The Cartography of Trinkets

The souvenirs we carry home when we travel, I believe, evolve as we do. In our youth, we bring back items or tokens that show proof of where we’ve been: a sweatshirt emblazoned with a city's name, the bag that screams PARIS, the hat with the logo others recognize as being from afar. Over time, those tokens shift. They become artifacts of remembrance, objects that, when looked upon, call us back to a specific moment: sipping an aperitif in a sunlit piazza, the warmth on our skin; the hum of unfamiliar voices weaving through the air touched with a strange accent.

Now, my keepsakes are simple—objects meant to be touched, held, and woven into daily life. A wooden spoon, purchased in a common grocery store, carries the essence of a Lapland evening, the sun refusing to set. As I dry the dishes, a kitchen towel, soft and sturdy, from Borough Kitchen in London, whispers of bustling markets and a quiet pint sipped while watching the crowds. A corkscrew, humble yet elegant, recalls a spontaneous stop at a vineyard outside San Francisco at the beginning of a road trip north, where laughter and wine both swirled in the glass on a sunny afternoon.

These unassuming objects may seem ordinary to others, but to me, they are treasures—subtle, profound, and luminous. Each one is a thread, intricately weaving me back to lands that have shaped me. They hold the quiet power of memory, a testament to the alchemy of movement: how the stretch of a distant horizon softens the edges of the self, making us open and eager to absorb what the world has to offer. They remind me of perspectives widened, faces encountered, and landscapes forever etched into my soul.

I recently received a gift of a kuru made from Pounamu. The kuru, its polished surface cool against my fingers, carries the wisdom of the fern’s spiral: it represents harmony and rebirth, but it is also a map—an unbroken journey outward and back, echoing the rhythm of a heartbeat, the pulse of discovery. The outward path of the curl takes one away from the center, it returns then to its starting point. It reminds me that travel’s greatest gift is not the places we touch but the truths we bring home—seeds of rebirth, planted to grow in the soil of our everyday lives.

For what is travel, if not the art of being undone? Each trinket is a whisper of lands that taught me to see things from a fresh viewpoint, each return a homecoming to a self forever altered. Those trinkets become my reference materials, my scholarly library of memories. To travel is to surrender to change—to gather the world in small, unassuming pieces, and find, in their quiet utility, a map of who we have become, because it is impossible to travel and remain unchanged.