The Traveler
About and abroad through villages ancient and enduring, deserts vast and stark, jungles teeming with life in their canopies as much as they are upon the ground, these are the places in which the Traveler is to be found. Sacred sites call out to them: Neolithic standing stone circles whose dolmens pattern the stars above, rock cairns set deep within the earth, womb-like, where rites of passage into adulthood – and being full-fledged members of the society – awaited the turning of age of the youths. And the people of these places, people whose lives are a continuum of the generations flowing as a river through time. To them there is no ‘history’, there is only the ever-present Now of life in rhythm and harmony with the stars, streets, stones and stories of their environs.
The Traveler is one who seeks the engagement of these deep movements of place, time and culture, not as a tourist (who is nothing more than a visitor to a zoo), but as a participant in the rites of life. Cultural immersion is the means by which the Traveler learns, and earns the value inherent within the experience. There is a wisdom woven in this rich tapestry of life. Its loom is tradition, the warp is ceremony and language, the weft – that which defines the patterns and texture of the tapestry – is the weaving of individual lives and stories into the patterns that emerge. The Traveler does not come as a colonizer seeking to collect tapestries. The Traveler comes to be woven into the fabric of life itself.
I am a Traveler. My life of deep immersion in the mysteries of Spirit and of the mundane exigencies of the world have brought forth a richness, a greater compassion, a way of being that holds in reverence and honor the stories and lives into which I have been woven. I am a far better human being for having acknowledged and dedicated my life to the life of the Traveler.
