Caminante, no hay camino; Se hace el camino al andar.
The soles of my feet are bare and within these pages I will bare my soul … I am going to endeavour to write this as if I have no readers; as my unfolding steps reveal my path, my writing will record it, a memoir as to where they lead me.
Three days ago I was running in the mountains alone for four hours when it arose within me that I would start to write again; I stopped two months ago; my blog ended its run abruptly – from one day to the next… On finding my days in England full of Christmas commitments, I let go of the daily discipline… And I haven’t written since.
But as I ran silently and alone in the Alpujarra mountains, the urge to write rose again… But this time, without any intention of sharing; no social media tweets, or linkedin or facebook announcements that I had once again written something down…
My idea at first was to go right back to the very beginning, when each night I wrote in longhand in a journal… I started this practise at just twelve years old and I wrote each day, until at twenty one, I reflected on the entries of my late teenage years and now just starting out on a new decade – I decided that the daily inscriptions were too full of sadness and darkness… Too full of the unresolved pain; too full of despair that I would every emerge from the confusion of my turmoil.
My writings communicated the fear that my only release from my tortured mind, would be to die; perhaps then I would find peace – but no sooner had I thought this thought, than I was immediately tormented further with the absolute knowing that the body dead was of no gain…
For I knew that the agony would remain unresolved, and there would still be the need to investigate and find a way to release myself from the tight stranglehold of the deep existential misery, that I was experiencing…
And so I stopped keeping my journal – the entries too ‘oscuro’ and sad to continue with… I threw away the big pile of books, charting my thoughts and feelings, my daily routines over nine long adolescent years.
And as I ran in the mountains this week, I thought to simply go back to the very beginning, to write longhand again in a journal each night…
But then I moved from that thought to one of typing my stream of consciousness onto a document and gathering the pieces of work together in a virtual folder…
And then I had this idea…
To record my writing here on my Soles Journey; but to not make the process a public one. To trust that if anyone finds my entries and enjoys reading, they will simply be a reflection of my own souls journey…
My perfect morning…
I was so inspired by the thought of the barefoot half marathon in India yesterday, that I suddenly as if it were a new dawning rose in my soul; a deep knowing about what I want to do with me life…
Setting off again and again… Because there is no past and so it is all new… In each moment I am being re born, so although the journey might look the same in many ways – it is also entirely new… The energy is new and the lands I visit will be new even if they are the same.
Many people feel very stuck and afraid and often cling to what they know; but the Buddhist scholar T’ien-t’ai developed a meditative practice to enable people to perceive the boundless extent of their lives at each moment. He called it “three thousand realms in a single moment of life” Ichinen sanzen.