Wayfaring Stranger

Welcome to my new travel blog.

This isn't necessarily a blog about travel deals or what cool spots people will ruin next, but rather a blog about chasing nonfiction stories I want to write about. I resigned my instructor position at a university a few months ago in order to dedicate at least this year, as Thoreau says, to "follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment." The title of my blog and this post come from Johnny Cash's song "Wayfaring Stranger," which reminds us we're all temporary travelers and witnesses of this world. We do our work while we can.

I began the year reading books, starting with Erling Kagge's Silence in the Age of Noise, and trying to quiet the negative thoughts in my own head, all of which screamed, What the hell are you doing? You gave up your steady job to, what, write? You're a no talent ass clown, Parker. You should have played it safe. I read a few more books, including one that spent years on my dusty bookshelves: Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In my college classes, I've taught hero narratives and walking away narratives (a sub-genre of hero narratives), but I never thought we are all the heros, metaphorical or otherwise, of our own stories and that I could actually answer the inner call that was unsatisfied with life as I was living it. I've marked many passages in Campbell's book, but the following passage is the fuel in the tank as I take off toward Laredo, Texas, tomorrow in order to hunt down homeless poet Sidney Setzer and begin telling his story:  

"But whether small or great, and no matter what the stage or grade of life, the call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration––a rite, or moment, of spiritual passage, which, when complete, amounts to a dying and a birth. The familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand."   

Shaved head and clean chin; I'm ready to begin again