For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to travel the world. That desire has often taken a back-seat, hidden beneath commitments of bringing up a family and illusionary edges to what I’ve believed is possible. But the mystery and adventure of it remains compelling, drawing me into lands and experiences not yet even dreamed.
At the same time I’ve always felt I’m searching for something in life. Searching and waiting. Often I’ve been clear what that is, other times I’ve just lived with the emptiness of its absence.
In recent years I’ve seen how these two things were previously linked in some way. Part of the reason I’ve wanted to travel had been a faint hope of finding what I’ve been looking for ‘out there.’ A never-ending quest, fuelled by the emptiness and blindness to what has always been within me. Always somehow waiting for it to find me.
I’d dreamt of meeting and finding that thing out on the road, perhaps in foreign lands and beaches. A chance meeting in a roadside cafe.
What is it I’d been looking for? Hoping for? Waiting for?
Connection. A deep feeling of loving, belonging, acceptance and connection.
And fun too!
Until recently, that feeling also remained a dream. But like a forbidden fruit, I have tasted beautiful moments of that life-long-craved connection, when everything around us stops and nothing else exists outside of the experience of us. A spiritual communion played in a physical realm of unity.
Or more simply, moments when nothing else at all mattered. Time, space, location, vocation, bank balances, temperatures, weather and tides, all an irrelevance outside of our beautiful meeting of souls.
And the times it showed up, it did so unexpectedly, when I wasn’t waiting and right where I always was. I didn’t have to go anywhere, do anything, or try and be anyone. In fact, it showed up whilst I was simply living being who I already am. In some ways it looks like it showed up when I had released any attachment I ever had to finding it. Not a giving up hope, but a surrendering to what is here now and allowing myself to be present to now.
Whilst those moments have been brief, short lived under circumstances I would prefer to be different, they have reminded me that what I have always desired in life is possible, and whilst I do still want to travel and see as much of the world as my time here will allow, I no longer feel the need to do that as part of a deeper search for something that had often felt both improbable and impossible.
And even more recently, in even more briefer moments, I have seen the source of that beautiful feeling of connection. Oh, how the gloriously romantic in me wants to believe it can only come from ‘the one.’ Yet, there’s been a deeper revealing of what it means to feel connected.
One of my mentors suggests that all each of us ever wants is an experience of our own heart, and in those moments of connection it feels like the image I often hold of myself disappears into the love of my heart. Of course, as a regular human being, I want to share such beautiful experiences, especially with someone with whom I’m intimate and love. But the source of those experiences is not from another, it is in the recognition of who I am and my own heart.
When I’ve thought that I needed someone I have suffered, simply because that someone cannot fulfil that which is within me.
When I truly see me and all that I am, I am fulfilled. Only I can love me the way I want to be loved, because I am the love that I think I want.
In the times of deeper connection all travel and going someplace else takes on a different meaning. It’s not the desperate longing it once was, but a sense of adventure to be shared. And its importance to me lessens as I hold dear the connection that I was searching for within that longing to travel.
So, to you, my dear ‘soulmate’, my dearest friend, partner, lover, accomplice in all adventures, whoever you be and wherever you are, yes I want you with me, I want to take the rest of this journey with you, to travel not only around the world but through this beautifully rich experience of life. Yes, come with me.
Come and join me, give life and love with me. It is this giving that is the sweetest joy of life.
My relationship with you will be one of giving and receiving, a dance of trust and knowing ourselves and each other.
I have seen me and know who I am and know what I have to give, with a clarity I’ve not felt before, whether you choose to see me or not. Who I am is not dependent on you and I don’t need you. But I do want you and want to give us to us.
In essence the search and the wait is over.
Seeing myself came in a single moment of realisation, and in that moment I realised, I wasn’t waiting for you, I was waiting for me.