Hello

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We leave our homeland, our property and our friends. We give up the familiar ground that supports our ego, admit the helplessness of ego to control its world and secure itself. We give up our clingings to superiority and self-preservation. But taking refuge does not mean becoming dependent upon our teacher or the community or the scriptures. It means giving up searching for a home, becoming a refugee, a lonely person who must depend upon himself. A teacher or fellow traveler might show us where we are on a map and where me might go from there, but we have to make the journey ourselves. Fundamentally, no one can help us. If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path. Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.

(above from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche)

Sometimes I look so far down my path I stumble on things right in front of me. I would do anything to turn around and go home, but the ground behind me is gone, and I don't have a home anymore. It has crossed my mind a number of times that I hate this and just want to come home to the familiar, to the known. To escape the dread, the tingling, the shortness of breath, the feeling of impending doom, the nausea and diarrhea, the lost appetite and worry about getting sick or incapacitated. To regain the sense of control. But was that control ever really there? If all it takes is a few days and a few hundred miles to put me into such a spiral, was there control in the first place? Or was there only a very weak stability that had yet to be disturbed?

Today I said I want to go home. I said it out loud. The magic words I should never utter. Because I don't want to be here, all alone.

This is going to be a tough journey. It would be tough for anybody. But it's especially tough for someone whose main purpose of moving is to overcome anxiety and become a stronger person. I know I'll be typing the same stupid things over and over again. Because I'll be feeling them over and over again.

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