The Traveller’s Tale

A young soldier who survived the winter-war prepares for her next journey. She assumes the identity of ‘Traveller’ and begins to gather food and medicines. There is only one problem: she does not know what she will need. For no one knows where she will go and what she will do. This knowledge begins to dawn on her and a haze of fear begins to cloud her heart-gaze. She realizes she is standing at the edge of a precipice and the path forward looks like a terrifying and choiceless plunge into the abyss.

She begins to desperately hoard food and medicines and clothes. Anything that might help is taken. She pores over old tomes and spends her days in the archives trying to envision the final destination of the journey and draw up the shape of her map. She desperately asks villagers about their journeys and asking for their maps, blind to the knowledge that no two journeys will be the same. She is frantic and afraid because she fears that the journey will lead her astray and she will lead herself astray and she will not survive the journey and she will lose her shape.

She steps further and further from the rooted oak-center of herself and takes bigger and bigger ground-eating steps and travels voraciously and gazes distractedly around her, for a yawning, dissatisfied gaping abyss-mouth is opening within her and it needs more and more and more.

But she has forgotten simple truths. The journey she will undertake is unknown to even the gods, and the precipice is not a precipice — that is merely an illusion-distortion created by the fog of fear. The path onwards is indeed only and simply a path. There is fear, but there is joy too, for the very unknowability is a joy. The journey itself will be a glorious shaping and the final destination that she will rest in matters less than the undertaking.

The traveller shapes the journey and the journey shapes the traveller. She has forgotten to allow herself vulnerability in the dark face of the unknown. She has forgotten to carry faith and hope and strength like a torch, and to remember that a seedling does not blossom into a fine and mighty oak overnight. For she carries within her all that she needs, and she has only to take the first step forth courageously and vulnerably and calmly, to begin blossoming.