My ride departs. The day is hot. I’m tired. Stranded again I ponder my journey. I ponder journeying in general as metaphor for stories, be they of the universe, or the evolution of species on the branching tree of life. Journey is the plot of myths and of “Tao”, or way.
Journeying unfolds in successions of night and day, of seasons, and phases of the moon. It’s in movements of rocks, winds, clouds, tides, rivers and creatures. It courses our blood from placental times through the adventure of birth, over the hill of life to death.
Journeying erupts in exploration, migration, pilgrimage, nomadic wandering, walkabout, the history of art, sport and spiritual aspiration. Adventuring, daring the impossible made and makes us human still. It brought us to this from apedom. Adventuring is most us.
As never before the world swarms with tourists, wanderers, merchants, scholars travellers and seekers in a new Axial Era. At home or afar, moving or still our story unfolds. Life is movement. Movement is change. Change comes more easily in changing circumstances.
On the road, like walking a hall of mirrors, every move, every incident, every encounter, every mood reflects the Self. Illusions fade. Exposed and vulnerable we become streetwise, journey-wise, self-reliant, accepting and detached. Free, the spirit grows.
Treading lightly on it we do indeed “inherit the earth”. Let “foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but [Essential humanity] hath not where to lay its head.” Ever moving on our species’ nomadic ways are innate. Settlement is the aberration.
Eight months from home, eight weeks on the roof of the world, above 15,000’; with clothes filthy tattered and patched I reach Kashgar. Taking the Karakoram Highway back over the Himal by Kungerah Pass and K2, I enter the Hunza Valley of northern Pakistan.
Beside the road lies a yak, just killed by snow leopards, which in turn mountain tribes are hunting to extinction. In Gilgit, where polo began, I find my friends, then fly to Ireland for a conference on “Ecology, Native Wisdom and Spirituality of the Earth”.
John Wilson
April 1994
