Here we go again...

In the final throws of preparation, I find myself going over the lists I also went over again and again, trying to make sure I have everything. Inevitably, I remember things I forgot, hidden in drawers, pockets and secret places, safely stored until they would be needed again. And even though I left them, I feel better knowing that they are there, waiting for me, giving me a reason to go back.

I can't help but feel as though I chose the perfect book to read on the first leg of he journey. Pulling out of the Vancouver train station, I re-read the introduction to Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World:

"So much seems possible at the beginning of a trip, so many things seem brimmed with meaning. The small towns slipping by, the unspent time ahead, herons meditating in marsh grass, a pigeon mummified beneath a bridge, the backseats of cars waiting at the clanging gate ("crossing / crossing"), the little decoration some nineteenth-century mason worked into the high peak of a factory wall, now abandoned, now disappearing over the horizon. Each thing seems all the more declarative for its swift arrival and swift departure. From a moving train I don't see the opaque weave of the real, I see the more expansive view the shuttle gets as again and again the warp threads briefly rise. I always take out my pen and begin to write, as if the landscape itself were in a manic and voluble mood and I its lucky and appointed scribe. I become convinced that just before me is the perfect statement of how things are.

That it the traveler's delusion."

I think, maybe, I'm okay with the delusion right now.