Bowing To Elephants: Evolution
BOWING TO ELEPHANTS is a travel memoir with a twist. An unloved rich girl from San Francisco becomes a travel junkie to escape a dysfunctional family and a narcissistic, alcoholic mother. Thanks to a journey of healing and self-discovery, the author navigates depression, loneliness, and loss while learning how to break down the false barriers that separate people.
Music, literature, art, and food influence our hero as she finds her way to far-flung parts of the world – the perfumed chaos of India, the nostalgic damp streets of Paris, the grey watery world of Venice in winter, the reverent silent mountains of Bhutan, the golden temples of Burma, the vast breathtaking African bush rich with elephants and lions and wildebeest, and the grim “killing fields” of Cambodia… By the end, Dimond accepts the death of the mother she never really had, and finds forgiveness, peace and her authentic self in the refuges of travel and Buddhist practice.
This book was born over 60 years ago when my stepfather Raymond gave me a dark blue leather journal trimmed in gold with my name on it during our first month in Florence, the first of three years in Italy.
I was an only child and lonely, living with a narcissistic alcoholic mother, and this journal became my best friend. I sat for hours recording what I saw, what I felt, what I dreamed about. Just as my stepfather filled his journal with fine ink drawings, I filled mine with my stories of the moment, using a pretty Italian fountain pen. While the adults around me dissembled and drank and smoked, I went back again and again to my refuge of the journal, trying to find comfort and answers to a whole lot of mysteries.
At some point in early childhood my maternal grandmother said to me when she saw me writing: “I think you may write the great American story, Mag!” I remember feeling shy and awkward then, but her words had planted a seed…. I had been surrounded by books all my life – and I read voraciously as a young girl – and thought writers to be remarkable and brave people. I might have dreamed of joining the company of Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, or Gustave Flaubert…
Memory tells me I was writing most of the years of my life, and when I taught writing to college students in the 90’s and early 2000’s, I kept wondering when I might take the leap to craft a book of my own. During that period I was on a mission: opening doors and windows for my students, telling them they all had important stories to tell and they shouldn’t be afraid of writing their truth. I continued to put off the doing of it myself. Why? Fear? Laziness? Just plain life with all its distractions and suffering?
As I look back, I see my old loneliness and that absence of being witnessed as a child fed my journal writing, and the curiosity and hunger for learning that played out in this journal over time took me out into the world to travel, to find answers to questions and then of course find so many more questions; this amazing odyssey which started in the 70’s and continues today was the fuel for this memoir.
When I was in my late 60’s, keenly aware of life’s inherent uncertainties, I made a promise to myself: complete a story of my adventures by the time I became 70. I did it with the help of Write to the Finish, an extraordinary online writer’s course with friends and colleagues in Taos, New Mexico; that community of writers became the essential scaffolding and ongoing therapy I needed to get the job done!
Interesting takeaway: choosing to be a world traveler enabled me to become the writer I had always dreamed of being.
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About Mag Dimond:
Mag has been a world traveler since her mother took her to live in Italy from ages eleven to fourteen. She traveled extensively in Europe and Central America, and ventured to such exotic lands as India, Cambodia, Bhutan, Japan, Kenya, China, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cuba. After a career teaching writing to college students in San Francisco and Taos, New Mexico, she now volunteers as a writing tutor at 826 Valencia, an esteemed literacy program launched by David Eggers.
She is a practicing Buddhist and dedicated member of Spirit Rock Meditation Center north of San Francisco. Excerpts from “Bowing to Elephants” have been honored in America Literacy Review, Travelers Tales Solas Awards, the Tulip Tree “Stories That Must Be Told” awards, and the 2017 William Faulkner Wisdom Awards. Additionally, Dimond has published essays at Elephant Journal, an online magazine with a readership of almost two million.
For more information about Mag Dimond and “Bowing to Elephants” – and to read a number of essays by the author – visit her website: www.magdimond.com.
Twitter: @DimondMag
Instagram: magpiebeads
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/mag-dimond-2377137
Facebook: www.facebook.com/travelswithmag/
In Bowing to Elephants, a woman seeking love and authenticity comes to understand herself as a citizen of the world through decades of wandering the globe. During her travels she sees herself more clearly as she gazes into the feathery eyes of a 14,000-pound African elephant and looks for answers to old questions in Vietnam and the tragically ravaged landscape of Cambodia.
Bowing to Elephants is a travel memoir with a twist―the story of an unloved rich girl from San Francisco who becomes a travel junkie, searching for herself in the world to avoid the tragic fate of her narcissistic, alcoholic mother. Haunted by images of childhood loneliness and the need to learn about her world, Dimond journeys to far-flung places―into the perfumed chaos of India, the nostalgic, damp streets of Paris, the gray, watery world of Venice in the winter, the reverent and silent mountains of Bhutan, and the gold temples of Burma. In the end, she accepts the death of the mother she never really had―and finds peace and her authentic self in the refuge of Buddhist practice.
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