Trust in What is Difficult

Burlington, Vermont, North Beach Campground

After months of preparation, closing a chapter and preparing another, life in America has been put in suspended animation. The forty-eight hour countdown begins tonight from the balmy August shores of a Lake Champlain campground and the tranquil North American, New England civility of Burlington, Vermont. “Glorious it is when wandering time is come,” says an Eskimo proverb.

The moon will be complete tomorrow, a marker of the twelve lunar cycles that will define this around the world voyage as a pilgrim, entrepreneur and lay journalist.  
I can feel the descent into the moment and the widening distance from the comfortable anxiety of living within the borders of a self-possessed benevolent empire, calendars and planners, getting ahead, working incessantly, obsessing over the trivial, aspiring toward consumption and the fulfillment of the unattainable.

The ancient Greeks taught that obstacles were the tests of the gods and the medieval Japanese believed that the perils of travel were fodder for poetry and song.

The bridge to what could just as well be another planet, India, is visible from my tent, to the airport, to a modern jetliner out of Chicago across Canada, Alaska, the northern glaciers, down through Russia and Kazakhstan into New Delhi, the other side of the world.

Time is beginning to be defined by the hear-and-now, by hours and days, by a deep situational awareness involving food and shelter and what’s next. Simple in theory, the objective is to live one day to the next with eyes wide open. Easier said than done. John Muir called busy Americans “time poor,” unable to bask in Yosemite’s greatness for more than a few hours.

Looking across the lake, the lazy clouds and distant New York Adirondacks Mountains illuminated by the waxing moon, a warm breeze gently waffling the trees above my tent, I can sense my perspective shifting from the linear to circular, from flat to round, from the role of American to global citizen. When I was in my twenties, in California, I lived in an RV, between a Bay Area driveway and weekend campsites and Pacific Coast shorelines, and came up with the motto: “Wherever you go, there you live.” It’s true now, except my home will be a backpack, my tent a train birth, a restaurant table, a bar counter, a jungle patch under a banyan tree. I am home in myself, an animal in motion, at once the center of all things, in a universe of infinite centers.

To ajar perspective, the best illustration is visceral and cosmic—of a pale blue rock orbiting an ember sun, in a large constellation, in the outer reaches of a solar system, among millions of other milky ways expanding outward, circles within cycles, an inflating balloon turning around an Omega axis mysterious and mystical. All these places are home when we are at home with ourself.

There is emptiness. I, like so many fellow Americans, have lost so much, at the hands of an economic meltdown defined by greed and arrogance, a system rigged to benefit the gilded, as has been the story of the ages. I let go of a new business before it had a chance to get off the ground; a spouse; a brother; friendships– all powerful reminders on the eve of departure of the inherent vicissitudes and uncertainties of life, and the hollow convictions and commitments I am tired of hearing in others.

Life is an impressionistic painting in motion, emotional, raw and unpredictable. Terrifying one moment, glorious the next, depending on what you see. As hard as we try to construct walls of security in our work and relationship and glorification of material possessions, as much as we judge others in self-righteous indignation, one way or another, during life or at its end, we realize that they are defensive facades of fear and paralysis, masks which obfuscate the fundamental rawness of our humanity and connection to all things. There is our nakedness and vulnerability, mortality and humility before the infinite, compassion and love for ourselves and the people and places we engage. That is all. Everything else is grist for the mill.

Rilke implored his young prodigy to trust in what is difficult, and this has been a helpful measure in turbulent waters. Between sitting with known fear and suffering, and a risky challenge of uncertain payoff, the later has always proved expansive—but never easy. To travel as would a pilgrim, where the voyage is the destination, where you seek experience over the false sentiment of possession, is an affront on the everyday illusion of immortality and the belief that the future holds our happiness.

The night is late. Time for sleep.