springtime epiphany

I've had my adventures. No, I am not hanging up my travelling pack. Not now, not ever. But I've had my adventures. I've traveled, I've seen more than my share. I've written poems on beaches and barstools, I've felt the unfamiliar roll of foreign words in my mouth, I've met compelling strangers. I've lived songs. And if I haven't Found Myself, who is to say I was supposed to? Who is to say there is any one particular Self to find? I've found selves all over - abroad and at home.

Maybe the thing to do isn't to find yourself at all, but to leave pieces of yourself everywhere behind you. Like tiny graffiti scratched into wooden benches - leave bits of you in the people you encounter, in the places you visit. In the shadows of monuments, in the soil of meadows, in the fissures of rocks, in the cracks between floorboards. Stuck like gum under tables, like an earring behind a hotel nightstand, like a coin on the murky floor of a fountain, a pond, a lake, a river, an ocean.

Maybe the ultimate goal is to get to your deathbed light as possible, light as a breeze, divested of all but memory and heartbeat. And then, leave the latter in that bed, tangled in the last linens you will ever imprint with your warmth. The former, you can take with you.

It's time to stop mourning the "waste" of years. In the most meaningful terms, years are never wasted. I am what I am because of all I've slogged through. The caked mud on my boots contains a million tiny fossils.

And there are still miles and miles of mud to go.