It's interesting, this view of myself as a mythic figure, someone destined to journey through his life alone, hooked into the silences, glimpsed on the fringes, with all the time and space available to both become expansive and to wallow in indecision from too much choice. I remind myself that I began this trip driving across country ten years ago last September, and that apart from a few robust chapters, I've been able to self-fulfill that image, to live it to the best of my ability, and to become extremely attached to the comforts of the definition it provides.

I feel that somewhere along the line, I may have forgotten the heart of that romantic intent for the sake of the pretty shell around it. This was meant to be a journey of adventure, to live my life as an experiment and to make it somewhat extraordinary. Lately, as change has thrust its multi-hued canvasses across the eaves of my porch and began brewing in cast iron stew pots a concoction that smells of the thickness of exotic meats and many-syllabled spices, I have frowned out my priest hole and closed my shutters. It is far easier to dwell in the small spaces I construct than to fully accept what my beliefs bring me: constant challenge, constant call for transformation, the constant fire of a steel lupine lock-gaze and the tensed haunches begging for action.

But now I am in love with a woman from England who demands of me that I am what I claim to be and that I believe what I say I believe, that I am what I am without the pretense of selective faith, that I act as I act through self-respect and lovingkindness. I am being brought a relationship that will require me to expand and heal. I am being brought a situation that threatens the delicate soul shell I build and sometimes fill with distraction and depression. I am being asked to grow up, and given the challenge of doing so without becoming an adult. I am being asked to end my patterns, to own and ask for the spaces I wish, to take the things I wish to take. But more than anything, I'm being asked to choose the world I have always said I was choosing, to truly accept what these last ten years of solid intent have brought to my door.

It frightens me to be truthful to myself, to act even through fear slavers and shrieks. But I feel a sense of blossoming here, that a very large shift has been building and being co-created for a number of years. And like a small child who doesn't want to go to school, I'd rather roll over and sleep longer, pretend that my summer continues and will never end. But the next day comes, and the structure and the expansion of school is full of joy, and I will find myself sniffing pencil lead and fondly doing my homework and stretching myself sometimes until it hurts in order to become more flexible.

The morning child is not comforted by what the mid-day teen will find, and so it's a process of conversation and self-trust. I will need to step out of this divorce apartment, shake off the stagnation skin of hibernation, push back against the writer's cramp, and immerse fully into the second world. I will need to finally leave behind the fiction of myself for the much more interesting, viable, and dynamic fact. I will need to open and soften, choose spaces and invest in the mindful efficiency of moments.

But I can do these things. This, after all, is the adventure of my life.