I don’t remember where I heard this expression. Or perhaps I never did. It may have sprung into the recesses of my mind. From a dream. A whisper from the wind. An echo from the stars. But I use it sparingly. With depth of heart. For it holds several meanings to me.
“You’re always welcome at my campfire.”
***
I’ve been writing about that urge to roam. To travel freely. Unencumbered. To experience the world through the lens of constant motion.
My first post in this series introduced the terms “Dromomania” and “Drapetomania,” which placed this desire squarely in the medical model for disease. The word “disease” itself has been defined as: “a condition of the living animal or plant body, or of one of its parts, that impairs normal functioning and is typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms” that is “not simply a direct result of physical injury.” A disease has also been said to be “a particular quality, habit, or disposition regarded as adversely affecting a person or group of people.”*
And there are four main types of disease: infectious, deficiency, hereditary, and physiological diseases. Diseases can be communicable or non-communicable, and when we have absolutely no idea what causes one, we call it “idiopathic.”
And let’s not forget mental or psychogenic diseases.
In fact, the suffix “mania,” in dromomania and drapetomania, arguably places the old terminology squarely in that category of mental illness.
So, is the compulsion to flee, to explore, to wander the world, a mental disorder? And what are those so-afflicted fleeing from?
Continue reading Compulsion to Flee – Part 3 – Modernity and Hermitism?
Picking up where I left off yesterday . . .
We’ve all heard the stories of Cortez conquering the Aztecs and Pizzaro conquering the Incas, but we often only hear the stories of those who are regarded as conquerors. The victors. Even if their acts were entirely atrocious and inhumane.
History is distorted that way.
Continue reading Compulsion to Flee – Part 2 – Conversion or Reversion?
I often write about my travels and the things I experience while traveling. The adventure of it. 😊 Particularly getting back to Nature and hiking in the wilderness. Something I do whenever possible. And the urge to travel, or to continue traveling once on the road, is always at the surface.
Lingering, like a Tiger ready to pounce on its prey.
Frankly, I like that feeling. For it drives me to drive. Gives me reason and purpose. An impetus to greet Grandfather Sun each day.
Intro: I wrote this story back in 1993, describing some of my time on the road between 1978 and 1980. I had packed up and bugged out after a little run-in with the law.
Something sparked the memory, and I dug out a copy of the publication it appeared in at the time – “Out Your Backdoor.”
I found it fun to look back at my writing style then. Not that much different from today.
I was trying to break into freelance writing and looking for small publications that would pick up an article – payment was usually a couple copies of the newsletter, magazine, or journal, or whatever print media it might have been.
With a few minor edits, here it be . . .
*****
I left you all at a juncture in my story “The Club 66.” So, it’s time to circle back a little. If you don’t remember, check out the last couple of paragraphs.
Disclaimer: I don’t recommend that anyone participate in such a ceremony without proper guidance, intent, and knowledge. Also, since we are all individuals, creatures with complex chemical-electrical systems, there is no way to predict how ingestion of any substance might affect someone. To either their benefit or detriment.
Nor can I offer any guidance in how to interpret such an experience. Words fall far short.
Revisiting the past seems to cycle in our lives. If not physically, mentally. But it seems there are times when the physical odyssey is unavoidable. It may even be unconscious at first. We embark on a journey just to realize midway we are circling back in time. Perceptions have shifted, aged, but we are retracing routes gone by. “Treading trodden trails,” as the saying goes. Neural roadmaps. Highways of memories. Echoes of day dreams.
The roads might be slightly different. And the faces we see this time around may be new to us, drawn together, in passing, by a transitional event. In this case, it was my mother’s final breaths.
I saw the parallels as I was driving by the home where myself and my brothers grew up. A small town now a burgeoning suburb of a major city. When the family moved there, the population was around 250, plus a lot of corn fields. When I left, there were little more than 2500 people. It’s no longer a rural community and the population has passed 30,000. The corn fields replaced with structures. More boxes for storage, of categorized life.
