“Come wander with me, love
Come wander with me
Away from this sad world
Come wander with me”
♫ Jeff Alexander – Come wander with me ♫
Why do we long for elsewhere?
The geographical cure: “the belief that whatever problems I’m facing at the moment will magically disappear if only I change zip codes for a day, a month, a lifetime.”
– Fred Bahnson
How can we leave at all? The house we used to live in, now lives in us. The creaking door, the children in the garden, the specs of paint on the ceiling.
home . origin . memory
The past imprints itself on us, drawing lines across our faces. Traces of who we are, where we’ve been. Just like paths, lines in the earth, traces of all the past journeys of those before us. We follow and re-create.
character . repetition . consequence
‘Er’ in Indo-European meant ‘to move’
‘Er’ became ‘err’ in English
erring is moving, straying from the path
But how do we create the path without straying, erring? How do we stop smoking without believing we have just smoked our last cigarette, when we are probably wrong?
Who are we without knowing?
we must learn to be
without certainty . map . destination
home in the unknown
“A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. … It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. … It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.”
– Herman Hesse