Pilgrimage

“Portal land,” my friend Sander jokingly remarked back in late 2017 when I told him I was moving to Portland. As it turned out, it was no joke.

Given that a portal is something you pass through as you move from one place or space to another, not a place you stay in, perhaps I should have paid closer attention to the notion of Portland as a portal when I moved here sixteen months ago expecting to stay indefinitely.

You see, I’ll be leaving town on or around May 28. Likely for good.

As happened with my move from Toronto to Nova Scotia twenty-five years ago (and many times since), Portland turned out to be a sort of halfway house between an old chapter of my life and an as-yet unwritten new one.

Of course, I couldn’t have known that when I moved here, at least not consciously. If I had, I couldn’t have made the choices and decisions that sparked the growth (and growing pains) I have experienced here. It’s likely no accident that I wrote my two Way of the Fool books here. And it’s no accident that I launched my time here with a “Way of the Fool” talk at the New Thought Center for Spiritual Living in Lake Oswego and capped it this past Saturday with a “Way of the Fool” workshop at the New Renaissance Bookshop.

“If I were to choose an archetype to describe my life’s journey,” I wrote in my Acts of Surrender memoir long before there were Way of the Fool books, “it would be the Fool, a tarot character often pictured stepping off a cliff into the unknown.”

If nothing else, my time in Portland has pushed me harder than at any other time in my life to more fully embrace that archetype…to more fully surrender to it…to more fully embody it.

Step #10 in my bookThe Way of the Fool: How to Stop Worrying About Life and Start Living It…in 12½ Super-Simple Steps is “Embrace the Mystery.” Step #11 is “Embrace the Magic.”

I will have to embrace the mystery and the magic when I drive out of Portland in ten days. That’s because, in quintessential Fool-like fashion and not for the first time in my life, I will be leaving with no idea where I’m heading, where (or when) I’ll land or how I’ll finance the journey. Like the Fool, I will be leaving with my little dog, with minimal possessions (whatever fits into my Prius) and with as much faith and courage as I can muster.

I’m leaning toward driving east along the Columbia River. But whether I follow the river for a day before veering off in another direction — perhaps toward Bend, a place of magic and miracle when I passed through in 1997 — or all the way up into Canada, I cannot now know. Step #2 in The Way of the Fool is “Be In the Moment,” so such decisions will likely come only as they’re needed. After all, it was an in-the-moment decision like that that brought me into the United States twenty-two years ago, and that turned out pretty good!

All I know for certain is that when I pull out of the parking garage here for the last time in a few days, my car will determine where I’m going. That’s the Way of the Fool.