Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Flying into the Abyss

So this blog has been quiet for the last couple of months, life in the real world has taken up too much of my time to allow me to post anything of note and I never wanted this space to become just another area for me to simply paste links to other sites. However circumstances have changed now and I should hopefully not only be able to post regularly for a while but I'll also have plenty of interesting things to post about.

Tomorrow I hit the road. My current life is packed away in cardboard boxes, stowed in my kindly parents loft, my new life fits neatly into a backpack and is defined solely by usefulness and weight. With my tortoise like home on my back I'm crossing the high seas and landing in Penang, Northern Malaysia, for 3 months. There I'll be training martial arts until I can walk on rice paper without ripping it, do mid-air box splits in slow motion and master the 'Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique'.

In Carlos Castaneda's 'The teaching's of Don Juan' the titular magician said that travel is a method of initiation, now I believe whatever you think of this fictional/real characters existence he was right on this account. Like the fool in the tarot stepping blindly into the precipice you throw yourself out into the unknown, deprived of sleep, shifted from your time zone, detached from the sign posts of culture and peer group that have constantly reflected your own assumptions, you are forced to confront how much of what you perceive as you is simply a collective hallucination, a product of your environment and the culture that nurtured you.

It my hope that I can share some of this initiation here in the virtual world, so expect blood, sweat, tears and waxing on and off...Next stop Malaysia!

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Howdy Adam, so your adventure begins! I've caught it in mid-air, and look forward to reading up the rest of your journey. You'll be hearing from me again, though at least you'll have new techniques for trying to fend me off ;)

5:16 am, March 28, 2006  

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