Mag Dimond - Bowing to Elephants: Tales of a Travel Junkie

Praise for Bowing to Elephants

This beautifully written memoir is a chronicle of inner and outer adventures, grounded in deliciously detailed descriptions of fine food and fine art, of city streets and wild landscapes, of architecture and literature, and exalted by the authors quest to respond to the cries of the world with compassionate action.

Mirabai Starr, author of Caravan of No Despair
and God of Love

I love this book! Each page is witness to the authors deft movements among the worlds of travel, childhood, and her heart. It takes a true master to weave a tapestry like this. And to do it in a way that does much more than simply tell a tale. Bowing To Elephants is a true gift because it transforms and elevates the experience of the reader.

Ben Gioia, international speaker, best-selling author,
and founder of InfluenceWithAHeart.com

Eloquent and honest Each place is depicted in great visual detail, and all five senses are played upon, make the related experiences tangible. The text also illustrates a deeper sense of a place, recalling the emotions of particular moments and evoking how the visited locations are special. Such details make Dimonds travel writing deeper than most

Katie Asher, Foreword Reviews

in the vein of Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilberts story of finding herself amid a year of exploring other countries, Bowing to Elephants (subtitled Tales of a Travel Junkie) is Mag Dimonds account of never sitting still

Anthony Aycock, IndieReader Reviews

Copyright 2019 by Mag Dimond

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published September 2019
Printed in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-596-4
E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-597-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019937405

For information, address:
She Writes Press
1569 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707

Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to
protect the privacy of certain individuals.

To Lavinia Dimond, my grandmother, my hero, who shaped my path.

To Madeleine Violett, my reckless mother, who offered beauty and broke my heart.

In these memoirs or recollections there are gaps here and there, and sometimes they are also forgetful, because life is like that. Many of the things I remember have blurred as I recalled them, they have crumbled to dust, like irreparably shattered glass.

Pablo Neruda, Memoirs

In probing my childhood (which is the next best thing to probing ones eternity), I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory

T he journey of exploring ones past is circuitous, and often painful and complicated. One has to peel away layer after layer of fragile and ephemeral memory to find the story. I discovered in my search that I needed to move backward and forward in time in order to find the through line of my narrative.

I began this book as a series of essays about my travels to far-flung places, and what I discovered as I wrote the pieces was that certain characters from my past life showed up and asked to be heard; they reminded me of cultural and intellectual gifts, some loving kindness, and frequent interludes of profound neglect and loneliness threaded through my childhood. It appeared that this memoir was not just about being a world traveler, but it was also about the early internal yearnings that propelled me to specific places. In the end, it was the story of discovering my authentic self and learning how to love by exploring foreign lands.

It all begins as I ask my mother an urgent question that demands witnessing and truth, and the honest answer Im seeking does not come. My family was falling apart, and the woman whose love I desperately sought couldnt admit it or comfort me. From this time forward, my young life would become a journey to understand the truth of things. The chapters in this memoir illustrate how most of my adult adventures have been, in a way, responses to earlier questions lurking in my heart and mind from the time I was a girl (Why do people separate themselves by class? How is it that art and music nourish the human spirit? What are we to make of death? How do we find love?). In each chapter Ive woven together my present-day travel stories with those emotional scenarios from my childhood and adolescence that had pushed me to become a traveler.

I wish you a thought-provoking adventure as you traverse the mosaic of my present and past lives. You wont get lost, I promise, and you may at times find that the winding trajectory offers unexpected and moving sensory experiences that invite you in to smile and reflect, and to be reminded of the many rich stories your own heart is holding.

I had been waiting so long to ask her my question. Waiting as she moved from her bed to the dresser to put away her underthings, waiting as she stopped to light a cigarette, waiting as she stared at her huge pink-and-red painting on the bedroom wall. I sat cross-legged on her bed in the late afternoon, staring at the floor and trying my best to be patient. I was pretty good at that for an eight-year-old. But I was tired, a little scared, and confused.

There had been a much longer waiting before. Several years at least of watching my mother and father slowly fall away from each other and from me, sitting over creamed spinach at the dinner table, cocktails in the living room, or driving silently in the car. I saw it all: the meanness and the fear. You see, from the beginning I was a witness.

A couple of nights before this, I had lain in my bed in the dark and heard her scream at him, and then there was silence. Some nights before that, I had heard a telephone being hurled at the wall as she shrieked, You never listen to meI dont. (And then I couldnt hear the rest.) Its all impossible! I felt invisible in my dark room with the nightlight burned out, and pretty soon a cold wiggly fear came. I tried to hear what was happening in the living roomI needed to know what it was, or at least I thought I did, but what I really wanted was to burrow deeper under my blankets to sleep and forget.

I fixed my eyes on her now as she continued to busy herself with her laundry, and then I finally spit it out. Mom, I have something to ask you.