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Journeying is an archetypal human experience. I especially feel the call to adventure as Winter turns to Spring, but the urge to get out of the house and experience home on the road can happen any time of the year. I live out of my Sprinter van 25% of the year, and when I found I could afford world travel in 2016, I explored twenty-five countries.
Staying in one place for too long so easily and inevitably becomes a stagnant routine. Emerson said: “The problem with traveling is you take yourself with you.” It’s true that you can’t rely on a change of setting to take the place of inner dynamism, but I would rephrase Emerson’s aphorism to read, “The problem and possibility of traveling . . . ” Traveling can be a change of scenery to distract from inner stagnation, but it can also be a secular pilgrimage, a voyage of discovery and transformative rite of initiation. Travel can bring you into contact with other cultures that can give you perspective on your culture and conditioned assumptions. There are so many forms of travel, inner, outer, international, interdimensional . . . but pick your traveling companions, if any, with great care! If you haven’t observed a person under acute stress, you may not know who they are and may be pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised.
Normally, I’m highly resistant to space travel due to the social claustrophobia of being isolated with random astronauts in close quarters. So, when I was asked in 2024 to study exobotany on a lush but distant planet, I asked my friend Justin to join me as a coexplorer.
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Wilderness sojourns are a particularly powerful form of travel. It is all too easy to spend most of your incarnation inside a series of rectilinear enclosures forever cocooned by all the conveniences of technological civilization. But there is something in the human spirit that longs for the depths of the forest, desert canyons, mountain tops, oceans, and caves. Life is not meant to be lived always indoors, surrounded by plasterboard and wires. Get out into the sunlight and sleep under the stars. Life is a journey; so don’t film the whole movie of your life indoors, lit by electric light. Answer the call to adventure!
There are some cases where a lifestyle of perpetual travel is its own trap. For example, in 2024, when I revised this card, I just completed a 44-day road trip that included 19 days at the National Rainbow Gathering, which occurred in Northern California this year. I do free dream interpretation, oracle readings, and general counsel at festivals and Rainbow, which is free and functions as a gift economy so it self-selects for people who live permanently on the road. One of those perpetual travelers was a vital young man who felt that path was still serving him well. But most other perpetual travelers who came to me were older and felt exhausted and unfulfilled socially and creatively with life on the road. They were struggling to find a way back to a housed life with financial stability.
I do have a house and stability to come back to (but I didn’t have those when I went on the road long-term in 1995 — The Path of the Numinous tells that story.) During the road trip that just ended, I noted that I had little of the insomnia that I often have at home while trying to sleep in a much more comfortable bed. However, I also experienced the anti-magic as well as the magic of travel. The anti-magic is that travel is often at the cost of the magic of daily creative writing sessions. Even though the back of my van is set up to work as a writing lab, the demands and opportunities of many travel scenarios don’t allow time for those sessions. I’ve been to Burning Man, surrounded by amazing, surreal art, and nevertheless felt the anti-magic of losing Parallel Journeys creative writing sessions that take me to other worlds and alternate timelines.
The highest value centers in my life — creativity, relationships, and travel are in some ways synergistic and symbiotic, but in other ways, they can be antagonists where I pursue one of those at the cost of the others. Having just gotten back from an epic road trip, the desire to travel is currently overwhelmed by the desire to resume my highly disciplined home life with daily writing sessions. Being in a stationary home currently feels more empowered. Here is where I can best fulfill my highest priority of creating original content. When I travel, I meet people I’ve never met before, and that’s socially fulfilling. But when I create online content, like what you’re reading right now, I can reach many more people, though I will not meet most of them.
It is also possible that this card could refer to an intense and metamorphic inner journey. The Wanderer would also apply to new situations (a new job, social situation) even if this doesn’t mean geographical change. When we encounter something new, we need to be humble, alert, and adaptable. Finally, we are all on a journey, traveling through human incarnation from birth to death. Therefore, the core of the Wanderer’s stance is relevant to any human life.
See I Ching Hexagram # 56 “The Wanderer” From the Wilhelm/Baynes I Ching:
When a man is a wanderer and stranger, he should not be gruff nor overbearing. He has no large circle of acquaintances, therefore he should not give himself airs. He must be cautious and reserved; in this way he protects himself from evil. If he is obliging toward others, he wins success.
A wanderer has no fixed abode; his home is the road. Therefore he must take care to remain upright and steadfast, so that he sojourns only in the proper places, associating only with good people. Then he has good fortune and can go his own way unmolested.
From Sarah Dening’s The Everyday I Ching:
The current situation is temporary. Do not let yourself get too deeply involved. Be prepared for change. Avoid making a commitment to any particular person or situation. Consider this as a time when you can gather information, expand your horizons and make discoveries about yourself and others. Be practical and willing to adapt to whatever changes may occur. When meeting new people, be respectful but also cautious at first and a little reserved. Associate only with those whose motives you feel you can trust. Do not compromise your self-respect in an effort to win acceptance. If you are sincere and courteous, the right people will assist you. Be sure to express your gratitude to anyone who gives you a helping hand. Where possible, be helpful in return.
An opportunity for personal growth
You are wandering in unfamiliar territory without a map. Your journey is about exploring new ideas and possibilities, perhaps even a new identity. You will be quite safe as long as you observe certain ground rules. Whatever the situation, treat it as a learning experience. Most importantly, be self-reliant. Because circumstances could change at any time, you cannot depend too much on others. This means that your only true security lies within. You are therefore thrown back on your own resources. This gives you an opportunity to develop your ability to cope with the unfamiliar. If you can be at ease with yourself regardless of circumstances, you will respond to whatever happens in the most appropriate way.
As the title implies, my sci-fi epic Parallel Journeys involves many journeys, and the most important characters are travelers. Their lives embody principles of life-affirming travel.
See introduction to:
A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler and:
An Interdimensional Traveler’s Codex
My two major works in book form (both available free on this site) are directly related to interdimensional travel. My sci-fi epic on the singularity, Parallel Journeys , is about interdimensional travelers.
Opening premise:
Does this reality feel fundamentally wrong to you? What if the truths of what lies hidden are exposed in the journal of a survivor of an extinction-level event in our near future? His journals have been sent back in time to warn us about the perilous edge between extinction and evolutionary metamorphosis on which the fate of our species trembles.
The survivor writing to us is an empathic 18-year-old named Tommy. He’s been sealed in a three-acre biosphere with just one other person, and the outside world has been radio-silent for the three years of their enclosure. Tommy is in telepathic contact with someone living during our time who may hold the key to an evolutionary metamorphosis. The journals, entitled Parallel Journeys, have been sent back in time to inspire you to create your own metamorphic butterfly effects to help our species avoid extinction and survive in a new form.
Parallel Journeys, can be read free on this site. If you prefer Audible, Kindle or physical versions, those are all available on Amazon.
My book on the Singularity Archetype, Crossing the Event Horizon — Human Metamorphosis and the Singularity Archetype now has a second edition available free on this site.
