Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. they are much more like you than you believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.*
Anne Lamott

It’s where we are though not
where we have to be –
We can take all our screwed-broken-clingy-scaredness
on a journey, out of the familiar and into
wonder and mystery.

First of all into wonder,
As first Philip Newell and then
Robert Macfarlane speak of it:

Our journey of wonder into the landscape of the natural world is, at the same time, a pilgrimage into the inner landscape of the soul.**

Stephen Graham‘s also among a line of pedestrians who saw that wandering and wondering had long gone together; that their kingship as activities extended beyond their half-rhyme^

Then into mystery, as the journey is
imagined by James Carse and then
AleXander McManus:

It is one thing to see something remarkable appearing inexplicably in the world, it is quite another thing to see the world itself as remarkable and all existence is inexplicable.^^

This is the Path of Fire. It cannot be diagrammed or decoded. It must be entered like a mystery. Not because the way is safe, but because something sacred stirs within the flame.*^

Have I forgotten our screwed-broken-clingy-scaredness? –
Not at all, we just haven’t let it get in the way of
what we are equally capable of –
A great search, a hero’s journey – and
who knows what might happen on the way?

*Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations For Mortals;
**Philip Newell’s The Great Search, seeing nature as a means of returning to our home in Earth and soul;
^Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, how wandering can upset and reset the way we see things;
^^James Carse’s Breakfast at the Victory, understanding that beneath our labels and explanations, life is far more mysterious;
*^AleXander McManus’ Blue Moments, inviting us into a modern day mystic’s understanding of the hero’s journey .