A Living Magazine - Grounded In Maine - Day 16 - Restless Ruminations

Another good night. I had some interesting lucid awareness as I slept. I felt better rested on this morning because of it. I packed up quickly and went to Starbucks to work for most of the day, only leaving to buy some sandwich stuff at Shaw's when my stomach began to speak more loudly than the people around me. Walking back toward the sleep spot I was amused by this...

"Hole. Do not move." 

Not sure why it caught my attention? All I could imagine was a bottomless pit. Good thing it was covered. I took a bunch of other pictures, but once again they were lost by that malfunctioning SD card. I found that it was touch and go. I could take it out of the camera and put in back in over and over again, and then sometimes it would be okay. So, until I could buy a new one, I would have to deal with some disappointment it seemed.

Since I'd pretty much spent out my loitering time at Starbucks (I did buy a coffee), I thought that finishing up some writing at McDonald's was the better part of valor. On these days when I'm not traveling and only writing there just is not that much to say. Couple that with the loss of pictures and this post is a bit skimpy. Okay, I guess it's really skimpy. I did manage to get a video of the sleep spot...

A walk through the rooms of my outdoor inn.

I set up the tent and paced around a bit in the small space, simply thinking (and being bitten by the stray mosquito). As usual I had a lot on my mind--too much. For a life of simplicity, my need to plan and adjust to what works and doesn't work keeps a kind of constant complexity going, of which I'd really like to free myself.

This is a very unusual Journey. Well, I guess they're all different. This one had very little planning, which has been a friction against my typical movement forward. Even with the visits, I am arranging the locations and timeframes need to be aligned or it's going to be a bigger challenge than the big challenge it is already. 

I also hadn't been feeling very good. On this day I'd felt shaky and my heart seemed to be doing some funky stuff. I think most of it is psychological. I'm tired, in a very general sense. The last Journey had not ended in the way I'd wanted. It was all well and good, but after working straight through 366 days, to be stuck without much food for a month, losing Buddy, and not yet being in a position to get the land I've wanted for so long, added up. 

Now, here I am again, doing the work again. I love the life, except for the uncertainty of my funding. It has been like that from the beginning. And to restate something I wrote in my summary of the Homecoming Journey, I receive enough funding, but simply can't budget because of not ever knowing when I will get contributions. It is what it is, and I accept it with as much grace as I can muster. Things could be much worse.

I really am going to need some time off from walking when I finish this Journey in the fall. My preference is to have time to write a couple of the books. That would allow me to then earn some royalties. What is more realistic is that I will return to the Portland area with no savings or extra exposure and starve until I can cook up an even crazier Journey--a Maine winter Journey. If this is the case, then I will at least have to spend a few weeks customizing the things I have to deal with sleeping outside. I desperately want to avoid doing that. Yet, I walked myself into a seasonal corner and I don't want to have to leave the state to survive the winter. 

The point of all of this ruminating is that I am just never able to let the future take care of itself. I can't just turn off my need to plan. I tried to do that before returning to Maine and found exactly what I thought I'd find: hunger and no plan. Ha! 

On the next day I would begin to stitch together ideas. I was also going to meet my buddy, Jason to work on ideas for publishing the fictional work. It was something to look forward to. Whenever someone voluntarily offers to help me with publishing and promotion, it is a truly significant thing.

I took one last shot to use as a current profile picture at Facebook, then climbed in the tent and was whisked away by the Spark...