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I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine.
It often dawns too late that we have only one life, only one path, and the choices we make become the story line of our lives.
I wasn’t going to become someone I didn’t choose to be.
I looked back on my twenties and realized that every time there was a crossroads, I took the first and safest path. I did just what was expected of me, or what I needed to do to escape pain or confusion. I was reactive. I didn’t feel like an autonomous soul. I felt like a pinball.
I lay there thinking back through my life—how much energy I put into planning, trying to guarantee my independence, but how so many of my best memories have come from the times where I needed help and received it.
There is a reason why organized religion has billions of human beings—the majority of us—under its spell. It is because it benefits us. And if it benefits us, it must have truth in it, some clues to the workings of the universe. If it didn’t, it would be unspreadable. And its best trick is to hook you with its beauty, and demand you drag with it all the rest.
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
We do not care for the beautiful things of this world.”
They seemed to hold pride and shame in the same hand.
Continuing the project of improvement. The intention and effort was what built character. Not success.
I think about his quest for answers, his fluctuations from atheism to Christianity to humanism to nihilism to animism. I think about how badly he wants the world to make sense. How it tears him up, so he tears through ideologies, testing them with all his might. As the mushroom magic courses through my brain, I suddenly understand why he loves experiences like these. For a few hours, the world makes sense. Everything has meaning. Everything is alive, in perfect friendship with everything else. I want, in this moment, for Weston to have peace in his heart. I want him to feel what I feel all the
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Even after all this time, The Sun never says to the Earth, you owe me, look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole world.
Jesus saves. But you gotta accept Him real quick or He kills.
“Yeah, mysticism is when you don’t have intellectual certainty about stuff, but experientially you do believe in things, like beauty and mystery and the universe as a force for good. You move beyond the dualism of good and evil to a more unified whole, a sense that everything belongs.”
Yet now, at the end of the trip, I felt a dull melancholy.
If the end is not a triumph and fireworks, but a simple, quiet arrival.
