Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.

From Antonio Machado’s, “Traveler There Is No Road”

Just keep walking. Just keep walking. Just keep walking.

I think about Pema Chodron who writes about life falling apart and back together. I think about leaping and trusting in nets. I think about rainbows with pots of gold. I think about the fact many roads start as desire paths. I think about the truth of a message communicated across languages.

We are all travelers and our paths are our own. Born into original grace. Curious and wise in miraculous ways. We learn to crawl, stand, and walk. Breaking it down makes it all seem so simple, but it is not. The journey to taking our first steps is not easy, and it does not get any easier once we are up and walking.

Faith. Trust. Courage. Vision. Hope. Strength. Curiosity. Steel. Paths are made of all that. E.L. Doctorow explains, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Though he said this about writing, I think it applies to our life path as well. Our paths can feel like driving at night in the fog. Our headlights might be dim. We might even get a flat tire. We might be hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. It is then that we must remember to just keep driving. Just keep walking. One breath at a time. One step at a time. We can make our whole trip that way. (The good news is life is about both dark and light.)

I write this mostly as a reminder to myself. As a traveler at heart, I have seen darkness. I have run out of gas around midnight 30 minutes outside of Missoula, Montana after seeing a Russian Circus. I have found the Southern Cross on the South Island of New Zealand. I have seen the fires as Ogoh-ogoh burn during Nyepi in Bali. The darkness abounds in each. The path is unclear. The lesson is to keep walking.