On being a traveler, a seeker, a troubadour

Listen! I will be honest with you,
I do not offer the old smooth prizes,
but offer rough new prizes,
These are the days that must happen to you:
You shall not heap up what is call’d riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,
You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d,
you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart,
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you,
What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting,
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you.
-W.Whitman Song of the open Road v11

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I came across this passage this morning. And it has me pondering. Having been someone planted in one place for a long time, owner of homes, parent of children, traveler in business, but always returning to one place; Also world traveler but without focus more than learning, exposure, possibility.. And the question has been posing itself for sometime now: What now…

These are the days that must happen to you…

I think, but do not know, that what is next; that what must be done in order to serve the emerging consciousness and the life that is struggling to emerge from its toxic womb;
that it is going to require something of this nature and quality. Something about pressing into an entirely different paradigm.  A path that will run straight thru the center of my fears, my longings; fulfilled and otherwise, and then onto whatever it is that is sometimes called calling. I call it the center of my longing.

I think, but am not certain, that this poem is one of calling to live on the edge of ones calling, ones spirit. And if that is to be a traveler, a troubadour, then be that. And if to be part of this spot, this land, this community..then do that. Whether the travel is, inside or outside, or some mix of both, live on the edge of that calling.

Do not let questions that are too small, yet feel comfortable beguile from the knowing that is deeper in.  However comfortable.  However fearful.

The world, this emerging world, needs also travelers and troubadours to bring news from other worlds into other worlds. At the moment, that seems to be what I need to be preparing for. again.

Who gets credit? Who wants it? Now what?

“Both presidents deserve credit,” said Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary

Yes. One for having the vision to create the mayhem under the false principle of Us/Them; of ‘if you are not with us you are against us’ and later, having failed in the mission of capturing the Evil Man, abandoned the mission claiming it never was important after all.   Like so much pain that Bush inflicted on the nation and the world, eventually leaving office , like some dark Mr Magoo  oblivious to the destruction left in his wake.  It was left to  Obama and his administration to stem the conflagration and ultimately completed the failed and abandoned mission.

What happens now is what is important.  Is there any chance that closing this bloody era of trillions of dollars and millions of people left in death, grief, and pain as a consequence of the failed policies of the various fundamentalists from each side.  Fundamentalism’s that each are pretenders to the claim of having “The Truth” and thus the sanction of their ‘god’ to kill and maim all those who do not…

Is there a chance that we might be quiet long enough to listen enough to learn enough of what it is that has been driving this falsely named “War on Terror”?

I wish.  I hope so.  I dont think so.

We do seem to be too busy cheering this great moment of death.  When we should be circumspect.   Our delight should be not that Bin Laden was killed, but for the chance that maybe we can move past this train wreck of the fundamentally flawed “War on Terror” into something that may actually accomplish something besides spawning more endless war.

I do not mean to say the killing was wrong, or even not necessary.  Maybe it was.  It probably was.  That major open wound of the epochal period of the Bush Doctrine needed to be finally sutured.

But it is not all that needs to happen.  Nor all that needed to happen.

If it happens to be the closing of that horrid chapter started by the silliness of our own foolish fundamentalists, and the beginning of closing down our toxic wars…If it happens to be the time when wisdom began to have a voice in how we conduct ourselves in these treacherous days… (Not just the wars, but more our social/civilization issues)…then it is a beginning.

If it happens to perpetuate more death, a rise of a new Islamic leader on one side, the escalation of the drones of death on the other…If sometime later we look back on this day as nothing more than the escalation of the battle of fundamentalists we will also look on this day as just another in a series of missed opportunities.