Bilbo and Frodo and the rapture of discovery

There is no loss because every turn in the road leads us to another miracle. Every miracle leads us to ourselves.

E. M. Cioran, recognizing the magic of finding what cannot be looked for, offers: "Astounding spectacle! You vow to remain here all your life, to examine it with all your life, to examine it with a voluptuous devotion, to wrest yourself from other temptations because at last you have met with the true and unheard of." (Decay, p129)

This is the rapture of discovery, the act of 'being' without knowing what it is to be; the act of doing without knowing what it is to do. This is how we proceed to exist within context, without being limited by that context; it is the message of the Bhagavad-Gita, all over again- we must 'give up the fruit of our actions', and exist only for the action itself.

To act, without desiring 'the fruit of the action' (ie. the fruition), we must simply merge into ourselves, lose every concept, and look ever forward without fear, or guilt, or demand. We must be capable of entering willfully into the unknowable journey, enjoying life's everyday, fabulous discovery of itself, without caring where it leads us.

As Joe Walsh acquiescently sang out about his journey, "I keep on go'in, guess I'll never know why."

The point is just to go. Just to let go. And suddenly everything is marvelous without mattering.

“The road leads ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with weary feet,

Until it joins some larger way,

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.”

                                    The old rhyme of Bilbo and Frodo (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, p110)

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These excerpts on following the heart and aimless wandering are taken from unpublished chapters of THE WAY OF WONDER, by Jack Haas