Women of Discovery
Its been hard not to have some wanderlust in these days of quarantine. Although to be truthful, I am the pickest of white sheet, clean toilet travelers. I still dream of far off places, tropical trees and warm water. It was a LONG cold winter followed by an even colder and lonelier spring.
Last fall I ran across this book, Women of Discovery: A Celebration of Intrepid Women Who Explored The World: by Milbry Polk & Mary Tigreen. I looked through it a few times but than of course had to return ot to the Library before I ever really got to go through it. But its been in my brain perculating. In fact it encouraged me to think about one of my first introductions to females as explorers: Laura Ingalls Wilder. How she unwittingly became an explorer through her families journey out West. Her stories of hardship, adventure and undisturbed nature traveled with me my whole life. She was my companion growing up on the same Midwest plains as she did, but than she followed me all the way to the remote mountains of Nigeria where her stories of homelife and disease took on whole new realizations as I experienced it.
Woman have been explorers as long as men have, sometimes by choice, sometimes against their will, but showing the same grit and determination that we laud on our male idols.
So in these times of staying home, I am diving into this world of women. Reading their stories, exploring their worlds and letting them take me to the far off places I can not currently go to.
“Exploration is a process from within and without. ”