Are We There Yet? - Travel as as a Spiritual Path

Are We There Yet?

Imagine this scene: We see a tribe riding camels across the desert. The sun is burning; the wind is blowing; the wilderness stretches out before them. A boy riding on a camel next to his dad is whining, “Are we there yet?” The father calmly trudges on through the wilderness. In the next frame, the young boy repeats his question, and you get the feeling that he’s been asking this same question all the long day. Finally, his father turns toward his son and in exasperation shouts, “For God’s sake, we’re nomads!”

To realize that we’re nomads is to know the double truth that we’re not there yet… and yet it is possible to know that we are always there, arriving wholly in this moment, fully present in this step, alive to the miracle of the journey.

We are there whenever we are awake.

The Gully:
My Training Ground for a Life of Travel

Back in the 1950s, when my parents came to northern New Jersey, they probably thought they were moving to the country. Our neighborhood was surrounded by farms and woods. As I grew up, just about all those farms and all those woods gave way to shopping malls and housing developments. By the time I was 8 or 9, there was just one precious plot of wild land left in Paramus right behind our back yard. We called it The Gully, and it was saved from development because it belonged to the Elks Club. This tiny scrap of wilderness was put to use for their annual picnic. The rest of the time it was my world, my place for adventure, exploration, clandestine pleasures and play. Well, not just mine: All the neighborhood kids played there. If you built a fort, some mean kid was sure to tear it down. Every tree, rock, or bush had a name. I had my hideouts, my secret places of refuge, portals to other worlds, places where my imagination could run wild.

The Gully was not without its dangers. I often came home scratched up and bleeding after fighting my way through blackberry bushes, or covered with the spreading itch of poison ivy. One time my brother and I were hopelessly stuck in mud (sure that it was quicksand), and once my boot came off in the snow and I limped home, numb with frostbite. I was serious about my play, and remember being indignant when my mom called me in for dinner. “But I’m playing!” I’d protest. Being an explorer was my job, my identity, my destiny.

The Gully was a microcosm of the whole wild world that awaited me, beyond the shopping malls, beyond the suffocation of school, outside the confines of suburban banalities. I refused to settle for ordinary. “I’m not from here,” I insisted. “I’m from an island off the coast of Madagascar.” (This was the most exotic place I could imagine.) By playing in the Gully, I developed a taste for adventure; I had a glimpse of the endless expanse that was hidden in plain sight.

The Gully was the outer scene for my inner explorations. I remember being fascinated by the phenomenon of déja vu. I would make up elaborate explanations that involved other dimensions and parallel universes. I devised intricate and elegant stories that gave me reasons to be both fascinated and terrified.

“If you fell into the crack between moments you might tumble into eternity and never come back!” And in spite of my terror, how I yearned to fall!

“I knew that at the moment of my birth, another soul was also born on the other side of the world, who was also me. How we yearned to be reunited! And yet if we were ever to meet face-to-face, the whole universe as we know it would be destroyed!”

In the Gully I explored these yearnings and these terrors, while nibbling sweet peas, blackberries and wild scallions. My adventures in the Gully prepared me for a life of travel. This tiny patch of land, bordered by backyards, a cement factory, a highway and The Elks Club was my training ground. The roar of trucks on Route 17 was the roar of the world, calling me.

* * *

It felt like the most natural thing in the world to claim the whole wide world as my own, to exult in mobility and follow my impulse toward new horizons.

I designed a life for myself that would allow me to travel and see the whole world as my teacher and friend. And I wanted a life where I could be continually challenged, so that each new challenge might send me to call on the resources that were buried inside me.

Often, my friends or acquaintances see my travel schedule and then turn to me with a look of pity. They say, “Oh it must be so hard,” or, “When are you going to stop traveling so much? It must be terrible to be on the road like that.”

And I say, “Traveling is my practice.”

