Passages

Travel challenges the flexibility of the psyche.  There’s gear to pack, loose ends to tie up, the leaving of the familiar, multiple lines at terminals, the checking and rechecking of documents.   At each transition there’s always a sense the way could become blocked, that the doors will not open.

Beyond the nuisance of organization and procedure, the whole journey is under laid by the reality that moving vast distances, even in modern jets, is taxing to the whole person.  Regardless, walking or riding, traversing space changes us.

Charles Olson, in his seminal writing Call Me Ishmael, proclaimed:

“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America from Folsom Cave to now.  I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.”

Like Ishmael, we set out through the world to make a claim.  It’s not a land grab of property, but a mapping of the curvature we inhabit and the stories that arise from each sector.  Like Ishmael, we make passages as an initiation into the Self.