Holy Rover
Saturday’s New York Times had a lovely essay about what seems like a trivial topic: the buying of souvenirs while traveling. In They’re Souvenirs, Not Stuff! Dominiqe Browning writes:
After struggling for years with my untoward attachments to my things, after resisting exotic bazaars and stands selling trinkets, I am declaring that I love my stuff…And why shouldn’t I? Shopping, after all, is an essential travel experience — a profoundly interesting way to understand a culture. (And that’s as far as I’m going with rationalizations.) I look for great souvenirs no matter where I am, including the most rural, out of the way, desolate, no-shopping zones in any guidebook.
Browning lists some of the items she has brought home from her travels, things she treasures for much more than their material value: tea towels from Canada, fragrant bars of lavender soap from France, a tin cup from a street booth in India. “Every single time I reach for that towel or that cup, I can hear and smell and see its natal surroundings,” she says.
While Browning begins with a spirited defense of shopping, she ends with an eloquent argument for how the material world can carry spiritual value:
I am convinced that we need a certain number of souvenirs in our lives, a healthy dose of remembering that we found respite, an escape from the daily grind, on far shores. Such stuff is good for the soul. It moves in and out of our lives on great, eternal tidal swells. If you get rid of your souvenirs, soon more will wash right back into your home, because stuff, like body weight, has a set point, ingeniously and particularly calibrated for each and every one of us, so that no matter what you get rid of, you will soon be packing in more, or you will be unhappy.
The Buddhists will tell us that attachment causes suffering. This particular phrase has so perniciously entered my consciousness that it alone causes suffering. I have thought long and hard about it. Even as I was fondling beautiful teacups in Kyoto — surely a place conducive to sensitizing one to the perils of attachment — feeling the heft of fired clay in my hand, running a finger along a vein of lustrous glaze, weighing up which vessel I would buy, and trying to calculate conversion rates, I thought about how another new attachment to a thing would bring on new suffering. And I threw caution to the cash machine, yet again.
Perhaps I just don’t get the Buddhist way of souvenirs. For I think of attachment as the stuff of life.
The essay made me look around my home for evidence of my own shopping adventures while traveling. Each room has at least one item purchased on a trip, I discovered. On my living room mantlepiece is a ceramic tile from Turkey bearing a whirling dervish, for example, while my front door has a “Shalom” plaque from Jerusalem and my bedroom a Buddha from a Japanese monastery. And then there’s the parade of Virgin Marys from places near and far–I’m particularly fond of those, I must admit. Whenever I see these items, they not only bring to mind my trips: they also exude something of the holiness I experienced in those places.
Since we’re talking about souvenirs today, let me direct you to my Online Museum of Memorable, Inspiring, or Just-Plain-Weird Religious Souvenirs. It’s still a work-in-progress, but as you can see I sometimes run across items that I don’t want to purchase, but I simply must record for posterity (I welcome submissions from readers, too).
Dear readers, do you have a favorite souvenir from your travels that brings you pleasure whenever you come across it in your house? And if you run across something really wonderfully weird, will you send me a picture of it?
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