I wrote this book to explain what it means to make traveling a practice, to learn from the road and surrender to each step of the journey, and then make that step my home.

I meet so many people on the road who seem only to want to get where they’re going. “Are we there yet?” Well, yes. And, no.

Yes. The spiritual practice of travel teaches me how to be there in every step, to fully inhabit the multi-dimensional experience of this moment. Through travel, I am learning how to show up and make myself fully available and receptive to the gift that God (the Great Mystery) is giving me just now.

And, no, I will never get there because the destination is a dynamic force calling me onward with the roar of the world, opening me up, sending me always toward my ever-expanding potential.

The Path of Pilgrimage

In 1980 I hitchhiked through Europe with a guitar, a change of clothes, a tent and a sleeping bag. I was learning the Art of the Road. I was learning to open my eyes. I traveled without a set itinerary, determined to open myself to a new adventure each day. Daily, I was forced to let go of expectations, and I encountered generosity in the most unexpected places. I kept making plans, only to see them dissolve in the light of startling synchronicities and unforeseen encounters. Every place of rigidity in me was forced to bend or soften.

As I stood at the tip of the Greek mainland, at the Temple of Poseidon, I heard the call of Jerusalem. I decided to make my journey into a pilgrimage. I imagined standing before the Western Wall of the ancient Temple and bringing the force of my whole life’s longing as my offering to lay before God. I imagined standing before that Wall with so much love that all the walls between myself and God might be shattered.

In that moment of Intention, my journey was transformed. At one level I still looked like a sightseer, entertained by history and strange customs. Yet I also knew that as a pilgrim, each step of my journey had the power to strip me bare, so that I might finally stand before God and know myself.

It was a wonderful and dangerous journey. The military had recently taken over the government in Turkey; there was a civil war going on in Syria; and then the Iran/Iraq War broke out, with Syria and Jordan taking sides against each other. I was learning about the subtle arts of survival, bargaining and bribery. I was, for the first time, stepping out of the Western world-view, learning new rules and unlearning so much that I had believed certain.

Meanwhile, I was keeping a meticulous journal of my inner life. I knew that each strange scene I confronted was reflecting back to me some aspect of my inner landscape that I had till that day been ignoring. I was determined to use each step of my pilgrimage as a vehicle for self-discovery. I was determined to see each person I met as a messenger who had come to teach me something essential.

I arrived at the Wall in Jerusalem in the middle of the night in the pouring rain. I was tired but more alive than I had ever been. Each outward step toward Jerusalem had also been an inward step of uncovering the complexities of my own heart. The daily Jewish prayer says, LiYerushalayim ircha, b’rachamim tashuv. To Jerusalem Your City, you will return with Compassion.

As I approached that ancient holy wall, I tried to keep my heart steady with compassion. The sound of rain against stone seemed like the tears of all my ancestors flooding me now… and then I heard a voice, calling me. “Hey Baby, come here and kiss me!” I could not believe it. The voice was coming from the guard booth at the edge of the courtyard where a bored but insistent Israeli soldier was beckoning to me.

I turned to him, exasperated. I sighed and thought, “I can’t believe you’re ruining this historic moment!”

Turning back toward the Wall, I tried to compose myself and focus my intention to be wholehearted before God. The whole time I stood there praying, the soldier kept yelling through the rain, “Kiss me, Kiss me!” And I couldn’t help but laugh.

Many years later I studied the Song of Solomon whose opening line says, “Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth, for your sweet loving is better than wine.”

Finally, I am able to receive the hidden message of my pilgrimage. That obnoxious Israeli guard who only knew a few words of English was my messenger, my angel, come to tell me:

God is calling you to intimacy with the Reality before you. “Kiss me,” Life says. “Open to the truth of God in this moment. Open to the fullness of pleasure and pain. Every time you turn toward the past or toward an abstract idea, I will call you back to Me through a simple yet profound engagement with Life. Your sweet loving is better than wine, better than an...