A different kind of journey, a path without direction

“...I would like to take you on a different kind of journey”, offers Pila Chiles, “ ...[And] to get the most out of this adventure, you may want to pack differently. I want you to take with you something that you may not have remembered to pack for a long time. ...it is the most powerful too you will ever own and your visa to opening all the doors lie ahead. It is your childlike wonderment and imagination.” (The Secrets and Mysteries of Hawaii)

Along these lines, Cathy Johnson, in her essay on the very process of going for a true wander, states, "When I go unprogrammed, 'eyes only' and open to experience, the world expands as if taking a deep breath."(Utne Reader, Aug '98).

To be 'unprogrammed' is to be spontaneous, divorced from whatever preconceptions and conditioned thinking we normally carry with us. This necessity while walking, and in all life, so that we might maintain true conceptual objectivity, is, as we have seen, to be completely without memory or thesis- to look innocently upon 'what is', to know that every moment has never happened before, and never will again, and so to walk as if we were walking for the first time, in a new land, for no reason we can imagine.

          Annie Dillard injects her own medicine into our journey, suggesting "Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope the birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back."(The Writing Life, p4)

And Jung asserts, “To go for a walk is to wander along paths that lead nowhere in particular; it is both a search and a succession of changes.”(Dreams, p153)

Again, during these peripatetic non-prognostications, and in everything we do, if we do it completely- with every fragment of our being- we become the act we are doing, and somehow in doing so, we unseparate into the Mysterious One.

            Cathy Johnson proceeds with her observations: "There is an art to wandering”, she relates, “if I have a destination, a plan- an objective- I've lost the ability to find serendipity."

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These excerpts on following the heart and aimless wandering are taken from unpublished chapters of THE WAY OF WONDER, by Jack Haas