So I started walking around the fields. It was a beautiful morning, one of those golden mornings that very rarely settle on earth. Empty as I was, my walking was light, long strides, the insects buzzing around, the birds flying from tree to tree, their lives within their melodies. Living within melodies. That sounded right. I have always lived in melodies. Constantly, I hear songs in my head, songs I have never heard anywhere else. Walking down a path through the green fields, cows and sheep, their bells echo through the valley. Around, the eight hills, filled with woods and darkness. I come from one of those hills. I started whistling, my heart racing, radiant like a child.

I didn’t have money. I didn’t even have a change of clothes. No food, no water. No medicines. You will think I am crazy, but that was a very objective and rational decision, that I had been postponing for too long. It is very easy to say that you are “burning your boats”, and starting anew. But people don’t really understand what “burning your boats” truly means. There is no way back. There is nothing you can do when you burn the boats. You can’t just take the boat back home and try to rebuild everything as it was, before you burned it down. When you make a decision that comes from your Soul, from the lips of your Beloved, burn the boats and never look back. Abandon everything and trust your own feet.

For only your own feet create the Path of your Liberation.

So, as you can imagine, I was forced to find a way to get, at the very least, some food and water. I could hunt, fish, eat mushrooms, nuts and acorn. But I guess deep down I wanted to connect with someone. And to do something useful for others in need. But what? Until yesterday, all I knew was to write. I had been writing for most of my life. And the isolation and bad life that this entails. Alone, in smoky taverns, drinking, writing. I got to know very interesting people in those places, but they were profoundly wounded. Like me. Being a writer, an artist, is a blessing and a curse. You are constantly living between worlds. One foot on the unseen, the other on the seen. But there is also a lot of incomprehension. Nobody is on the side of the artist. People enjoy good stories and art, but don’t enjoy the company of the artist.

And that’s fair enough. I don’t enjoy the company of the majority of people, either. But that is a two-edged sword. As my works started to become more well known, and the pressure on me increased, I withdrew more and more from society. And I became totally immersed in my inner worlds. Because that was the world I knew, the only world I could really understand. The only world that was always fertile and ready to bloom and grow, whenever I sat in front of the table, to write, to connect with that vast Universe.

But, at the core, I felt miserable. And I still didn’t know why. Many readers might think it was due to my isolation, but that was not the case. I am sure about it. Since I was a child, I have always spent the majority of my days alone. The best time I had, was just being alone as I am, right now, wondering the forests and fields. Hiking. Traveling. Discovering. Always by myself.

It was the lack of adventure, that was killing me. Not loneliness.

But a true adventure.

So I just decided to disappear from society. Completely. And when I say “society” I mean, here, the society built by the elites, by the rule makers. Rules that they themselves never follow. One day I thought: “What if I created my own rules and my own world?”. I was tired of withdrawing to my Inner worlds and fantasies to doing so. Why not doing it in Real life?

In any case, now I was here, without a dime, my stomach grumbling. There was only one thing I could do. Yeah, one thing my grandfather taught me, in the countryside. Long ago.

For the whole day, I was wondering around the old houses and farms. They all look quite run down. Nobody seemed to be harvesting anything, anymore, for a simple reason: people were too old for that. And too poor. I told them that, if they let me till the land and do some farming, I would only ask for food and water, in exchange. I didn’t need anything else. But one after the other, they looked at me with suspicion and they’d say they weren’t interested in farming, anymore. Some were polite, some others not that much. But I didn’t blame them. Young people had abandoned them for the cities. And they’d only come back to see if they were dead, already, so that they could inherit the houses and sell them. Or transform them into hostels or rent them to foreigners and tourists.

The sun was setting. I was sitting over a stone, near the country road. I was discouraged, for sure, and hunger made my head hurt. But what I felt the most, was sadness. Sadness for those old people, for that land, that world that was about to disappear because of greed.