The Universe Within
I have written on the theme of spiritual homelessness, and the transitory nature of any earthly estate. I used my own wanderings as a metaphor for this. Now I write about the other side of the coin.
That other side, of course, has to do with expectations. The late Keith Green wrote a song which said, "You can run to the end of the highway, and not find what you're looking for....You can search to the end of the highway and come back no better than before...." What he was saying was that physical journeys will not help with the spiritual journey. One of the founding fathers of the hippie movement, Allen Ginsberg, traveled through India in pursuit of a spiritual awakening. The story of his journey has been told in A Blue Hand, by Deborah Baker. He wandered from guru to lama to yogi, never satisfied, and in the end realized that what he sought could not be found in this or that place. You do not need to go halfway around the world to find yourself.
One of the first things I learned in my travels is the truth of the old adage, "Wherever you go, there you are." That is, no matter how far away you go, you find that the person you are inside has followed you. Your vices follow you. Your emotional and spiritual baggage follows you. Going to a new place will never make you a new person.
This is such a truism that I hesitated to write it. But, when I was younger and more foolish, I actually felt I was progressing in life when I went somewhere else, and that I was in a rut when I stayed "too long" in one place. Like the Prodigal Son, I was driven by a desire to move on physically, rather than spiritually; and like the Prodigal Son, I tended to spend nearly all I had in the process. I am not unique. Hundreds of years ago, Charles Wesley found that crossing the ocean to be a missionary in America did not put his soul at rest; only when he returned home to England did he find what he sought, not by being in a certain place, but by opening his heart in a certain way.
I still have a list of places I would like to visit and things I would like to see; but I do not delude myself that this in itself can satisfy. As environmental activist Mike Vandeman told me via private email, there is a Law of Diminishing Returns in travel: after one has traveled to many places, there comes a time when one more will add little or nothing to one's experience or education. Even if I had never left my birthplace, I could still have found all the blessing and joy my life has known. Though I still wish to travel (and thank the Lord for the travels I have made), that wish does not drive me as it once did, when I was spiritually immature, blown and tossed by the wind.
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