I'm back, but I'm starting to wish that I wasn't. It seems that everything has changed while I have been away.
Travel is always a liminal sort of time. There is the true liminality of being in transit - neither in one place nor the next - and also the liminality of your life on hiatus. While you are away you live the bubble of your life at one remove from its normal sphere.
Normally, this is why I love travel. I enjoy the feeling of being between. My favourite way to see the world is from a truck - constantly moving from one place to the next. An extended liminality that can go on for days, weeks or months, with no need to allow the instrusion of my other life to burst my bubble. Indeed, on this trip I found myself not wanting the journey to end, and I needlessly replenished my supplies on autopilot, steering myself only at the last minute away from the ticket desk, the way a sailor only reluctantly tears himself away from the lure of deep water and drowning.
I had the sense (as I often do) that if I were to give in and go that I might never come back.
It is a siren song, the call of the open road, but that is not the Test I have to face. The Test is coming back.
A month is a long time to be away at some times in one's life. As a student a month was nothing, and I have regularly gone for several months at a time without seeing friends from those days, still slipping comfortably back into conversations almost as if I never left. I took it for granted, even found it stifling at times, but now I wonder at what it was.
Because this time I have come back and everything has changed. In the space of a working day I have discovered that my working and homelife are both about to change (we'll discuss the changes to my spiritual life by proxy another time). My closest colleague is leaving at the end of the year, and my housemate has given her notice on the house (unbeknownst to me) and so in four weeks' time she will be gone, and I have to start the process of finding somewhere or someone new.
So what does the Universe make of all of this? It's pithy comment: The 8 of swords. The Test. It seems I have walked into the shitstorm promised to me by my Tarot teacher in the summer. And I forgot my umbrella. So as the shit hits the proverbial fan, I find myself once more in need of the life laundry. Delicates cycle this time, with softener please.