My old home is now a dental office with the yard paved over. A parking lot for tooth repair. The vacant lot across the street, a playland of the imagination where mythic battles raged in the jungles of weeds, now a motor bank. The majestic apricot tree on the corner by the park, gone. Not even a seed to carry its memory of the sweet fruit it offered free for the taking. The lake we fished in, fenced off, imprisoned.
The historic downtown, an outward reflection, a mimic of time, but the core has transformed. The library is office space. The hardware store, an art gallery. The feed mill, a microbrewery. The old school is torn down. Time and places evaporated.
But all of my memories are intact. The pleasure and the pain of growth.
Every summer this home was a launch point for the family reunions. First with my dad’s family in Indiana, and then my mom’s in Michigan. Those were times of active voices. Of laughter and play. The excitement of seeing cousins, of family card games, and mysterious old homes to explore. Spiral staircases to dusty attics, and coal furnaces in the basements. We mined for treasures. And we found them in shiny objects unearthed, planted by the generation before.
And there were haylofts in old barns, where we leaped into the sky, hay piles lying beneath to break our fall. Flying for instants that lasted forever. A shirt was a cape, or a parachute.
An old hand pump still brought water from the earth. A hidden aquifer of life.
An electric fence for horses, and a dare to feel its pulses. Grab hold the wire and zap a brother with the other hand, before mom or dad would shoo us away.
Pulses, pulses, I feel my heart beating as I drive, wandering back in time, shuffling though images not matching the roadway. Highway hypnosis.
I’m retracing that reunion route again, but this time, the nuclei of both families are gone, having passed on to the Blue Road of the Spirit.
My father passed in ’09, and after revisiting the ground where I was raised, I stop to pay my respects to him and my paternal ancestors. He was buried in the family plot in the town where he grew up. A few miles down the road is “Stearleyville,” or its shadow, founded by my great, great grandfather. The reverse of my hometown. The small village is gone, fully reverted to farmland.
The cemetery is filled with generations, back to the original immigrant couple. Two stones eerily bear my own name. One my grandfather, and one his second son that died as an infant – born on my same birthday, passed 30 years before my birth.
I remember my dad’s funeral. Full military honors. Steeped in tradition.
He taught me the meanings of honor, integrity, loyalty, strength of character, and hard work.
We talk in silence. For a while.
Then it’s on to Michigan. A small town on the border of Ohio. My mother also to be buried in a family plot. Similar small town and farm family roots. The memories of both homes blurred.
She’s outlived the rest of her family so we have a small ceremony. A few cousins, whom I’m meeting for the first time. It’s a nice service for a well-lived life of a good heart.
She taught me compassion, empathy, and self-sacrifice.
My parents’ bodies lay some 300 miles apart. Their spirits united? Their soul contracts complete? And the particles of consciousness they helped bring into the world are scattered about the Midwest. Such is the stardust of which we’re composed.
Family plots. Family traditions. Traditions I will not follow. My ashes are to be released into the wind. No name carved in stone.
I wonder, when I leave, what neural roadmaps my daughter’s memories will travel. I hope that she too has flown wearing a magic cape.
***
Photo: I didn’t actually take this image, but it is an image of my brain from an MRI . . .
And if you didn’t see it earlier, check out my intro to this post in my Daily Musings – Rotation.
We’re already nine days into the new year and I realize I haven’t posted anything yet. True, things have been busy. Crazy busy. But that’s no excuse. After all, my mind is constantly churning out thoughts I seem to have no control over.
Spewing and spewing more words, phrases, ideas, and concepts than I can wrap my head around. Nonstop. Mass internal confusion. The collision of thoughts like sub-atomic particles ricocheting around in a super collider.
Condensation trails in a cloud chamber.
It’s no wonder it’s tough to think and write cohesively.
