Did you stay on the path you started on?
Did you know the way?
Did you follow someone's map?
Right at the edge of this picture is Cape Blanco, the westernmost point in the contiguous United States. Standing here you realize that the entire Western World is behind you!
The entire North America continent!
Someone had to step out into the wild and explore this part of the world.Someone had to set sail and chart new territories. Someone had to draft maps, identify any new fruit, new tubers, new berries, new fowl. Lewis and Clark explorations of the territories west of the Mississippi were difficult on many levels.
(The town of Port Orford is the oldest town-site on this coast, founded in 1859.)
Every time we step out of our comfort zone, every time we are surprised by life's twists, we are doing what humans have done for millions of years, blazing new trails and adapting. With each mile into a new territory we have expanded our ability to thrive in adversities.
Each generation adds bits of new trails for all of us to follow comfortably.
We just have to remember to write down all the steps, all the turns, all the highlights, so future populations can follow.
This describes physical territories.
How do we chart emotional ones?
I needed to read this today. I come from pioneer stock. My grandmother homesteaded all by herself. My ancestors came to the Eastern shores of this country just 30 years after the first settlers. After the Revolutionary War, another generation of my people set out to settle in Ohio on land that was given to them as payment of a pension for serving in the war. I come from this kind of stock.
ReplyDeleteThey had to be resilient, adaptive, and able to leave their comfort zones to do what they did.
I think we chart these new challenges by having resilience. We get trapped when we think life is supposed to be a journey that is easy. We have to learn to cope with change and have belief in our own resilience in order to bounce back during difficult times.
I needed to remember this because sometimes those bread crumbs we left along the way are no longer there, and we have to look inside for our inner compass.
We begin to chart our emotional journey with love and compassion for ourselves. We must own our emotional journey so that it can nurture us and make us more than we were before. For if we do not we can not breathe and our spirit will be broken.
ReplyDeletei think we each begin over again and again, the future generations beginning at their own starting points, as we began at ours. horizons might look different but i think this might be a myth. it is always the same horizon, we wake, we breathe, we look - what is between here and death? do we ever make more of it than those who came before us? if we are lucky we only manage to make enough of it.
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erin
that is what great about life, we can follow a path but who's path are we really following? I like to think each day is a new path, a new page and we try to leave breadcrumbs in hopes that others will follow. Some will and some won't but sometimes I think we leave the breadcrumbs for ourselves.
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