I've hit a wall. An interesting wall, but a wall none-the-less. For those in the wonder, I migrated to Mexico on the beginnings of a quest to voyage overland, feeling informed by the messages of internal council, but with the intent that a return home would be not only a sense of quitting, but quitting on a mission devised by the greater unconscious. By the definitions of society this would be considered a holy mission, which gives it a far greater connotation that I feel it should have, but it is that to me in many ways.
A few weeks ago my Peruvian drive was given a 180° reverse and I find myself driven North with the full belief that this will still send me South. During this time I've seen signs upon signs that I'm not to be spending my time documenting the details of this quest, but more to absorb it, take it in, and allow it to simply just be.
I've been told on several occasions that I should be writing and sharing more of my findings on this odyssey by both close friends and comrades in this journey as well as arm chair onlookers and home bound practitioners of what it is I hint at seeking. I'm even chastised every so often when I swing from the predicted moves that would seem to come from pursuing these aspirations. I recognize that these come from concern that I'm faltering in my set task, and that these people are trying to help in keeping me on this path. The fact of the matter lies in that these people are not on this path. I am on my own path, no one elses, and no else can be on mine, everyone has their own. An outside view is both valuable to the traveler and disorienting.
In turning north I decided to go dark. This is more than just what it seems. For a long time I've lived a life of dualities that make sense together whether social archetypes recognize this or not. In previous posts I've mentioned that I've been an escort, that I've held secret lives while living completely normal ones next to it as I go. Something I've realized recently is that this has been an unhealthy manifestation of something quite necessary for being alive. Everyone has a side life they tell no one, or a very limited few, about. Shame holds us all back whether its the act or the secret that makes it shameful.
I've begun to call this aspect my shadow life, borrowed from my interaction with the Mankind Project last year. I've come to realize this secret living is a necessity that I've been ashamed to hide from loved ones and therefore have felt the need to eventually confess it at times. In the past this shadow life has been a relatively unhealthy existence that I come and go on, mostly out of shame, not out of want or will to continue it. By societies definitions I am a complete degenerate. By societies general reception of me I am an exceptional man and one who holds some sort of healing presence for those around me. I never really understood this compliment until recently I've begun to see that this "healing presence" is just an acceptance and willingness to listen. The healing aspect, I think, is that people seem to feel free to unload on me, and share a bit more of their truer, and often darker, nature without feeling threatened by criticism or judgement. I've only recently started really understand, and therefore, accept this compliment.
This past week I've disappeared from communication to anyone. Few know where I am, and no one knows where I've been or where I'll be. This is my shadow life now. I need a cloak now in my actions because I need to live. Everyone needs this, I believe, but so few of us are ever given the chance to truly get it so we turn to deception more often than not. How can we escape with the abundance of responsibilities and obligations that we've honored ourselves to? My turn is to say that I simply told everyone that I would simply be unreachable and that I was taking a drastic turn. Their own curiosities are their own.
Over the course of my journeys I've been told several times by those I have a great connection and trust in as well, as well as those who simply hero-fy me from afar, that I have a duty to report my findings of what I'm pursuing, finding, and experiencing. In the first three days of being in Mexico my camera died. Todd replaced it a month later and a few weeks after that (two days into a ten day highly influential road trip) that camera was broken. A month after concluding my daily reports of my every activity my first camera was wrecked. On top of this, while in Mexico, whenever I sought to write, whether I'd been alone for hours or not, when I sat to write someone would show up and get me chatting. I never ended up writing. I'm not to document, in my belief, but I'm simply to absorb.
I wonder, if my findings are so valuable, why don't the people who admire and Santa Clausify me go on their own journeys. It seems, admiring a hero for something one would like to really do just procrastinates one from not pursuing it themselves, in their own way. I like sharing this journey, and just my life in general with people. I like to tell stories, sometimes too often, but I often times over burden myself with self made obligations to share every aspect of myself with people. As I said above, my journey is mine, and though it maybe to useful to hear about my successes and failures to help someone else with their own path they still have their own path to take. Using mine, or Todds, or anyone elses, including celebrities and historical or fictitious figures, to substitute for taking that quest will take you no where.