What is that voice in our heads constantly telling us how the world is? And I don’t mean that voice from the subconscious that warns us when we need it most – that’s our gut talking. That’s intuition. That’s something entirely different.
Fear, desire. Lightness and dark. The polar opposites are said to be interrelated.
But that doesn’t seem to match our perceptions of reality. I mean, do people fearing some awful event actually have a secret or subconscious desire for that event to happen? Self-flagellation??
I’m not really sure.
There is a growing body of literature talking about our power to manifest the things we want in life. And I’m not sure how much credence to put in that line of thought. This mystical power if activated improperly, by a negative focus, would rain terror down upon us. And that seems to negate the concept of free will, or our ability to say “no thanks.” “I don’t wish to be struck by lightning.”
From some of my prior writings, you know how I love buzz words. Especially in the employee-employer context that I see so often in the management literature.
I’m not really sure what motivates people to “rebrand” and try to stake original claim to concepts that have been around forever, more or less. And I’m also not seeing any of this “elevated thought” being put into actual practice by all of the “influencers” and so-called “thought leaders.” In fact, I see the old traditional, industrial-age, top-down, hierarchical, my-way-or-the-highway management structure still thriving.
And regardless of all the hype about worker retention, the words of my past managers still ring in my head that “attrition is our friend.” In other words, if you were one of the creative ones, the ones that offered innovative thoughts and solutions, that in anyway questioned authority and the old “we’ve always done it that way” mentality, well then, you needed to be driven out of the organization, not retained. You were a threat to management.
In fact, if you were innovative, you were considered a direct and lethal threat to the management team that was busy (barely) trying to justify their own existence. They didn’t want any smart folks replacing their glacial-moving, accomplish-as-little-as-is-necessary, paper-pushing to retain their Herman Miller “Cosm chair” complete with “auto-harmonic tilt, intercept suspension, and flexible frame” working “together to give them the feeling of weightlessness.” 🙂
So, with that slightly cynical and sarcastic, yet realistic, intro, here are today’s buzzwords. And there was a cluster of them today. “Unbossing,” “servant leaders,” “knowledge workers,” and “compassionate directness.”
And now that the laughter has subsided . . .
Time is slipping away, and as we approach the end of another year it’s time for people to engage in reflection, projection, and resolution.
Some are already referring to this as being the end of a decade. And they’re glad for it, calling it one big dumpster fire.
To others, it’s the end of another year of tumultuous political machinations. Or perhaps, a role call of all those who died, famous and infamous, loved and unloved.
Others find victimization, trauma, sadness, and are truly heartbroken.
And to others still, it has been just another amalgamation of meaningless seconds ticking away on the clock of the Universe.
My last post was a bit short. And it really only listed out some research findings. Although it was interesting research about the power of positive relationships. And it did include some fun terms like “micro-aggressions,” “micro-experiences,” and “positive alacrity.”
I had to look up that last word “alacrity,” and it means “promptness in response, cheerful readiness.”
One could say that I didn’t put a lot creative effort into that post, or mockingly, and fairly, say that “I phoned it in.”
But sometimes shorter and simpler is better. The acronym I used for this was “KISS.” I used it as “keep it short and simple.” In law school, it stood for “keep it simple stupid.” That’s kind of interesting because one might think that highly educated folks, like lawyers, might not mind long and detailed analyses. It goes with the territory.
But people are pressed for time. And maybe that time is not well spent on “legal briefs” or social media?
I really do like studies. Even the ones where we think there are obvious conclusions, as if we didn’t need any documentation.
“Everybody knows that!”
But us humans do like to research. To authenticate, substantiate, certify, justify, confirm, establish, corroborate, prove, support, validate. Whatever word you want to use.
We like confirmation and quantification.
So, while I’m not overly surprised, I do find it intriguing that the research bears out that modern medicine has very little to do with our overall health – only about ten to twenty percent at best. A full eighty percent or more is determined by our relationships. At least that is what a seventy-five-year study conducted by the Harvard Medical School concluded.
