Existential Fart

I left Portland, Oregon exactly two months ago to embark on a road trip with no exact itinerary. My motivations were partly subjective and internal, yet contained at least a thread of practicality. To be perfectly honest, I was bored. I was also spending money beyond my means. It was frightening to leave comforts behind, but I knew I had to challenge myself.

If you will indulge me, I had a feeling of being a caterpillar stuck in my cocoon, which wouldn't be so bad, if I hadn't been aware that I was supposed to be becoming something new. For all of my belief in the power of the individual, I am accepting more that environment is extremely influential as well. So as a person assuming responsibility for my life, I need to actively choose an environment that will assist in the type of growth I would like for myself.

If you will follow me further into the abstract, I am interested in becoming free of my conditioned way of being. My intention in expressing this is not to criticize myself, for certainly I possess many good qualities. However, I suspect that in order to release myself of my negativity and self-limiting patterns, I need to let go. If my life were a rug that I'd spent thirty years weaving, and I became aware of an error in it's construction, what could I do? I could simply ignore the error and pretend it was perfect. I could attempt to disassemble and repair it, perhaps investing ten, twenty, or thirty more years in doing so. Or I could hang it on the wall, admire it for the imperfect work of art it is, and embark on the construction of a new one. This may be a crude metaphor, but my goal is to demonstrate the principle that the healthy and unhealthy ways of being inside us are often interwoven.

This post may be too ethereal to be of interest for many readers, but I include it because it provides a backdrop for my recent adventures that I would like to write about.
 

Patterned clouds, Nevada County, CA