My quest seems to have me traveling everywhere right now, but this isn't the entirety of my path. A lot of it, and most of what I feel like will be in the near future, will be very stationary; and that will be one of the largest challenges for me. I've been really inspired by my mom lately as I watch her clearly taking her own steps from a very physically stationary position. Her journey is just as exotic, thrilling, frightening, and challenging as my mobile one now, and serves to be equally as inspiring to me as she tells me mine is to her. Many of my friends are undergoing this sort of adventure as well. Exploring the wilds of stability. I'm excited now to see how well I can navigate this challenge as it comes to me.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Perspective: Both Foreign and Domestic
As I have said, and re-realized, many times before the first step is to step out the door. The second step, I am now realizing, continues to be taking that first step again. I was at a function the other day I could have been at in Denver, New York, Portland, where ever, and I'm with the same people.
I see more hardened faces on travelers I see here, almost judgmental, like they have taken that first step to enter the world first hand and are quite proud of that move. How many will lean on that first move as a life accomplishment to be content with and how many of them will take that next first step? I wonder about this for myself now.
On New Years Eve I finally landed myself south via plane in Cancún, Mexico. It was under another series of circumstances that just went quite well together, the details of which I'll spare you these days. For a long while I'd been planning to head into Latin America, and up until about three days before I arrived I still wasn't sure when I would actually get there. Oddly, a blizzard in the Northeast of America would be the deciding factor to get me there the morning of New Years Eve.
When I did arrive I was thoroughly unprepared in my standard fashion. I had no pesos on hand, I had one spot booked for that night to sleep at, and I was in the process of finalizing my attendance at a school in San Cristóbal de Las Casas on the 10th of January. Other than that, I really had no idea what to do with myself. Stepping of the plane in a winter jacket and long heavy pants into 90° degree weather every reason as to why I was going to Central and South America seemed completely distant from me.
This has been a reality for me over the past three weeks now that I've been here. I came here based on a vision, granted multiple visions from more people than just myself, but this seems a bit ridiculous. It seems ridiculous when you wander, dazed, out into a resort designed airport with no local currency or understanding of the language, no friends, no one to welcome me, and a host of new and old friends behind me far in the north.
I would soon discover I wasn't to be lonely here. Within an hour or so of being in the hostel I booked that night, I found myself heading to Playa Del Carmen with an Australian student, Jess, and a Dutch meteorologist, Ghed, and we got along famously that night. A few days later, I was leaving Cancún with another new friend, Bo, a British student studying in Guadalajara.
Bo and I did a week long blitz tour of Caye Caulker, Belize, Flores, Guatemala, and finally had a few days together in San Cristóbal back in Mexico before she went home. This was huge for me to have a companion on first arrival, and essentially to escort me to my school, because as it was I was still in a bit of a daze about actually being here.
Later in the week, after classes started and I secured a room for the week in the school I would have several talks with Todd via Skype about this strange feeling. I actually don't know if I can call it strange. It feels strange, but it also feels right and expected, if that can make sense.
Touring with Bo, I slipped easily into "tourist mode". I loved meeting everyone in hostels, going out for drinks or random excursions with them. I don't think it was bad for me to allow myself my backpacking time, but it also left me feeling unsettled. This brief period has been followed by my weeks studying Spanish at school. Stability time in Mexico. Between the two of these periods my logistical mind seems bothered by the whole trip seeing the reality of it as a playful vacation away from life. Procrastination time to party just a little bit more before having to return home. Worse, the suggestion now internally that I could stay here, I don't have to return home.
In and out of the hostels, on and off chicken and first class buses, I'm meeting a lot of other travelers. Some on holiday from University, others just off and going like I am. Everyone of them have stories of extravagant places they've been to, they all collect stories as I do, all of them seem also to have some sort of philosophical bent that justifies all this traveling. Under it all, everyone seems to have a hole in one way or another that they are trying to figure out through traveling. At least that's how it seems from my observations.
I'm clearly no exception from this. I've talked quite a bit about the holes in myself that I'm trying to fill. So why am I here? Is this all a gigantic waste of time? Or is this a necessary step in my own particular path toward having what I want, which clearly seems to be in a home, family, and community? What does my gut say when I listen?
What resurfaces in my thoughts when I run this question around is my sister's advice from over two years ago now. It was when I was trying to figure out if I wanted to stay in Denver and really give it a go in community, with the coffee shop, with my friends there, or if I should take to the road again and follow this intuition. She said, neither is a right or wrong decision, you just need to commit to which ever one you decide on and follow it all the way through.
Half way into November, I was on a road trip with my friend Oscar on our way to Santa Fe, where he'd drop me off at Todds. In Flagstaff, AZ I got an email from yet another friend who had disappeared quite thoroughly into my past, Melanie. Apparently the night before she sent it she had a dream that changed completely right at the end. It became one of those lucid dreams in which I walked straight up to her and said, "Hi, do you remember me? I'm Chris Dyson, we used to hang out in New York years ago. You should contact me." Then she woke up.
