After returning from Europe, I reluctantly made my way back to Coolville, knowing that my sacred journey was over and dreading the prospect of reintegration. I had spent five weeks in Europe and covered England, Scotland, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, and Istanbul. I had traveled with family and traveled alone. I had immersed myself in European and Islamic cultures and gotten used to hotel rooms, trains, and restaurants. That feeling I always get on the road–that I can do this forever–had returned, and my body’s and life rhythm had adjusted accordingly. Now I would be back at work in the modest hamlet of Coolville. Joseph Campbell notes that the “return crossing,” when a sojourner has to come back to the everyday world, is the most difficult part of the journey, more difficult even than facing his own death. He was right. Greater than the fear of dying on a journey is the fear of dying while not on a journey, one of those slow deaths that creeps up on you while you are working too hard or being bored. “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Thoreau remarked. I have had enough quiet desperation in my life. Give me the desperation of a traveler in need of adventure or refuge anytime.

Soon enough I was swept back into the everyday life, but I tried to bring my sacred journey with me as much as I could. People are strangely incurious about other people’s lives. Sure, I was asked about my trip, but I deliberately did not give many details, and no one asked for more. I actually think that is fine because there is no way to represent this trip in the everyday world anyway without diminishing it. Suffice it to say it was exhilarating, beautiful, magical, terrifying, lonely, joyful, disorienting, and sacred. These things I carried with me as I returned to work. I felt stretched between two worlds, and while I saw the benefits of my life in Coolville, I also would have gone back on the road in a heartbeat if I had the means, and maybe even if I hadn’t. But there is work to do here, sacred work that only I can do at this moment and in this place. Frankly, it is the buffaloes themselves that keep me here. We need each other.

For the last three weeks I have worked a number of twelve-hour days and every weekend except one. It appears I have a weekend free in October and another in November. My work load is impossible, and I see no way to complete the tasks ahead of me. Furthermore, Sancho is a new mother and is probably not returning to the Buffalo Center. And to add to it all, we have a self-study due in December, the fortieth anniversary of the Buffalo Center this year, and I go up for promotion to full professor. But I refuse to be desperate, quietly or otherwise. I have a life, and I lived it last year and this summer. I have a new associate director, Willow, who now takes care of the community, so I do not have to worry, as I did last year, about hanging out there, though I hope I still do some. I have a life, and I plan to live it.

So I am working hard but looking to live. Who knows what shape my life with take this year? Who knows what tragedies and joys will come, and what feelings will accompany them. I know only that I want to say yes to life in whatever form it appears. I want the pain and the joy, the heartache and the bliss, I want to live. Walt sings me a song tonight, one he has sung to me many times before. But tonight I hear it most clearly, and I offer it to those who want to live and to you Camerado.

 

As I lay with Head in your Lap, Camerado 

AS I lay with my head in your lap, Camerado,
The confession I made I resume—what I said to you in the open air I resume:
I know I am restless, and make others so;
I know my words are weapons, full of danger, full of death;
(Indeed I am myself the real soldier;
It is not he, there, with his bayonet, and not the red-striped artilleryman;)
For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws, to unsettle them;
I am more resolute because all have denied me, than I could ever have been had all accepted me;
I heed not, and have never heeded, either experience, cautions, majorities, nor ridicule;
And the threat of what is call’d hell is little or nothing to me;
And the lure of what is call’d heaven is little or nothing to me;
…Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.