Farther On

Life on the road with no real home and no anchors for reality other than the money in my pocket, the people that I find around me as I move place to place, and a general notion of where I would like to go and what I would like to see can seem a tenuous existence in the early hours of the morning.  This is especially true this morning when I struggle with my desire to be on the road; to be free of emotional and spiritual pain and confusion and with the desire to live and experience new love in a new relationship as one of those hopes I had when the kickstand first went up months ago in Niagara.

This morning I hear the lyrics from the Jackson Browne’s song Farther On from his iconic record Late For the Sky:

In my early years I hid my tears
And passed my days alone
Adrift on an ocean of loneliness
My dreams like nets were thrown
To catch the love that I'd heard of
In books and films and songs
Now there's a world of illusion and fantasy
In the place where the real world belongs

When we have that moment of “Aha” that this relationship we are in and this life we are leading is at an end and our personal state is one of aloneness and unhappiness, we imagine as in the lyric a better life based on the ideal of love that we become attached to through all the societal inputs that we are exposed to.  Life on the road brings me in contact with many people who are wonderful and have a beautiful light about them as they live there lives.  Because I chose to live and lead by heart I am vulnerable to be drawn to their individual light and attracted to their individual charms that define their uniqueness and that make them loveable.  It gets tricky as the last 2 lines of the lyric state to separate the fantasy and self-delusion from the real world of two people living their lives.

As I wrote in the Time after Time blog spot our attachments limit and taint or filter our love experience and we need to be patient and work with the timing and alignments to keep the relationships real and functional because at any given moment we are at different spots personally and with the world around us.  Often times it is one of the two in the “two of us” that needs to carry the load and make the adjustments through belief and hope in the relationship’s future because the external world is overwhelming the other of “us”.

We need to manage our feelings in the moment of making these adjustments to keep aligned.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say
It could be I've lost my way
Though I keep a watch over the distance
Heaven's no closer than it was yesterday

There is such a sense of aloneness when you are the one that is making the adjustments to keep the alignment.  That feeling that you are no closer to you goal of a healthy loving relationship than you were yesterday or in some cases establishing a new relationship when the basics are there but the alignments are against it at the point in time where you stand.

And the lyric finishes:

Now the distance leads me farther on
Though the reasons I once had are gone
I keep thinking I'll find what I'm looking for
In the sand beneath the dawn

But the angels are older
They can see that the sun's setting fast
They look over my shoulder
At the vision of paradise contained in the light of the past
And they lay down behind me
To sleep beside the road till the morning has come
Where they know they will find me
With my maps and my faith in the distance
Moving farther on

And so there we stand in that dawn light as it floods into the room under the blackout curtain.  The reasons to keep going do change and we need to look at the reasons and see if they are valid and consistent to the course we have chosen for ourselves or are they compromises.

Then, we go out to face the day with our faith and the maps of our beliefs and desires either moving on away from what had promise but never work for us or moving towards the love and fulfillment we want, prepared to toil in solitude in the garden to achieve the alignments.

Listen to Jackson singFarther On

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RObVZ7KuREY