Why I Wander

Look my friend, as I celebrate this next year on this earth, I see it as an opportunity and responsibility to share a story with you.

I believe in the power of living your truth and not telling your truth. I believe that it is easier done than said. I believe that if one simply learns to seek what makes them uncomfortable, live in that discomfort, and move beyond it, we can begin to connect to ourselves. And it is through this process that we can begin to “find the cause of [our] own ignorance” ~ Bruce Lee. It is with this hope in mind, this spark of beginning to question rather than to answer, that I share this with you today.

There was a time once when I was a wanderer. Not because I was lost, but because I chose to wander. Why do I wander you may ask. Keep asking.

I lie huddled in my tent, gusts and howls surround me. Father Tree under which I found shelter moaned under the pressure of the wind. The air seemed to fill up the emptiness of the desert around me. When things are so empty, just one little thing can fill up a world. I sat alone, the night after full moon, atop this hill I call Tortoise. And on the back of Tortoise, with nobody else around, the sands of the desert twisting up around me, I felt no more than a mouse. In the midst of this new world to which I had wandered to, I was however happy to be but a mouse. Mouse had made the unknown his home and so he too had become unknown.

Mouse awoke on his last morning in the desert. The Spirits had howled and battered the world around his nest all through the night. Now those voices had faded and what remained was the Shining Sun in all its naked glory. Father Tree, that Tree which had given Mouse his shelter through his time on Tortoise, was no more. The Spirits had broken it, and it lay toppled by Mouse’s nest. Mouse scrambled out of his hole to find that what was his unknown home had become all the more unknown. Father Tree lay upon the sands of the desert, fallen and broken. But in its fall, it continued to preserve the life for which it stood. For it had not fallen on Mouse or his nest, but rather right by Mouse’s side as if to say, “Mouse, it is time to go”. And so, Mouse left.

Mouse returned to a mountain he calls home. Here lay a rock, one which sees so much but says so little. And this rock was Mouse’s best friend. So Mouse and the rock sat huddled together, and looked out into the Sea. Mouse had wandered so far, how could the rock ever understand? This is when Mouse began to remember the Tortoise — the hill upon which he had sat just a moon ago in the middle of the Spirits, in the middle of the desert, under Father Tree. And rock, in that moment, became Tortoise. The sea became the desert and the desert the sea. If Mouse pricked his ears, the Spirits came rushing back. And I knew, then — this is why I wander. There in the midst of the known, the comfortable, I found the unknown, the uncomfortable. That’s when I truly knew, I was home.