I am writing this now from a precipice. A place from which one can fall or soar. I am not the first to come to this place, but I am in the first wave. There are hoards of innocents who are starting the caravan I began many years ago. Before it was a caravan, and before there was even a path.
We made the path by walking.
We bruised our heals when our shoes wore down. We slept outside in the rain will little more than a tarp to keep us dry, and many of us had no tarp at all, and so we covered ourselves with leaves and branches. We foraged for sustenance, We suffered hardships alone that were new and terrifying, and which we traded for the old familiar hardships within the Certainty of Death and Taxes.
We traded those Certainties for solitude and poverty.
We traded them for instability and homelessness, but the sunsets we witnessed alone on the road were breathtaking . We learned to walk on an imaginary ground without sinking into the dirt and getting sucked back into the grey grid we had fought so valiantly to leave.
We learned to cultivate a semblance of a whisper of a rumor of a truth from the ruins of the cheap plastic lies we previously had paid dearly for, and we learned to savor them like Manna from heaven. We learned to speak with a God we had been taught to mock, and to hear a loving and powerful response in the pattern of the map of our surroundings.
This is a story of deliverance.