running returning

I am afraid it's been so long that I wrote here, that whatever faithful audience I had has stopped reading. Oh well, that wouldn't be the end of the world, only if blogs were worlds. Parallel universes and such. A possibility, I suppose.

My trip is over. I am now an unemployed, vagabond drifter, no longer a traveller "proper," as a loaded touring bike helped testify to. Two days now in Vancouver. Two in Washington for this, a few more days in Vancouver, and then . . . home? Ah yes. Home is that little brown bungalow in Oakbank that is now up for sale. Home is a brick house in Wolseley, stained with memories. Home is a sunroom on Beverley Street. Home is the back room of the old Banff Post Office. Home is this apartment. Home is my tent pitched on a grassy knole. Home will be many more things, too.

If my soul were a compass, I feel like it would still be wavering, still trying to find true North. Like all the peaks I climbed during my summer in the Rockies, we'd round a bend, striving for the peak, and then the true peak would emerge, far off in the distance and luring us further with its increased altitude. How much of life is like this, "a striving and a striving and an ending in nothing," as Olive Schreiner says in one of my favourite novels. But yet this is not dismal, it is not empty. That our strivings end not in our own great worth, but that our worth was and is there anyway and all along, is of great consolation to me. But I'd still like to find North. And if not, South or West or East would do, too.

It's good to be back to my virtual home. There is still room for rambling . . . have no fear! And if I'm only talking to myself and my few relentless readers, that is fine by me.