A Note on Peaches, Tough-Guy T-Shirts, and Coming Home

I woke up this morning thinking about the essay I sent you yesterday. I didn’t say everything I wanted to say.

I left out “coming home.”

Over the years, I’ve noticed that the trip lasts much longer than the trip. It’s not over when the plane lands. A place is still with me as I unpack my bag and throw my t-shirts in the washer. It’s still with me when I take my dog Tommy

out for a walk and pick out salad fixings at the grocery store. As I pay for the groceries, some little memory slips back into my head.

Does this happen for you?

I’ll be standing in line at Lucky’s, holding a bag of peaches, and suddenly I’m back in a market in Palestine where buying vegetables took thirty minutes because everyone had to ask about each other’s mothers.

Or I’ll find myself sitting at the kitchen table long after I’ve finished eating, staring out the window, remembering families in Italy eating and talking and gesturing like time didn’t exist. Sometimes it’s a smell that brings a place alive. Sometimes a face at the market. Sometimes it’s something that feels much bigger and stranger—a feeling in my body, disorienting and dizzying, that reminds me how big and wild and mysterious this world really is.

You can’t hold onto these moments. Grasping for them makes them go away.

They arrive, move around, fade, and then arrive again hours or days later in a slightly different way.

Maybe that’s why I’ve never cared about counting countries or collecting passport stamps.

The places are already inside me.

These little moments—the word “flashback” doesn’t do them justice—change how you see things.

That’s really why I teach memoir and travel writing.

Of course, we’ll do the practical work—scenes, dialogue, structure, how to build a paragraph so it doesn’t fall flat. I genuinely love that stuff. But what I really want to do is sit with those strange, quiet details long enough to figure out why they won’t leave you alone. Why the eyes of an old woman selling herbs on a street corner in Russia still haunt me. Why a boy with his sleeves rolled up like a tough guy in a movie, who asked for ten shekels to take me to his roof, stays with me longer than the actual view of the Temple Mount.

Those are the stories I care about. They’re the ones I love reading, and the ones I still carry around.

If that way of moving through the world—and writing about it—speaks to you, I’d love for you to join me this fall for Travel Writing with Heart.

Sign Up for Travel Writing with Heart

“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”