my 33rd birthday, another sacred number.
The idea was this: I would spin a globe seven times starting on the exact hour of my 33rd birthday, in the waiting room of the maternity ward of the hospital where I was born. My mother would toss me the globe each time before I spun it. I would then explore these seven places–first through research, then through travel.
Knowing that the globe I used would have to be significant, I decided to write Peter Whitfield whose book, The Image of the World: 20 Centuries of World Maps was in my bookcase. He recommended that I contact James Bissell-Thomas of Greaves & Thomas who generously donated a replica copy of the Hans Holbein's 1533 Terrestrial Globe for the project. The 1533 Terrestrial Globe was based on a globe made to celebrate Magellan’s circumnaviation of the world in 1522. Greaves & Thomas created their globe from Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors, which is full of intrigue and mysterious symbolism and currently on display at The National Gallery of London.
With all of the pieces of the plan in place, the adventure called Spin The Globe began on December 4th, 1999 in
Rochester, New York in the maternity ward of Strong Memorial Hospital. The first spin began as soon as the second hand hit 2:54am. I rejected a destination only when my finger landed far from any land mass. Within five minutes, fate had chosen my seven destinations.
But there was a problem—even after marking the seven points on my globe, I still didn’t know where they were. Maps had changed significantly since the 16th century! I needed some help, and called Gavin Maurer who worked in the map division of National Geographic. We had met the year before at the Frankfurt Book Festival where I went to find a publisher for If Only It Were Love. Gavin recommended that I work with R.J. Kern, a young National Geographic cartographer, who was up for the challenge. I sent R.J. the globe and he found the seven corresponding points on a 20th century map.
Spin The Globe was meant to address the following: what drives explorers; what it means to leap into the unknown; why some people prefer to be armchair travelers instead of having their own adventures; the nature of fate vs. free will; the internal versus the external journey; what happens when you relinquish control to chance and set out on an adventure with no clear idea of what it is about.
