The only place I could put this one is right here on the Pinnacle. It was the adventure of a lifetime:
Picture it. Sixty-four years of living, and I had never been abroad. I had no foreign language at my disposal, not enough in funds to indulge in paid lodging beyond the meanest sort, and just three or four friends scattered across the face of Europe. That was the context in which I set out for an entire summer of rambling the Continent, in 1991.
I did have one or two uncommon things going for me. I had learned to live on life's edge. I had twenty years of practiced skill behind me, in an artful kind of living that I like to think of as a return to Innocence - consisting in equal parts of faith, trust and pure adventurous instinct. I also had the priceless gift of a list of potential helpers . . . people who knew me not at all, but had committed themselves to hosting peaceful travelers along their way.
But even that revolved around an infinite sense of trust, for more often than not I hadn't even contacted any of these folks before I was virtually on their doorstep. So it had Pinnacle status in a second way, being the culmination of a twenty-year trail down an essentially Taoist path, cultivating a willing acceptance of whatever should come along.
Let me briefly recap that trail, so you can appreciate its significance as a foundation for what follows . . .
In 1971, after years of futile struggle as just another drone in the beehive, I gave in to the desperate dream that I might yet have some say in the shaping of my life - even at the age of 44 - and dropped out of the ratrace. It put me on a trail of complete insecurity, and began the learning of life's inner forces: a vast world of supportive hidden resources that we simply forgot how to tap into when we turned our attention toward controlling nature and the world in which we live.
The early stages of this dropout trail took me into the arts of 'living by my wits,' as it has sometimes been called: creating personal 'bread trips' (non-job ways of earning a few dollars), discovering barter and how to forage for my needs, paring down those needs to a level of minimalism that yet remained within my limits of tolerance, in this new and scary world of making-do without the guarantee of a weekly paycheck.
Before long, I came to see a strange kind of magic at work. I was too lucky, too often at the right moment, to continue to see it as chance - something deeper must be happening. This began my learning in earnest, and I gradually came to live the life of a Taoist: tuning-in to the flow of an energy that was like an inner guidance system.
Five years into this stream, I was willing to trust it entirely and had gone beyond the last remnants of material security (which had not been much to begin with). I reached a zero bank balance, and handled it with the equanimity of a veteran metaphysician.
By that time, however, I had settled into a network-nest that fostered its own kind of security: I was publishing a small donation-based magazine called Black Bart, and living among the people whom this magazine (and spin-off workshops) had connected me with, in California's richly alternative Bay Area - encouraging the persistent illusion that I had simply structured for myself a world to suit my own purposes, in this very supportive environment. I knew otherwise, at some deep level, and was resolved to put this awareness to some further test.
The occasion arrived in 1985, when I put caution behind me (Black Bart had been left behind, too, a couple years earlier), and set out on the road, hitch-hiking around the country to see where the fates would bring me, and how I should manage without that comfortable network-nest that I had grown secure in. The fates brought me to the Northwest, where I began from scratch, all over again - at the age of 58. The tale of what evolved in the Northwest can be found, in this site, as Derelict Days in the Northwest, on the Winding Trail. (That tale is, in fact, a suitable preface to Innocence Abroad.)
Thus, I demonstrated to myself, all over again, that the hidden world of enabling energies is a very real thing - reliable to the point of chancing one's very survival on it. But there still remained a nagging persistence of illusion - not that "I had done it, myself," for I knew this not to be so, but that my developed skill at 'living on the edge' had been a necessary element of my 'success' in the Northwest. After all, I had become acutely alert to all the nuances of getting along in the cracks of American culture: I knew where and how to forage for my needs, I knew the many ways of 'working the system' for its benefits, my very facility with language was a platform from which every need could be pursued to its fulfillment. It surely could not work for me, say, in a foreign land abroad, where I'd be entirely handicapped by a lack of fluency with the language, itself.
And now, of course, I know otherwise. Language familiarity or 'knowing the system' has absolutely nothing to do with it. Everywhere I found myself, abroad, the hidden energies worked as well as they ever had at home. I was as completely embedded in a world of essential security - in Poland, in Bulgaria, in Greece - as I had ever been in California!
Thus, the journey you are about to embark on, figuratively speaking, provides the absolute proof that our lives are blessed with an inner force - which I tend to call Providence - that can be relied upon and believed.
Strangely, it seems to work best for us only in moments of risk and need. But I would guess that these are the only times we allow it to happen, without jumping into the breach with some measure of control . . . to end up never knowing what might have happened.
If you are ready,then (and I certainly am), let's move along to the opening of Innocence Abroad
Your alternate option is to return to the Staging Area for routing elsewhere in (or out of) the site.