Travel and regret

Maybe I will fly into Bogotá, travel around Colombia, Medellin, Taganga, maybe make my way through Ecuador via Mintanita, spend time in Cusco and La Valle Sagrada, Santiago, Bariloche and El Bolsón, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Thome das Letras… I’ll stay in each place I like staying as long as I can, and just keep moving on until I get exhusted from lots of long distance bus rides, I guess. Maybe I will carry very minimalist luggage and a small acoustic guitar? And as much as I feel I have entirely failed I will try again to see if my journeys might be framed as a story within a story or a story on their own to help me make some sense of my life but it almost doesn’t seem worth trying now. I want my life to mean something but it seems to mean nothing. Is there a way that my story can end on an inspiring note, or am I now the villain of my own story, and there is no way out if that and back to the integrity of my own heart? I need friends to share with more than ever and yet I look around and I am all alone. I would love to do a little road trip and feel a wee but if freedom on this continent before I do that kind of traveling but if I do not get a car really soon getting a ticket to South America is probably going to come first.

Mostly it is just sad being in this country right now, everything about it feels sad, feeling like I betrayed so many people here that I wanted everything for just sends me beyond the ends of hopelessness and the only way I can think to be open to what my life might be telling me (is there a chance to one day not feel horrible about myself every day?) is to be on the road again and feel what I have to feel and give birth to what I have to give birth to one way or another.

I am not excited about it so much as just terrified and I don’t know if I am going to know myself any other way. Have I hurt everyone I cared about on this continent? Is there anyone who would be kind and bold enough to tell me what they think of me, who might still be able to see my good heart, and know that I am sorry, and hold me as worthy if my dreams? I am so disappointed in myself and I have no one to grieve with who would possibly understand. I don’t know what it will take to make it much longer the way things are going. Sleeping in a dark cellar with no transport where my heart is breaking and I feel guilty staying in bed too long is not the best pace for me. This has been such extraordinary kindness and if just 1% of peoppe were as kind to folks going through suffering and predicaments like homelessness s my host here we would have a much more peaceful society.

I do not know if that will be any different when I travel, but I know what to do when I travel, at least I know who I am a little bit, on occasion, and if I am trying to give birth to something when I m there, who knows, maybe my heart will open up to the love of the world and I will find peace. I so doubt it though. I can’t really think of many things to do right now to feel okay with my life… except try to figure something out on another continent. I care too much and I have probably left too many of my past acquaintances with the idea that I don’t care at all. I feel like I have failed everybody I love and it’s a feeling of inexplicable regret like falling falling falling what is the point of even trying to catch myself on this bulging root but I have hurt everyone I wanted to protect and there is nothing but falling falling to what feels like the death of everything I thought I was… and I do not know anything except that I am sad, lonely, and terrified, and do all I can do to trust that the universe will show me the boundless love and kindness of others, that I might express kindness to everyone I meet.

“And if I can’t, if it just hurts too bad
Then we’ll wait for it to pass
And I will keep you company for those days so long and black

And we’ll keep working on the problem
We know we’ll never solve
Of love’s uneven remainders
Our lives are fractions of a whole
But if the world could remain within a frame
Like a painting on a wall
Then I think we’d see the beauty then
We’d stand staring in awe

At our still lives posed
Like a bowl of oranges
Like a story told
By the fault-lines and the soil
Oh, oh, oh, oh”
— Bright Eyes

This is how my heart feels, down to the bone. It hurts too bad. Right now. It hurts too bad. I have no one to keep me company on these days so long and black days. I feel rather like people I have somehow hurt or offended, or more horrifyingly, betrayed in some way that crushes my heart, may be rather laughing at and mocking my pain. I do not know how to find such a one to keep me company while trusting these storms will pass or to even feel like I even deserve it. It just hurts so bad like it’s never gonna pass and everyone I cared so much about who’ll never know or care that my caring is real have probably all forgetten they even met me or else mock me on these days so long and black.

That song carries energies I want to live into, but it is so painful because the uneven remainders of love and loving intentions messed up to oblivion feels like the most painful thing in my life right now and though that feels unconquerable there are too many of them to solve… so what now do I do when half my life, and everything it has meant, feels unsolvable, and I have to walk around every day feeling, at my core, like a failure at love, and therefore a fraud at anything I might seek to give birth to but I need to do it, nonetheless, as long as I am here I have to keep trying to make a contribution to the world in the only ways I can still figure out how… I just wish someone from my past would stand my me and tell me they believe in me. I wish folks would give me honest feedback rather than playing with me because they can… I can’t make up my regret in my own heart in any way I might fain imagine to do it.

I did tong len meditation last night. It is one of the most helpful kinds of meditation for me though it can feel hard at first since you are breathing in the suffering and breathing out the compassion. I breathe in the suffering of those experiencing heartbreak and confusion similar to my own and I breathe out compassion for myself. It helps me feel my own heart and my own suffering and compassion for it all in a gentle way and makes it easy to remember that whatever I am suffering there are others going theough such similar feelings. There are times that my mind tells me self-compassion isn’t going to do any good. The only thing that got my mind off a road to destruction today was planning a trip, and letting what is in me give birth in the only powerful ways my spirit is intuiting: through music and screenplays. At least that is the beginning of finding out what is in me that needs to be said and then maybe my heart will tell me where to go from there or maybe it won’t but I do with what I’ve got as much as I wish I had old friends who haven’t given up on me who might support me as a fellow traveler on this ever so lonesome path through life.