Blood and guts of forgotten stories. I’ve spent a curiously long time stretching through truths I’ve already uncovered– as if the dust that rested on them would provide a new meaning once wiped clean.

Last night was the first night in two months that I had a dream that harken back to old magic. I’d slipped realms as a new story burst into being. I’d forgotten what it was to breathe in the dreamscape again. The nights have been so quiet that I’d begin to fear I lost the ability to find them.

In the first couple weeks of being back, I’d sat at the dinner table with my parents and asked them how many Odyssey-like dreams they’d had. Or if other compelling versions brought them nose to nose with the grander mysteries of life as they slept. My mother had a single dream that bordered on a nightmare that she shared. My father had a couple more of his own– including a prophetic dream that detailed the inside of an upstairs room at a family member's house that he’d never set foot in until years later.

But none of the other realms or lost gods have populated my dreams. No grand swirl of destiny and black maw of cosmic secrets that keeps me from ever truly doubting there’s more to this primordial soup.

I’ve been terrible at sitting at my desk and typing anything out. Even my pocket notebooks have smatterings of dust as I’ve gone from daily entries to weekly. The notes app on my phone is little better– though it does show creative pile-up as a single day can offer three or four entries if I’ve been present.

Otherwise, this stretch of living without deep reflection has characterized my return. The excess of reflection on Tsushima has made me gun-shy of digging too deep into my current thoughts.

Or maybe that’s the type of excuse that keeps you from putting pen to page.

I feel the excuse of thirty more odious than any other age I’ve been. Hitting my third decade has brought a catalog of weird rules and expectations that don’t align with where I’m at in my life.

It’s like sketching out the details for a DnD campaign without realizing what you’re playing is closer to Yahtzee.

I walked through a familiar hiking trail on Mt. Hood a week ago by my family’s old cabin. I hardly saw anyone on the nearby roads or trails as I turned my phone off and snapped pictures with my camera. I’d ended up on the mountain on a whim. A free weekend day and nothing planned– I’d wanted to escape the city but felt guilty about doing something alone. Maybe less guilty, but a heavy dose of irony as returning to Portland centered around not being alone. Not living a life in which the majority of my time was solitary.

But there I was– alone, save for the occasional chipmunk and tweeting bird. I walked through patches of sunlit pine and shivered from the cool mountain air. It may have been the last days of summer in the city, but up here? Fall had claimed its rightful place.

All of this centers around identity and the mutable nature of it.

I’ve returned from Japan able to speak conversationally fluent Japanese. I’ve solo-traveled across the world. Through rural areas and some of the biggest metropolises humanity has to offer. I would walk into restaurants and bars knowing that I’d get a story out if from simply by asking the right questions or providing an open face.

I kept wondering in the past two years how I’d change from my experience. How it would be that I’d interact with my old world after spending all that time away from it.

I see it in the intense sociality I’ve thrown myself into– the community service through coaching and the hesitancy when trying to jump over stone steps that I haven’t even had time to look down at.

I find it in the cramped reflections as action takes precedence when you (mistakenly) feel you’ve languished.

I know more and paradoxically, so much less. I read through my notebooks from the island and travels to see the pencil-shaded outlines of wishes that have come true. I read the center bent pages that had to curl around the pen I’d leave within– knowing that I’d panic if I was without it. Even if I didn’t have anything to write.

It’s in all of this that I believe that I know more about not knowing.

I think of this poem when I allow myself the time when not rushing between fields and friends– when the ache of readjusting doesn’t keep my eyes from turning inward.

Caminante, no hay camino / Traveler, There Is No Road

by Antonio Machado

“Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.”

Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.