Sometimes it happens like that. You just connect with a writer and how she sees the world. You find yourself not just reading a book, but feeling like you are friends on the journey together. That’s what happened to me reading Magic Carpet Seduction: Travel Tales off the Beaten Path by Lisa Egle.
In Magic Carpet Seduction, Lisa takes the reader on four very different trips to four very different parts of the world. While each trip can stand alone as a satisfying short story, there is a real sense of integration to the book. Each trip we take with Lisa, builds on the last in terms discovery and depth. I felt like I was a silent traveling companion with Lisa, not just a distant voyeur reading her travel memoir.
We met at work, teaching English as a second language to students in China. We really hit it off, sharing the challenges and joys of cross cultural relationships with students. So we decided to go for a girl’s get-a-way tour and make our own way across Central America and Mexico together. That was fun and empowering. We met some special and inspirational people. Lisa and I really got to know one another on that trip. Then we decided to visit Turkey where we really came to understand why we travel and how to guard and respect our own experience. By this time, we were such good travel companions that we decided to visit friends-of-friends in Jordan. We became part of their family and life-long friends. Last, we made a spiritual trek into the mountains of the Qadisha Valley. There we discovered the life of a holy hermit was more worldly than expected but no less spiritual.
It’s in that last chapter, “Paradox of the Hermit” that Lisa reveals what she has been showing us all along about being a fully integrated person. You can confront the physical challenges and logistical realities of travel while still being emotionally true to yourself and what you want. Most of all, you can do this as a spiritual being in tune with the energies and magic around you all the time.
Lisa, you had me at nǐ hǎo.
Read ~ Write ~ Wander
~Angie
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(available now for e-readers. Paperback coming soon! book cover art courtesy of Amazon)