Lost on the Way to Armenia

 The title says it all.  We've waited for what seemed like an opportune time.  We have the houses sold and most of our "stuff" sold off, donated or put into storage.  What we take with us, we take as backpacks.  Imagine that, our entire world of possessions in a backpack.  Well, we don't really have to imagine it because two years ago we spent four months taking cruise ships as transportation to South America and to Spain and Africa.  We found we had enough "stuff" to either enjoy a hot-tub on a cruise ship, or enough winter clothing to manage a trip into snowy areas, enough to hike a mountain or just the right accoutrements for a formal dinner invitation by the city president of a Spanish exclave (Melilla). So packing is not our problem.  Getting our responsibilities reduced by divesting ourselves of houses (and lawn mowers, cars, hot water heaters, heating bills, etc.,) has not been part of the problem.  Money to travel is not a problem....

 Someone, or to be more truthful, more than one person has noted that the times of our life and of the greater world travel in circles.  There is a certain repetition to the world, the seasons, our history, ourselves and time itself.  But, it has been said that rather than simply being a single circle, there are many circles, each one slightly offset from the last along a line of travel.  Such a diagrammatic thought experiment allows us to envision that each circle repeats, but with slight modifications, slight changes and slight perturbations that give it a unique formula, similar to the original but also slightly more evolved. We often say that the repetitions in our lives create a sense of order and, for many, a sense of purpose.  Ritual has reason and reason has its foundations in ritual.  Societies and their peoples define their lives with the cyclical natures of the sun, in separate yet similar circadian rhythms.  Waking up each morning, we submi...

All great journeys start with a small disturbance in the ordinary.  It is a question that flickers in the depths of the imagination and a door that is left slightly ajar in the mind. Sometimes it arises like a curiosity trying to clear its throat Sometimes its an incessant restlessness tapping at the hands of time on a watch.  A great journey begins at the exact moment that staying put becomes the stranger choice. And that moment of wanderlust has again arrived. ..... Pull out an old fashioned globe of our planet.  For this exercise, a Google map will not be sufficient.  It is sometimes necessary to hold the tangible in our hand in order to begin to imagine the inconceivable with any sense of understanding.  Now that you've pulled out your globe, or, in the case of you, the dear reader, your virtually imagined globe, spin it and drop a finger at random at some point, stopping the spin and igniting your imagination.  Look at where your finger landed and read...