I had just left San Francisco two days before she sent it and she was in Oakland. A month later I returned to San Francisco to spend Christmas with her for a week. She had just returned earlier in the year from living in Beijing for a year or so. She also had been almost as nomadic as I have been over the years, and now she was contemplating staying in Oakland. It was an interestingly timed reunion given how similar both our lives were, and the opposite ends of which we were taking them.
Here I was setting off on a long year or two abroad for the first time, yet very interested in just staying put, while she is coming back from such an excursion and seeing that daunting prospect of building a home in front of her. To both of us, we had a frightening step ahead of us, that at every point along the way we could back down and go back to our old ways.
I passed my sister's advice along to her. Just commit to what ever decision you make. So here I am now, in a kitchen in Mexico typing up a blog on my doubts of why I'm here, but yet, I honestly can't say they truly are doubts either. In my bones, I feel like I'm doing exactly the right thing for myself right now. I'm in school learning the language, I'm living in a home where everyone wants to speak Spanish all the time to practice and get better. In my bones, this feels like my preparatory phase, and that this down time to explore San Cristobal is exactly right. In my brain, however, is where I begin to push again, saying I need to start, I need to get out there, hit the road, get immersed in the countryside like I did in America.
I don't feel tuned in right now, but I don't think I need to feel that way either at the moment. This is a time for logical consumption. You can't intuitively ingest a language, I need this time to study and prepare. I do feel like next month is when relaxation time will be over, but I don't know what that means. My worry, as I told Todd, is in how easy it is to just slip into the party here and live that way. It would be completely unrewarding, but it would be fun.
Here in San Cris, after only two weeks, I find myself walking down the streets and running into different groups of friends. This hasn't happened for me since the early days of New York City living. The city itself is completely my speed. Its small, but incredibly diverse in the locals who live here and the visitors that pass through frequently. The music scene and culture is as intense as NYC, but the population is only 86,000. To top it all off, to live here is dirt cheap.
In the end, however, I know I need to keep moving at some point, and I can feel that time getting closer. To go back to my original point, this is what I see in the faces of other foreigners I see down here. This hardened look I was talking about, its that face of pride in that you had the courage to do something most other don't. Its judgmental without consciously being so, because no one knows what actions take courage in someone elses life or not.
On that first step out, when you take that deep breath and just do it, you feel a pride in having done so, and should. This first step, though, is continuously made because we always need to move forward to feel alive. In elementary school, when you first dare yourself to go out on stage in a ridiculous cow costume for the first time, when its over you are proud of the fact you did it. To go out again in another school play validates that pride as being for a real accomplishment. Once that becomes routine, though, you need another first step into something new, or something expansive.
For me, leaving on The Walk was a big first step. I consider it one of my first public steps into doing something I didn't think would be well received but felt I needed to do anyway. Since then I've grown accustomed to traveling around the US cheaply and adventurously. It became not necessarily easy, but habitual. I had my challenging days, and I had my days where everything went the way I expected. The next first step was to go somewhere completely foreign, and more than that, truly put some serious faith into this intuition concept.
From what I observed over the past year plus hitching in the US I've noticed that these intuitive pulls seem to come in waves of two or three months. I have a strong draw which leads to an intense month or two. Following that it seems to disappear completely for a period I think of as the application time. I learn something new about faith, patience, greed, which ever, through that intense period, then over the next month or two I have no guidance whatsoever. I've always interpreted that the time to practice what I've been taught without any nudgings or signs. Sort of like teaching a child about math and business, then leaving them on their own to run a lemonade stand for a bit.
After these test periods I've noticed new subtle pulls tend to come up again. This is where I think I am now. I can feel it lurking somewhere, I'm not being challenged or tested at the moment, but I'm being given little signs on what preparation needs to be done for the next lesson. Something like that, anyway.
Succinctly, I would say the feeling I have right now is one of limbo. I'm enjoying myself, I'm learning and meeting new friends, I'm coming to understand a little of how moving around and living will be here as opposed to the US, but I'm looking anxiously at next month when I think the intensity will ramp up again.
Back in '09 I remember having a distinct feeling in the fall that 2010 would be even more intense than 2009 had been. I thought, how can that be, this year was pretty intense with all the old friends I reconnected with. Sure enough, 2010 was several times more intense between things within myself, my relationship with my Dad, and my relationship with Allie. Around September again, when I was preparing to leave Port Townsend and the reality of leaving my sister and Allie was mounting I started getting that same feeling that 2011 was again going to dwarf 2010.
