Evening thoughts 27 May 2013

Even with the internet, even with friends who travel and tell stories of far away places, sometimes there is a call to open wings and fly away. Long ago and far away, the mantra to begin a fairy tale or an odyssey.

For me that long ago is not so much a historic reference, but a place with layers of evidence of the comings and goings of people. And the far away is only the instant it takes to commit to heading out on an adventure.

Where I grew up in the western United States of America in Colorado and Wyoming, the context came from a Euro-descendant background.

Trappers, explorers, connestoga wagon pioneers, missionaries, US Army fort and train builders… in reality a trajectory of a very small number of people moving proportionately through a vast geaographical area over a period of about three centuries.

The indigenous peoples of the High Plains and Rockey Mountains they encountered had a much longer and more integrated relationship with place. Sadly, in many cases those who had been oppressed became the oppressers.

Many Celtic stories include chronicles of wanderers moving westward. I’ve traveled the breadth of much of the west coast and down into Mexico. My brother and I placed our Father’s ashes in the Pacific (peace) Ocean.

With these actions we fulfilled Celtic projectories and legends that highlighted western migration and fulfillment. Even the concept of west as a place where the dead traveled to the afterlife. And our great grandparents also fit into this idea – Frank Gillespie and Maud McCoy who rode horseback with Buffalo Bill in Cody, Wyoming to look for the spirit cave. This compulsion to keep moving fulfils something in the Scottish diaspora that plays out in the New World.

Scots prompted by duress and even by moral imperitive migrated west to North America. In my case, to the United States. The “prime directive” motivated wanderers, survivors, enlightenment philosophers, poets and even scoundrals whose DNA seemed coded to explore.

Look at the names with Celtic roots in US history expecially around the American Revolution and the writing both of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights – presidents, exploreres, inventors, philanthropists, builders, scientists, educators and writers.

Those who survived the perilous journey across the Atlantic Ocean burst forth with a new sense of freedom, and once acclimated helped fuel the romantic notion of the American Wild West that sparked imaginations back in the Old World.

What next?

Where is this story leading and how will it evolve?

I sense there is much more to discover.