Off to a Journey

I love the metaphor and reality of journey. It opens me to things not fully planned, nor fully planable. It opens me to surprise. It opens me to patience. It opens me to seeing bigger or perhaps just differently.

Sometimes the journey is over cement, as was the case for this snail on my front sidewalk recently. Sometimes the journey is over softer and more fluid landscapes. Sometimes the journey is deep into the forests. As has always been true, the journey is both inner and outer.

I’m embarking on a journey today. It’s a trip north to Sointula, an island off the northeast coast of Canada’s Vancouver Island. The context is a Men’s Retreat, where nine of us will gather for four days of story, song, silence, dream shares, cooking, land, ocean, camaraderie, mutuality, mystery, willingness to be moved, love, kindness, clarity. It’s a gathering that has been important to me over the years with men old and new in shared wonder and in shared sorting.

I love the metaphor and reality of journey. I’ll pause writing this blog next week, and likely the following too, for the journey that follows this journey, and for some writing that is waking my heart, my explorations, and the kind of convenings that I next wish to birth and offer to others seeking home in the world.

If you wish a few resources that I’ve written previously on journey, try these below. And as has always been true, reach back with a comment, or invitation to listen together, or or invitation to explore how such journey can help in teams, communities, organizations — it is work and journey that I love.

• An Orientation to Guide (some words and prose from a previous blogpost — November 2020)
• For Guidance in These Times: 8 Orientations to Grounded Journey (an 18 minute podcast reflecting and connected to the above blogpost — November 2020)