road trip |
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| the Cruiser always takes you home
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updated wednesday morning 12 july 2017; technically we are back home but updates will continue until the mandala pairs are done and the places are filled in; Sometimes additions and corrections are made to earlier postings and sometimes the changes don't show unless the page is refreshed. In the photos sections, right-click on an image and select "view image" to see a larger view. |
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why road trip All of life is a foreign country. + Jack Kerouac, letter to John Clellon Holmes (24 June 1949) Some beautiful paths can't be discovered without getting lost. + Erol Ozan The concept of time, as it's commonly understood by normal people with normal jobs and normal goddamn lives, doesn't exist on the road. The nights spread out like the dark, godforsaken highways that distinguish them, and the days run together like Thanksgiving dinner smothered in gravy. You never really know where you are or what time it is, and the outside world starts to fade away. It's cool. + Tiffanie DeBartolo, How to Kill a Rock Star Now, on this road trip, my mind seemed to uncrinkle, to breathe, to present to itself a cure for a disease it had not, until now, known it had. + Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in. + D.H. Lawrence An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered. + G. K. Chesterton Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life. + Jack Kerouac Half the fun of the travel is the aesthetic of lostness. + Ray Bradbury Wonders of a journey consist far more of such intangible experiences and unexpected situations than of factual things and events of material reality. + Lama Anagarika Govinda |
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prelude: road trip as spiritual journey
This past year, I created and led a series of classes called Awakening: realizing spirit in ordinary life which helped participants to see their own lived experience as the most immediate opening, the most accessible path, to what has been called "awakening" or "enlightenment." The idea is that the great spiritual traditions (Christianity, Buddhism, to name only two) began with the lived experience of one person, and what was realized in those extraordinary lives is actually already present and accessible to any one of us in what has been accurately and mistakenly called "ordinary" life. Our ordinary lives are extraordinary, full of transparent moments, epiphanies, suffering disguised as joy, joy disguised as suffering, all markings along the way. It is, of course, more complex than that, and it is usually not clear where our path is leading. But if we take our life as spiritual journey, then the destination is not the paramount consideration (we are, after all, going to end up dead at some point and that is a given). And if we take our lived experience as no less significant as the lived experience of those whose stories are connected with the great spiritual traditions, then we have the same access to the same spiritual depths that inform those traditions. It is the journey that gives life meaning, the dynamic Quality of travel, that opens up awareness and connection and everything else that "spiritual" experience is supposed to be.
In the Awakening course, we used the track themes from a CD called Migration by R. Carlos Nakai and Peter Kater
as a mode of inquiry, and they have proven to be quite helpful. There are many pathways to realization, these are not the
only ones, and they may not even be the best ones, but they serve adequately.
The music is excellent, but the track names nicely describe the developmental aspects or stages of a spiritual journey.
Quoted from the CD jacket notes:
Road Trip is Spiritual Journey. Especially because it doesn't "go" anywhere but back home, back to where we started. Except: it will not be the same place any more. A good road trip disrupts, just long enough, all the static patterns of Quality and deadening routines that insinuate themselves into daily living, and we begin to see things with fresh eyes. A good road trip teaches us (again) that home is not so much a place, as it is something we create, wherever we are; or perhaps more accurately, home is something we are wherever we go. The themes from Migration are helpful in seeing past the surfaces of maps and interstates and campsite reservations to the more significant aspects of experience. Writings along the way, posted here, will, like all good spiritual practice, always have an address in real time and space, but they will also look to the spiritual themes of wandering, initiation, honoring, stating intention, surrender, embracing the darkness, lighting the flame, transformation, quietude, becoming human, walking the path, and service. Plus, it's just a lot of fun. + TD ~~~
Migration CD can be found
HERE.
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Text and images copyright 2017 Thomas D'Alessio