WELCOME TO THE PATH OF WANDERING
In the past, I used to carry my books with me and read from them constantly; I have stopped doing that. It is not that I don’t read at all anymore, but now I focus on bringing alive the teachings I have received and studied. This is what is challenging for me: to apply these teachings in all situations of life…I feel that what I know is small. But the possibility to realize is vast.
– Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Awakening the Sacred Body:
Tibetan Yogas of Breath and Movement
This is my blog about Wandering.
The purpose of my blog about Wandering is to organize and examine for myself, and share with you, my emerging understanding of how Wandering is not only the most bedrock of all Jewish values, but the most urgent life skill - more than a skill, a lens on the world - more than a lens on the world, a set of tools and insights for responding to our human experience with as much consciousness, presence, intentionality, generosity, and grace as possible. A path for successful human living in this moment and in this time we find ourselves in: these tectonically shifting times. And the times ahead.
A Path of Wandering, one might say.
Also, and speaking of which, the purpose of this blog is to share practices to help you raise your awareness of and comfort with with Wandering. To make Wandering more natural, more productive, more impactful, and more fun.
And like, pointing out where Wandering is happening around us in positive ways that we can learn from. And not happening around us in negative ways that we can learn from.
Ok you twisted my arm. I’ll take a crack at a definition. But just as a placeholder:
To wander is to move forward wholeheartedly, unencumbered by the past - with unflagging attention and ultimate purpose - towards a goal that is indispensable, indeterminate, and unknown until the moment it is achieved (at which moment the next goal to wander toward begins to emerge…)
To kick off the blog, I will be launching a weekly series dedicated to exploring the Path of Wandering, a path that has both saved my life and helped me to emerge – an incremental, ongoing process – into increasingly resonant, connected, powerful and intentional versions of myself. If you’re into that kind of thing!
A new entry will drop every Monday.
I’m going to start off exploring the question, is Wandering a good thing or a bad thing? What do we think about it and why: what kinds of semi-conscious associations and visceral charges have pushed us to think about it (and not think about it) in the ways we do (and don’t)?
Where do those associations come from, what outcomes do they tend to produce? Who do they benefit and/or disadvantage? And once we become more aware of them, what should we choose to do with them if our singular uncompromisable goal is to fulfill our highest positive potential, minimize suffering to the greatest extent possible, and create thriving individuals and societies?
Is Wandering a moral and/or mental pathology we should diligently work to immunize ourselves against…a spiritual purgatory reserved for the rootless, pathetic, and unwell…a critical skill for navigating some of life’s most acute and important challenges…a necessary paradigm shift for seeing reality as it truly is…or something else I haven’t thought of yet…?
Because, finally and most importantly, this blog about Wandering is about you. The ideas and texts and practices and other materials I will be sharing have been evolving and emerging over the past decade-ish in the extreme isolation of my personal brain. The blog itself will help me to organize them, but only YOU can tell me if they resonate or not, what they mean or don’t, if they’re meaningful and helpful or trite and pretentious and why.
Only you can share what Wandering has meant and might mean to you.
And these are things I really want to know. Need to know. So we can wander together, in conversation, like Abraham and Sara and their original Caravan of Wanderers: an improbable seed-culture deemed fit to become a vessel for world-historical blessing explicitly because of their willingness to a) abandon everything inherited and known, and b) wander indefinitely across borders of culture, religion, language, and state, towards a transcendent aspiration whose nature somehow lay precisely in its essential unknowability….
“My father was a wandering Aramean…” (Deuteronomy 26:5)
Wandering together is still frustrating and disorienting at times, still punctuated by periods of soul-searing vertigo and trapdoors of existential dread. But it is also still self-evidently better than the fate of Cain. For committing the paradigmatic human murder of his one and only brother, Cain was cursed not just to wander, but far worse, to wander alone: brutally uprooted from land-identity-community, marked as indelibly singular and thus singularly isolated, untouchable, impotent, abject. (“If you till the soil, it will no longer yield its strength to you. You shall become a ceaseless wanderer on earth...” Genesis 4:12)
This is not the wandering we seek.
In the course of outlining his motivation for writing, a contemporary Buddhist teacher explains the value of traveling with fellow wanderers, and wandering with fellow-travelers. It extends beyond moral support, which is a good enough reason, to the potential for catalyzing creativity and insight that triggers transformations previously deemed inconceivable – realizing, in other words, some of Wandering’s deepest potentiality and purpose:
“Every time I teach on these topics it is very lively for me: I am teaching them not as an expert, but as one who is on the path. I feel that what I know is small. But the possibility to realize is vast. There is much of value in these ancient teachings, and as we learn to apply them, the creative possibilities of life present themselves ceaselessly.”
The possibility to realize is vast AF! So please don’t hesitate to reach out with comments. Or questions! Or to say hi!
In the meantime, may the creative possibilities of life present themselves ceaselessly – which tends to happen, more often than not, on the Path of Wandering…
Charlie