I still feel that way, and I think that's the nervousness I'm feeling now. Its, in some ways, another lesson for me in patience. I'm in no rush, there is no schedule, I just need to allow myself the pace that I feel is right, rather than want to go back to rushing through all my experiences.
I visited a Zapatista village in the mountains yesterday and learned their iconic animal is the snail. It is such a beautiful symbol for such a revolutionary movement. They chose it because a snail is small, weak, and slow, but most importantly, despite its slow crawl, it continues to move forward regardless. This is something I need to take to heart for myself. I tend to need to move swiftly or I run the danger of stalling out. This needs to change as it is an indicator of something very wrong in me.
Courage comes in many forms, as is always said. In World War I, there was the courage it took to go over the top of the trenches and run into fields of barbed wire, machine guns, and strafing planes, but the push to go over the top was one you could do in a hearty breath. The prolonged courage came in returning and facing home, which far fewer have the stomach for.
Something I recognize here is that my initial sense that getting here would be that initial push, and being here would just fall into a flow is too easy a hope to hope for. I need to learn from my past travels, and others examples, that my courage that I'll be needing to call on is to fall this thing, whatever it is, all the way through until I feel completed with it. One of the hardest things about that is that I'm the only one who is able to see what that is, and if it happened tomorrow I would have to face the criticisms of everyone else who is expecting a grand adventure out of me.
When leaving Port Townsend my sister gave me one of the best going away presents I could ask for. It was nothing. She and I made breakfast that morning and ate it on the beach in front of the sunrise. During breakfast she told me she'd been trying to find the perfect going away present for me and nothing was showing up. Finally it came down to the last few days and it dawned on her that that was exactly what she should give me.
Knowing how much weight and expectation I was putting on this trip, and knowing all the reasons for that expectation, she reminded me that absolutely nothing could happen. She said I should go down there, do everything I feel I should, enjoy myself, and not look for the next sign around the corner, but be there and that that may be the whole point. It was a reminder that despite observing and trying to follow and understand this inner and Universal guidance that life just simply needs to be lived regardless.
The point of the guidance is to live it well. To shift everything around and dedicate and absurd amount of energy to it, trying to explain to everyone else what it is I think I've found is a bit extraneous. If the purpose to live is to live then no guidance should be needed. I think the only reason its helpful now is to get away from the craziness we've ingrained in ourselves as necessary. Who knows?
I see more hardened faces on travelers I see here, almost judgmental, like they have taken that first step to enter the world first hand and are quite proud of that move. How many will lean on that first move as a life accomplishment to be content with and how many of them will take that next first step? I wonder about this for myself now.
On New Years Eve I finally landed myself south via plane in Cancún, Mexico. It was under another series of circumstances that just went quite well together, the details of which I'll spare you these days. For a long while I'd been planning to head into Latin America, and up until about three days before I arrived I still wasn't sure when I would actually get there. Oddly, a blizzard in the Northeast of America would be the deciding factor to get me there the morning of New Years Eve.
When I did arrive I was thoroughly unprepared in my standard fashion. I had no pesos on hand, I had one spot booked for that night to sleep at, and I was in the process of finalizing my attendance at a school in San Cristóbal de Las Casas on the 10th of January. Other than that, I really had no idea what to do with myself. Stepping of the plane in a winter jacket and long heavy pants into 90° degree weather every reason as to why I was going to Central and South America seemed completely distant from me.
This has been a reality for me over the past three weeks now that I've been here. I came here based on a vision, granted multiple visions from more people than just myself, but this seems a bit ridiculous. It seems ridiculous when you wander, dazed, out into a resort designed airport with no local currency or understanding of the language, no friends, no one to welcome me, and a host of new and old friends behind me far in the north.
I would soon discover I wasn't to be lonely here. Within an hour or so of being in the hostel I booked that night, I found myself heading to Playa Del Carmen with an Australian student, Jess, and a Dutch meteorologist, Ghed, and we got along famously that night. A few days later, I was leaving Cancún with another new friend, Bo, a British student studying in Guadalajara.
Bo and I did a week long blitz tour of Caye Caulker, Belize, Flores, Guatemala, and finally had a few days together in San Cristóbal back in Mexico before she went home. This was huge for me to have a companion on first arrival, and essentially to escort me to my school, because as it was I was still in a bit of a daze about actually being here.
