I love history. I like talking about history even more and ultimately being able to tell the story. Stories about who are and where we have been, and especially those we have met along the way who helped to shape our path or way. Our greatest challenge always being our remembering and memories that take us there. Why words and our vocabulary become so essential to what we speak and write today and remember tomorrow. Words are like opening a dictionary that demands definition like there is not a moment to lose. We all have them with today’s events seeming to serve to push them out of the way. For myself, its being able to remember and then write commentaries on the past that remains important to history’s telling.
Like our mind only having so much room and it seems full of worthless junk. As we focus on who it was that influenced us the most and who we in turn influenced along the way if even unknowingly. Why music and the arts are so essential to memories that are meant to take us through history to what we have always known but forgotten. They sooth our minds and allow us to go back to capture those things as though a coat we left behind against the cold. We seem always cold until we retrieve it, once gotten it helps to keeps us warm. That’s the comfort our memories bring. Why Lieh Tzu becomes so important to me. What I write is not so much meant to be of real scholastic value, but as though as a travelogue through my own history. Places I’ve been before, people I have met along the way, vibrations of music and the sounds of certain expressions from long ago. Why our stories become so important.
All serving to move beyond the present with something we have added to for new stories yet to be told. Adding to stories told through time. Its giving meaning to the present with wisdom to be shared and telling others that becomes important. I’m getting ahead of myself now and there is time to go there. For now, just keeping to events that give context to the journey ahead. Finding comfort in the story as only the continuum of spirit.
My Travels with Lieh Tzu / Interpolations along the Way
Introduction – Your Writing becomes You
Number 0ne of one hundred fifty-eight entries.
1. Beginnings
It is said that each of us is granted two lives, the life we learn from and the life we live after that. To perchance awaken midstream in our lives. As if we have been reborn; given an opportunity to find and follow our true destiny and endeavor.
That our ultimate task is not only to discover who we are – but where we belong in history. Is not this the ultimate challenge? To simply rise up, traveling as one with the prevailing winds. Becoming one with the angels, or dragons, as they manifest before us and letting our spirit soar. Freeing our mind, heart, and soul to go where few dare to wonder.
I know my task as a writer will be complete when my writing is as indefinable as my subject. Just as I know my task as an individual, as I exist in the here and now, will be to simply tell the stories that I have learned along the way. That we each have a story to tell. As we free ourselves of attachments, ego, and baggage we have clung to as we try to find our way. That the ultimate travel is the travel of our spirit and the ultimate is to share our gift with others.
To become one with the ages. To bring forth the stories, myths and legends that tell the way. To stay interested in life, as I am in reality here only for an instant before moving on.
My task is only to look for constant renewal. Finally, the true expression of self is in losing myself through expressing the voices of the past. That I am here to relay that the fears and hopes of humanity rest not in where we find ourselves in the here and now, but to find and reflect our inner nature waiting to be re‑discovered and built upon again and again. That all true learning is self-learning of who we are to become.
That once we have awakened so that we can see beyond ourselves, then have we not found our spirits traveling the winds through eternity. This being so, could there be a more ultimate way of travel than to be found traveling with Lieh Tzu? 1/21/96
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