To prepare, to look the thing in the eye and make demands, to step through the fog into a clarity that is so bright you feel blind, to move a piece across the board and call it victory, flesh became reason. It is motion that saves all. The journey becomes the beautiful thing, something worth keeping, memory.
When you began the journey, it was just ideas and while they formed with a strong definition that made everything seem possible, they were for most parts children with a vivid imagination. Nothing was tested and trusted and everything was easy even the parts you made difficult because you made them difficult so you can overcome them with pomp and pageantry. But from ideas, it became words and heavier and then you began to feel the fear, to hear the voices in your head whisper the mantra: you will fail.
You will fail for some means the end of the quest, the resting of the untested blade by the sideboard while a glass of drink assuage the thirst caused by all the deep thinking. For some, it is a proof of something ancient and damning, a familial spell like Sophocles, like Macbeth, like all the heroes and villains whose fates have long since been decided by the fickleness of life and even though the tragedy of their lives were caused by their own actions, even if they never get to find that they never had any control until it was too late, it is the gods who are to blame. For some, some few, it is a dare, a question, which they must answer.
So it is quite possible to begin the journey with doubt, with questions, with a helpless feeling in the pit of your stomach. It is quite possible to second guess every footpath, every junction, every signpost to another town. This does not mean you will turn tail and run. This does not mean you will forget why you began the journey in the first place or lose sight of the beauty that has arisen daily to welcome you on your way down a hill or up. You must forge on in the fog, in the dark with only your mind as your compass and a prayer on your lips. It is how the harrowing task of finding self is mostly made.
One day, you will sit across the sea, in a different continent and stare across the years and the meandering path you have taken to arrive there and you will see clearly for the first time how divinely wrought all the insane decisions that brought you to where you are were made and how they fine tuned themselves to make the song that sings within you, that lights you up, puts the stiffness in your spine but before that you must enter the world through a open door. You must set out from home, from everything you have ever known and let the unknown take you, for good or for ill, let it take you again and again until you are changed.
If the journey does not change you, if it does not tilt your perspective on life, then you will never arrive at your destination. You will become the worst kind of nomad, the one who circles a spot like a confused animal. You will speak fifty different languages fluently but will not know the language for love in any language. You will know the culinary arts of a thousand cultures but none of your food will taste the sweetness of a heart filled with joy. For every journey however trying must end with a room illuminated by the knowledge of self. You must be able to say: I am.
For all who journey into the unknown at this very moment, who have left home and stead, have ventured into the yawning maw of this dangerous life, grand terrors await and a profound beauty that will shake you. You will not survive it the same. Keep a little light in your heart, you will need it. Either to brighten the path when the days grow dark and cruel or to illuminate another fellow sojourner on the way. For blessed are travellers in search of themselves, they shall meet the divine. Keep your light on always. Amin.
📸: wood block (Japanese Art)