Later in the week, after classes started and I secured a room for the week in the school I would have several talks with Todd via Skype about this strange feeling. I actually don't know if I can call it strange. It feels strange, but it also feels right and expected, if that can make sense.
Touring with Bo, I slipped easily into "tourist mode". I loved meeting everyone in hostels, going out for drinks or random excursions with them. I don't think it was bad for me to allow myself my backpacking time, but it also left me feeling unsettled. This brief period has been followed by my weeks studying Spanish at school. Stability time in Mexico. Between the two of these periods my logistical mind seems bothered by the whole trip seeing the reality of it as a playful vacation away from life. Procrastination time to party just a little bit more before having to return home. Worse, the suggestion now internally that I could stay here, I don't have to return home.
In and out of the hostels, on and off chicken and first class buses, I'm meeting a lot of other travelers. Some on holiday from University, others just off and going like I am. Everyone of them have stories of extravagant places they've been to, they all collect stories as I do, all of them seem also to have some sort of philosophical bent that justifies all this traveling. Under it all, everyone seems to have a hole in one way or another that they are trying to figure out through traveling. At least that's how it seems from my observations.
I'm clearly no exception from this. I've talked quite a bit about the holes in myself that I'm trying to fill. So why am I here? Is this all a gigantic waste of time? Or is this a necessary step in my own particular path toward having what I want, which clearly seems to be in a home, family, and community? What does my gut say when I listen?
What resurfaces in my thoughts when I run this question around is my sister's advice from over two years ago now. It was when I was trying to figure out if I wanted to stay in Denver and really give it a go in community, with the coffee shop, with my friends there, or if I should take to the road again and follow this intuition. She said, neither is a right or wrong decision, you just need to commit to which ever one you decide on and follow it all the way through.
Half way into November, I was on a road trip with my friend Oscar on our way to Santa Fe, where he'd drop me off at Todds. In Flagstaff, AZ I got an email from yet another friend who had disappeared quite thoroughly into my past, Melanie. Apparently the night before she sent it she had a dream that changed completely right at the end. It became one of those lucid dreams in which I walked straight up to her and said, "Hi, do you remember me? I'm Chris Dyson, we used to hang out in New York years ago. You should contact me." Then she woke up.
I had just left San Francisco two days before she sent it and she was in Oakland. A month later I returned to San Francisco to spend Christmas with her for a week. She had just returned earlier in the year from living in Beijing for a year or so. She also had been almost as nomadic as I have been over the years, and now she was contemplating staying in Oakland. It was an interestingly timed reunion given how similar both our lives were, and the opposite ends of which we were taking them.
Here I was setting off on a long year or two abroad for the first time, yet very interested in just staying put, while she is coming back from such an excursion and seeing that daunting prospect of building a home in front of her. To both of us, we had a frightening step ahead of us, that at every point along the way we could back down and go back to our old ways.
I passed my sister's advice along to her. Just commit to what ever decision you make. So here I am now, in a kitchen in Mexico typing up a blog on my doubts of why I'm here, but yet, I honestly can't say they truly are doubts either. In my bones, I feel like I'm doing exactly the right thing for myself right now. I'm in school learning the language, I'm living in a home where everyone wants to speak Spanish all the time to practice and get better. In my bones, this feels like my preparatory phase, and that this down time to explore San Cristobal is exactly right. In my brain, however, is where I begin to push again, saying I need to start, I need to get out there, hit the road, get immersed in the countryside like I did in America.
I don't feel tuned in right now, but I don't think I need to feel that way either at the moment. This is a time for logical consumption. You can't intuitively ingest a language, I need this time to study and prepare. I do feel like next month is when relaxation time will be over, but I don't know what that means. My worry, as I told Todd, is in how easy it is to just slip into the party here and live that way. It would be completely unrewarding, but it would be fun.
Here in San Cris, after only two weeks, I find myself walking down the streets and running into different groups of friends. This hasn't happened for me since the early days of New York City living. The city itself is completely my speed. Its small, but incredibly diverse in the locals who live here and the visitors that pass through frequently. The music scene and culture is as intense as NYC, but the population is only 86,000. To top it all off, to live here is dirt cheap.
In the end, however, I know I need to keep moving at some point, and I can feel that time getting closer. To go back to my original point, this is what I see in the faces of other foreigners I see down here. This hardened look I was talking about, its that face of pride in that you had the courage to do something most other don't. Its judgmental without consciously being so, because no one knows what actions take courage in someone elses life or not.
