We’re Going Places
Nowhere does it say that we will know exactly how to get there. This place where we’re going. We just know we need to go somewhere. Isn’t that what we crave? Going. I know I do, yet even when I know that I need to go someplace, I don’t always know what it means. Go where? Here? There? And for what purpose?
I don’t think of traveling as a physical experience as much as I think about it metaphysically. Traveling, to me, is putting away old emblematic thoughts I might have for myself and shedding the past. I like moving forward. Who doesn’t? But more than just moving for the sake of moving, I find it imperative that we take that past self into the future by discarding or dismantling that which no longer fits.
Alchemists do this. They are forever transforming themselves. I’d like to think of myself as a storyteller, a traveler. Travelers tell stories of their past. We tell stories to teach. We ask questions and ask others to share their stories. We’re no different from anyone else, but we know we want to push and make changes in the psyche, in the environment, in the heart, and in the home.
Storytellers need stories as we need time and movement. We desire action. Sitting all day long drives me bat s$%t nuts, but I have chosen this profession for myself. And yet. Is it all that I am? No. And for that, I am grateful to the gods for the motion in my body. It is transformational. This is the motion of change. Of course corrections. Of alchemy.
Traveling is motion. It represents desire. We think we must leave one locale and go to another when what we desire most is an internal shift. We don’t recognize it as an internal need, but as an outwardly one because this is how we are programmed to change.
But the outward search leads to more searching while the inward search leads to a feeling of contentment.
I don’t deny my body the opportunity to travel, to change, but there is balance in this motion. When the body desires change, ask yourself, as an alchemist would, what am I really needing for myself? Am I running away from my past or am I stepping into my future? Running without addressing what we are running from leads to more running. Stepping into the future having taken the time to address what we are asking to leave behind only enhances the body, the mind, and the spirit, and leads to greater self-love.
Love isn’t the best word to use here, but it is the one we recognize. We love ourselves when we care for ourselves, so naturally, we need love, the vocabulary word, but could there be something else going on here? Could the word love and the need for self-love be something else less obvious? I’ll ask the questions. I don't know. I only know that when I travel I do so because of this love I have for myself to find a better way out of the darkness and into the lightness of being, but this is not because of love, per se, but because I recognize Truth.
We are love, and we desire love, but this internal search is the search for Truth. It is the search for completeness. And until we recognize this desire to find what it is we’re looking for we will go on searching for love. Love is not not the answer. It is part of Truth. Love is the bond we seek in others, in ourselves, but while acknowledging that this bond is an important one, certainly one we all recognize as critical to our well-being, can we not accommodate another vocabulary word?
Truth.
