~ The Migration ~

~ The Migration ~

“After a long day of walking on the trail, we stood by the river in a small, sleepy town in rural Spain. Barefoot and drunk, we shared a smoke and a bottle of red wine as the sun set below the hills of the valleys around us. As the river and wine flowed down, he told me his reason for walking across the country. Eyes transfixed to that reddened sky, he told me of his sixty-hour working weeks, his stress and utter disarray with how his life back home had become so jaded and devoid of life. He spoke of the pain, the emptiness and, finally, the decision to leave it all behind with a one-way plane ticket into foreign lands. In that moment I could feel the relief and freedom emanating from my fellow human-being. Clearly these were things he had bottled up inside of him for too long – things that had secretly tortured and broken him down over many years. Now out here walking across Spain, he had decided to make his stand against the absurdity of it all. It was a shifting position that I recognised from myself, where my journey into the wild had begun a few years previously. Like so many people caught, chewed up and spat out by the cultural machine – he had finally been pushed too far and now his response had begun.

    It is true. In this life there comes a time when a man can no longer accept a situation of existence which has belittled him for so long. The breaking down comes gradually over many tickings of clocks and traffic jams and deadlines. There’s more to life than this, his heart demands ever more loudly. After the days of emptiness have been endured too long, a snapping point is reached. It is at that moment when the spirit is unleashed and a great migration begins. Outward he moves beyond those cubicles of pain. Into the night of the unknown, beyond the security – beyond the bickerings of fools and preachers and bosses and politicians. Beyond them and their soulless advice. He moves into the hazy dreamlands where the mad and mystics wander, where the eyes blaze bright like stars – where the traveller stands barefoot and bewitched under skies of freedom and nothing is certain but the pure fleeting transience of life. It is there where the spirit is cleansed. It is there where the ships of the soul set sail toward the shores of destiny. It is there – in those lands of the living – where the world shines clear and life is finally experienced in all its chaos and beauty and mystery and magic.”

(taken from my book ‘The Thoughts From The Wild’ available here)