On that first step out, when you take that deep breath and just do it, you feel a pride in having done so, and should. This first step, though, is continuously made because we always need to move forward to feel alive. In elementary school, when you first dare yourself to go out on stage in a ridiculous cow costume for the first time, when its over you are proud of the fact you did it. To go out again in another school play validates that pride as being for a real accomplishment. Once that becomes routine, though, you need another first step into something new, or something expansive.
For me, leaving on The Walk was a big first step. I consider it one of my first public steps into doing something I didn't think would be well received but felt I needed to do anyway. Since then I've grown accustomed to traveling around the US cheaply and adventurously. It became not necessarily easy, but habitual. I had my challenging days, and I had my days where everything went the way I expected. The next first step was to go somewhere completely foreign, and more than that, truly put some serious faith into this intuition concept.
From what I observed over the past year plus hitching in the US I've noticed that these intuitive pulls seem to come in waves of two or three months. I have a strong draw which leads to an intense month or two. Following that it seems to disappear completely for a period I think of as the application time. I learn something new about faith, patience, greed, which ever, through that intense period, then over the next month or two I have no guidance whatsoever. I've always interpreted that the time to practice what I've been taught without any nudgings or signs. Sort of like teaching a child about math and business, then leaving them on their own to run a lemonade stand for a bit.
After these test periods I've noticed new subtle pulls tend to come up again. This is where I think I am now. I can feel it lurking somewhere, I'm not being challenged or tested at the moment, but I'm being given little signs on what preparation needs to be done for the next lesson. Something like that, anyway.
Succinctly, I would say the feeling I have right now is one of limbo. I'm enjoying myself, I'm learning and meeting new friends, I'm coming to understand a little of how moving around and living will be here as opposed to the US, but I'm looking anxiously at next month when I think the intensity will ramp up again.
Back in '09 I remember having a distinct feeling in the fall that 2010 would be even more intense than 2009 had been. I thought, how can that be, this year was pretty intense with all the old friends I reconnected with. Sure enough, 2010 was several times more intense between things within myself, my relationship with my Dad, and my relationship with Allie. Around September again, when I was preparing to leave Port Townsend and the reality of leaving my sister and Allie was mounting I started getting that same feeling that 2011 was again going to dwarf 2010.
I still feel that way, and I think that's the nervousness I'm feeling now. Its, in some ways, another lesson for me in patience. I'm in no rush, there is no schedule, I just need to allow myself the pace that I feel is right, rather than want to go back to rushing through all my experiences.
I visited a Zapatista village in the mountains yesterday and learned their iconic animal is the snail. It is such a beautiful symbol for such a revolutionary movement. They chose it because a snail is small, weak, and slow, but most importantly, despite its slow crawl, it continues to move forward regardless. This is something I need to take to heart for myself. I tend to need to move swiftly or I run the danger of stalling out. This needs to change as it is an indicator of something very wrong in me.
Courage comes in many forms, as is always said. In World War I, there was the courage it took to go over the top of the trenches and run into fields of barbed wire, machine guns, and strafing planes, but the push to go over the top was one you could do in a hearty breath. The prolonged courage came in returning and facing home, which far fewer have the stomach for.
Something I recognize here is that my initial sense that getting here would be that initial push, and being here would just fall into a flow is too easy a hope to hope for. I need to learn from my past travels, and others examples, that my courage that I'll be needing to call on is to fall this thing, whatever it is, all the way through until I feel completed with it. One of the hardest things about that is that I'm the only one who is able to see what that is, and if it happened tomorrow I would have to face the criticisms of everyone else who is expecting a grand adventure out of me.
When leaving Port Townsend my sister gave me one of the best going away presents I could ask for. It was nothing. She and I made breakfast that morning and ate it on the beach in front of the sunrise. During breakfast she told me she'd been trying to find the perfect going away present for me and nothing was showing up. Finally it came down to the last few days and it dawned on her that that was exactly what she should give me.
Knowing how much weight and expectation I was putting on this trip, and knowing all the reasons for that expectation, she reminded me that absolutely nothing could happen. She said I should go down there, do everything I feel I should, enjoy myself, and not look for the next sign around the corner, but be there and that that may be the whole point. It was a reminder that despite observing and trying to follow and understand this inner and Universal guidance that life just simply needs to be lived regardless.
The point of the guidance is to live it well. To shift everything around and dedicate and absurd amount of energy to it, trying to explain to everyone else what it is I think I've found is a bit extraneous. If the purpose to live is to live then no guidance should be needed. I think the only reason its helpful now is to get away from the craziness we've ingrained in ourselves as necessary. Who knows?
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