Forty Days and Forty Nights

 You may have noticed a dearth of blog posts from me lately. There are several reasons for this. The primary reason is that I have ventured into the murky side of wandering. In some ways the novelty of new sights, great hikes, and constant change has worn off.

I reached the end of my travel plan this last Monday. After October 21, 2013 there is no plan. I am what the RVers call “fulltiming,” i.e. living in my motorhome with no other place to live. For a number of years I’d thought about, wished, and hoped to fulltime. However, the vision always involved traveling with a partner. That relationship has met its ignominious and lamented end through unconscious as well as intentional neglect.  Ah well, pick me up, dust me off, soon to realize that a golden opportunity to do what I had always wanted had presented itself, albeit in a significantly different guise. Off I went, and you can read about those adventures in the earlier posts of this blog.

But now comes the hard part. What does it mean to wander? Why is there such a significant Wanderer archetype present in our human psyche? What makes “home?” Do we ever really “choose” our home? What do Wanderers bring to the table of human understanding?

Think of Marco Polo and his brothers! Those guys really set out to wander. They all thought he’d died. Surprised the heck out of ‘em when he reappeared. I am but a mere, pale inkling of that kind of wandering. I have the instant communication of the internet, and I can fly anywhere in a day if I need or want to.  I’m certainly experiencing no privations whatsoever. Grocery stores are everywhere. I even have a wine cellar, six bottles!

Some of my urge to wander has to do with physical geography. The USA is a land of stark and extreme contrasts of very large proportion. As I grew up in another, very small country, my childhood ideas of the USA were always distant, mysterious, inaccessible, strange, and sharply filtered by our subscriptions to Time Magazine, National Geographic and Christianity Today. I don’t think I’ve ever completely outgrown that particular childhood vision. Basically, I’d still like to figure this place out.

Unlike Marco Polo we know what to expect when we wander about in the country. There are no more frontiers, despite the Arizona nostalgia for Frontier that shapes the self-concept around here. The maps are now all accurate, even extremely precise. We have GPS. There still is the unassailable desert, however, a harsh and forbidding but beautiful environment, ever so ready to impersonally and uncaringly kill the unwary and unprepared.

More of the urge to wander is, I think, a desire to identify and rescue parts of my true Self.  It has been gently pointed out to me that the vast majority of my adult life I have spent partnered. I have taken precious little opportunity to become aware and comfortable with me, myself, and I.  I have residual distrust of this endeavor, coming from the Christianity Today model of things. However, I find myself yearning for a better, deeper understanding of myself, even though this psychic endeavor is not to be rushed, or engineered upon demand. I wait patiently for snippets of understanding, a dream with meaning, a flash of a further question, an arrow pointing toward new awareness. The desert environment is traditional for this kind of growth. I can understand why.

This “after the plan” time has been unique in another way. I have been as sick as I ever remember being, with a severe case of sinusitis. It has been a ten day bout of pretty good misery right front and center in the old head. Oceans, oceans, I tell you, of yellow stuff, not to put too fine a point on it. Mounds of damp, soggy Kleenex accumulate everywhere in my motorhome. I have had to sleep sitting up the past two nights, just to be able to breathe. Mind you, this is in no way life threatening, or permanently damaging (I am quite on the mend today) but I find it curious that my body should hit me like a ton of bricks in this way precisely at this uncertain, liminal time in my life. I am quite rarely sick, and reflecting on this period of illness will I think, have more to tell me as I proceed.

In my fitful night sleep in the desert, I am quite often made aware of the cross-country freight trains rumbling and whistling off in the distance, chugging up toward the nearby Continental Divide, or deadheading (I imagine) back West toward the coast. I am given to understand that no two train whistles are exactly alike. I don’t think my tonal memory lasts that long, but in my recent experience, it is likely to be true. Anyway, I think about these trains, who is driving them, how do they stay awake across the vast, dark desert, what are they carrying? They are carrying stuff. Maybe cars, cows, commodities, containers from ships, coal, chemicals. Okay, I’ll stop with the alliteration, but you know, stuff. (If you’ve never seen George Carlin riff on stuff, I recommend you search it out quickly on YouTube.)

All this is to say that I am also reworking my relationship to my stuff. Living in a <200 sq. ft. motorhome, in which I have absolutely everything I need as well as lots of things I don’t use, makes me aware that I have a curious attachment to stuff that defies complete understanding. I have no room to put more stuff. This has put a screeching halt to the “shopping as entertainment” phenomenon. I am curious to see what effect this stuff diet will have, should or when I settle back in to a “stick house” of some sort.

If you’ve read this far, you have gotten the idea that lots is going on, and you’d be right. Therefore I’ve decided to give myself the wonderful opportunity to take a Forty Days and Forty Nights period of time to just sit with myself and all of this, and see what comes of it. Not often in life does one get such a chance to do this. I intend to make the most of it in the next six weeks or so.

I’ll have more of the fun type wanderings to tell you about too. Next destination is Bisbee, Arizona, a quirky mining town with much to recommend it. My campsite will be at the lip of the Lavender Pit Copper Mine (now inactive) at the edge of Bisbee. We’ll see what contemplative thoughts arise at that location. Stay tuned!