Calling All Cars Just to Say Hello, Part 1

Adventure travel—what conjures up images of a rather wet Thor Heyerdhal on the Kon-Tiki trying to prove the currents of fate, not the hands of mastery, drew things, or, at a highest height, on mountains that is, maybe an old, black and white, otherworldly photo of Tenzing Norgay atop Mt. Everest comes to mind, which, no doubt due to a faulty racial default in our thinking, most people used to think was of Sir Edmund Hillary, or on a more mundane level, a superfast montage runs through your imagination of ‘running through the jungle’ wildcats and polar bears (jungle: anywhere wild and woolly) hot on your heals—is not exactly what you think it is. It’s travelling the world penniless, or rather, only with what money people have given you along the way or you have earned along that same way, but either way the whole thing’s quite an adventure, because, dead broke or not, you are in the hands of the aforementioned fates and have to use what mastery you have in your hands to navigate those terrible, sweet and lonely winds towards one safe harbor after another, or not so safe, whatever the case may be, and, believe me, it can take your breath away.

I spent several years in this mode, starting with a hunger strike outside the walls of the old city of Jerusalem in ’95 (you must pardon me, I was only 33), adrift on the waves of the world, travelling from country to country a vagabond, although I billed myself a spiritual pilgrim, setting my pilgrim feet on five continents, although in Africa it was only a step or two, to Mt. Sinai, Cairo and her Great Pyramid (my personal blog, “A Collaboration of the Unknown in Perspective”, tells those Egyptian storiesin a collection of stories called “A Journey of a Thousand Tongues,” which, I might add, hardly a single tongue has yet to wag about). All this was before the net became the dwelling place of our show and tell, and I carried neither a camera nor kept a waking life journal, after the Israel and Egypt poetry posting adventure that is, and parts of the journal I kept then, called “The Overthrow of I Am At the Equality of Soul”, are posted in that aforementioned collection, and so I basically have only an old passport to prove I went here and there, and these stories that came out of it that I’m writing now, over 30 years later. Let me say here and now that, over time, the when of things and their names do cloud over a bit. You can never remember exactly what happened back then. Do I let the facts get in the way of the story? I try my best to stick to the facts, do not purposefully lie, exaggerate, or embellish for effect.

I do also have a now motley collection of dream and muse notebooks I began to keep after a nine month stay in Cuzco, Peru, when the muse first began to sprinkle down, muse being inner voice and vision, it becoming a flood in an little healing community off the grid in the state of Bahia, Brazil, called Kahlil Gibran.That ongoing inner journal, which I keep to this day, would not give much of a picture of my travels, like viewing them through the waters of consciousness, sideways and underwater at that, and so, other than perhaps getting illuminated here and there, you would have very little idea what’s going on with my adventure travel, which I can make a strong case that I continue to this day, although I’ve been in India and in basically the same place since ’04, because I’m still penniless and have no bank account or notable possessions, did not even have current ID until some weeks ago when I finally renewed my passport. If you don’t think you are a traveler on God’s green globe, stationary or not, you need to do some more figuring on life and its grand, same, same but different adventure. We’re on a planetary spaceship for God’s sakes, hurtling through cosmic space, etching deep furrows in the unknown, and if that’s not enough to make you dizzy thinking about your life’s journey, just ask yourself what in the world is behind, or bigger, than the cosmic space we’re shooting through at umpteen miles per hour. You have got to figure it just keeps getting bigger, adventure that is. You with me?

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