I-Ching 56 The Wanderer

There’s something very comforting about hiding behind a pair of sunglasses—something that has nothing to do with the sun but everything to do with protection. I was protecting myself from being seen. My eyes say it all and on this day it was passing judgment with every look.

It was noon, and the sun was beaming down on me, and I could feel the burn on my skin, both soothing and painful. I was thousands of miles away from the last place I called home and nowhere closer to finding the permanent place where I could lay my head to rest.

If I thought about it, I couldn’t remember the last time I ever felt that word with true meaning- home. What was home at this stage of my life? What was it that I wanted? I sat outdoors at a cafe, hiding to people-watch and sipping a hot chai.

Even with the sun shining on me, the chai felt soothing going down. Fire had been something on my mind recently. I had recently been through enough of my own fire to catapult me into a transformative process.

I knew I was beginning new, partly by choice, dealt in fate. “Never ignore the path,” I hear my grandma’s voice in my head. Now, it’s something I say to myself every time I feel the fears of uncertainty slowly creep in.

I looked around the busy streets of St.Kilda on Easter weekend—all the locals and visitors, including myself. How many of us were wanderers, seeking the next place to explore? How many of us had no idea what we wanted or where we were going?

I saw the smiles on people's faces, and I asked myself what was there to smile about. Christ died on this day. It’s not like anyone cared. It was a day off. Maybe I was irritated because following this spiritual journey, this path had been more about suffering than anything else. Poor Jesus died on his spiritual journey so that we could get drunk and eat chocolate.

I couldn’t find it in me to rest and enjoy where this journey had taken me. What would it take just to relax? Everyone else could. In fact, that was the issue; people could give a shit, I gave too much of a shit. I had done everything I could to speed up the process of my future and cultivate the energy to make sure my future would be what I needed to be.

But I should have known better; you can make plans, but the universe had its own ideas for me. “Stay on the path,” I say to myself, trying to convince my mind that this would all be worth it in the end.

I took my chai and decided to walk along the beach, observing behind my glasses and hoping for insights to lead me somewhere closer to the next place I’d hopefully call home. The beach was packed. I was shocked at how comfortable people made themselves in such proximity to each other.

The water was shining pure diamonds, and I had a flashback from reading right before I had packed up and left for this journey. I had gotten a card from an Oracle deck called Biome. The reading stated that it was part of my journey to explore the biome of many places and integrate myself into the environment.

I looked around. A deep sadness came over me. I was so busy trying to find a place to call mine when, in reality, Earth was home. It didn’t feel that easy. The world was in a crisis about borders, who belonged where, and whether they could belong.

We all share it like we take care of it, but most of us just take what we need from Earth to enjoy it. Nurturing Earth was a different story.

Earth was getting hotter every year, and here I was, taking in some of the highest levels of UV in the world. People were busy getting in their beach days, and here I was, thinking about our last days.

This may be part of the path: living with the hard truth that none of this will last. Nothing will be the same, and it’s not intended to be. A few days earlier, I canceled my return flight to the place I had once considered home.

I remember spending my last days in the mountains. Deep down, I knew it would be some time before I saw them again. I am on a journey to experience different biomes before they ceased to exist because they were endangered.

Could it be possible that the rest of my journey was meant to be spent exploring the planet we call home? Life was more than a few holidays a year, and I refused to live a life where a calendar told me I could celebrate my time based on what they told me.

I don’t want to be permitted to lay in the sand. None of it felt right, and it was as if it was an impending doom that we all ignored because it was too much to process and too much to allow to interfere with the reality of where we were headed as humanity.

Even then, knowing what we knew, we still chose to ignore it all and have a drink instead. It wasn’t like I wanted us all to save the world; I wished for us all to choose differently. To live in harmony, a mutual symbiosis instead of the constant parasitism, we seemed to thrive off. How could I relax?

The heat from the sun seemed to put some sort of pressure on me that was building in my heart. The biome card made much more sense because I had asked what I was meant to learn.

I was meant to come back to the beginning of time, back to the fire. At that moment on that beach, I could hear Gnossiene No.1 playing as if the world had gone silent, and it was all I could listen to. What did it matter where home was anymore?

We were all so lucky to even experience this. This spiritual journey was much more than my suffering. It was about the places in the world that would take me to all the places that would soon be purified by the sun, to the point of no return, to become something new. I was becoming something new under this fire as well. My resurrection was taking place.

All the things I thought I knew about myself were slowly dissipating. My rebirth was constant. I took the last sip of the chai, and I savored every moment of its taste. I needed to enjoy these moments I would never have again.

I don’t want this to end, but it's not up to me. All I could do was pour my love into as many things as possible and connect with the environments I would be in. I let myself relax as I soaked in the realization that it didn’t really matter where I ended up.

A door would open and soon enough I could lay my head in peace knowing that as long as I stayed true to my intentions, things would fall into place like they always have. The trick is to never stop moving, to keep the energy flowing, to keep creating, and to create for the highest good.

It dawned on me that it was a shame to think I had no home when the world always welcomed me with open arms. I was greatly protected because I stayed on the path. To ignore the path is to ignore your purpose, your humanity.

At the core of who we are, we need each other. Earth was home, and it had never ignored us. It had always given us what we needed. My greatest sin would be to ignore nature, which is my home, and home is where the heart is.