Papillon.
Addiction isn’t the problem—it’s the solution.
When all you care about is here, this is a good place to be.
The crossing
Original source image.
The labels, the colony, the old warning.
Every departure meets a counter-story: stay put, behave, accept the definition of reality you inherited.
On Devil’s Island
“How come you ended up in a place like this?” “Favoritism.”
Reprint · 2011 World Cruise: “Welcome to the penal colony at Devil’s Island, whose prisoners you are, and from which there is no escape.”
This was the greeting that awaited prisoners to the penal colonies.
Now Devil’s Island is the escape.
The diagnosis
Call an unconventional passion an addiction and the person must defend the life that makes them alive.
The contempt
Drifter. Bum. Unproductive. The labels arrive before the evidence.
The everydayness
The hardest enclosure is the one that has learned to call itself normal.
Other states. Other lives. Other souls.
The return is not a souvenir. It is a larger permission to become more than one version of yourself.
In the old days, habits of cultural consumption—like listening to jazz music all day and night—were considered passions. So was forever going to the movies or “the theatre,” allowing us to create new personalities and use them to fulfill unmet psychological needs.
Come to think of it, I think I have an internet addiction too. Awesome.
Seagull Management
The original source caption.
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” Anaïs Nin
Escape is not the opposite of reality.
Sometimes the foreign land is where the false parts of ordinary life fall away. You do not leave the world. You finally arrive in it awake.