The Road back to Myself
August 6th, Arenal Volcano, Costa Rica, My Journal
I learned about my aloneness from Rilke. Or, in other words, his prose unveiled my aloneness. The one that was waiting like a steady friend.
I don’t yet know where I go when I’m alone. I’ve lived the entirety of my days this ways, and I’m still listening.
It would feel easier if my aloneness led me to God. Or into the sturdy confines of the forest’s dense canopy. But it does not — at least not yet. Their embrace is not absent in my aloneness — nor is it present.
So then, my aloneness, he must be leading me back to the place from which he comes, no? One clear, simply-put, direction. A one way street with no turns-outs nor signposts. It must be — The Road back to Myself.
I’ll head that direction. Not from some Great Act of Courage. Nor from some knowing of the journey’s promise. I’ll travel down the one-way path because I’m already on it, and it goes that direction.
My pain in this Life comes not from the Road itself. Nor from the direction it heads. My pain speaks to me, rather, when I pause on this road — when I take in everything that lives beyond it.
I’m not sure who put these structures there or why, but they encompass my attention. I used to be able to exit the Road with ease— to go play in these displays of allure and attraction. It’s not so easy anymore— for one reason or another. So, I pause along the Road to take them in from afar.
So that pain I speak of, yes yes. Let me return. The pain is in the parts of me that do not want to keep walking. The characters who (and bless their presence in me) find promise in what lies beyond the Road. The road feels bleak to them when so much apparent color lives beyond it.
I have been traveling this Road for a while it seems. I only say that because my feet feel on familiar ground. Because I seem to always keep moving in that one direction. Because I’ve come to recognize the pull of That Which Lives At The End. And that all feels like some wisdom, which could only mean this Road and I know each other. This is not our first dance — and probably not our last.
That is what makes the pain of these pauses nearly unbearable in moments. I know, and still, I stray. A look beyond the Road, into the World Out There, and I forget where or why I’m walking. I lose touch with the whole of me that can find no distinction between the walker, the walked, and the Promise that whispers from the end of the trail.
I leave my rootedness on the Road in a yearning to be Something I Am Not. Or maybe: Something I Am No Longer.
And sometimes, if the longing is strong enough, I can will just enough of me to the Road’s edges. And when I reach towards — reach into — all that outside of me which encapsulated my attention, I find it gone. Like a mirage. It’s appearance just that — an appearance.
So, I find myself back on the Road. Or, I find the Part of Me that Yearns to have rejoined the Part of Me that Knows. And as it naturally goes when I am All Together, I begin moving again. Moving in the only direction this Road will take me.
After some time, my inevitable and necessary attempted escape fades from my memory. I am walking — at just the pace these feet know to move. Changed a bit — broken open — by the pain that was and the pain that will be. And headed somewhere, in spite of that pain. Because of that Pain. Headed somewhere. Some Where that I know to be mine.
