Journey’s end?

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

-T.S. Eliot

I am a wanderer. This is not something new. I can’t honesty say that I ‘memba my first great exploration as I left the birth canal … but I suspect I was pretty excited about it. My earliest memory (technically my second earliest memory) is actually of a man in a big, bulky white suit jumping down a ladder creating a puff of dust … and to this day many will say it never happened. Whether it DID or not, does not matter. Nor does it matter if I actually remember seeing that, or it is just something I manufactured for myself, for that image has in many ways shaped who I am today. The irony of my attempted wanderings is they have taken me on great adventures, only to find me right back where I started from, wondering what actually happened, and more importantly … what’s next.

That is where I am now.

The best way to explore life is to ... well ... explore life.
The best way to explore life is to … well … explore life.

I started this last adventure, not truly realizing until this very moment that I was not truly STARTING anything but just continuing, only to find myself right back in my old cave. But somehow it is more profound this time. Or maybe the contrast is sharper. The last few years of my life have been extremely epiphonious (Real word? Maybe not, but it applies.) Especially the months around my “hike”. I am back here, trying to absorb all that I have learned about myself; about humanity in general; about what is important and what is just part of the great drama known as human life. It has left me with more questions than answers … the biggest being, “What do I do now?” There is so much more of the world to explore, both physically AND metaphysically, yet we live in a culture where such exploration is reserved for the extremely wealthy or the outcasts. Otherwise one is not behaving as one should … defined by those who would control the masses and supported by said controlled masses. So now I am in limbo, spending my days in vast amounts of thumb twiddling in between going walkies with Brown Dog.

I have to admit, this is not all that productive on any front.

I do not wish to stop exploring the world … which is to say exploring LIFE. But I can’t find it in myself to squeeze back into a box that I never respected in the first place … and respect even less now as our culture slips into what to me is somnambulance. So I wait here, hoping for a path to follow, knowing all to well that waiting rarely gets one anywhere. I need to create it myself.

So me, tell me … what’s next?