The revelation will not be televised.

"I'm on the verge, just one more dose,
I'm traveling from coast to coast.
My theory isn't perfect but it's close." - Red Hot Chili Peppers


It started as a joke. I didn't realize why I'd done it, even when it was staring back at me in careful black block letters. Years ago, when Kelly gave me the artisan-crafted leather journal that would contain my travel writings, I wrote out the steps of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth, the Hero's Journey, front and center on its first page.

Maybe it was my lingering sense of only-child self-importance, or just a way to see if patterns hold true no matter how small the quest one undertakes. Admittedly my life is not an epic. It does not hold its own in comparison to the fictional heroes whose fabric was cut from this pattern, consciously or sub-consciously by their creators. But the brilliance of Campbell's theorem is its commonality. It not only finds a way for stories throughout history to overlap, but for the readers and viewers who have breathed them in to find mutual ground too. This is why we are drawn to such stories, because the protagonists are just us in a different environment. Neither my life, nor this trip fits the carbon-copy of the Hero's Journey. But there are undeniable elements within it that certainly apply.

The Abyss: "Regarding sharks in motion."
Atonement With the Father: "Two weeks notice."
Refusal of the Return: "The revelation will not be televised."

The way a deep sea diver resurfaces is in stages. After hours of isolation, of wading through darkness and heavy, salt-laden water, the change in pressure is so drastic that their return must be gradual, calculated. Those who rush back to the surface get the Bends- bubbles form inside your body, and symptoms range from headaches and queasiness, to paralysis and death.

I knew that my good friend Kelly meeting me for 10 days in Thailand would be more than simply two friends re-uniting after a long separation. With one month left in my travels, it was my first step back towards the vague concept I have of home. And coming from the Middle East and then India, it was also a return to a more Western world where American fast food chains aren't aberrations breaking up a foreign landscape, but merely more neon-colored Legos constructing a post-modern metropolis like Bangkok.

I know there are ways to which I've become accustomed, backpacking grooves I've worked myself in to that are incompatible with life in the States. In the first ten minutes of conversation, I got a little reprimanded by Kelly for some of these- describing weather in Celsius, distance with the Metric system. I'm not trying to be pompous, or Anglophilic, I've just thought in these terms, without interruption, for months. At some point I stopped doing the mental conversions back to the American system, at some point this became how I measured and broke down the world around me. And while I know it sounds arrogant, and gets old quick, it's hard to tell any new stories about my life that don't feature phrases like "The second time I was in Munich..." or "This guy I met in Lithuania..."

The ten days of her visit didn't dwell on these things. We were too distracted by the gorgeous architecture of wats (temples), the impossible hue of the water near Ko Phi Phi, hour-long massages that cost less than $5, getting lengthy rides down a mountain and in to town from incredibly kind Thai strangers (if you haven't seen the video on my Facebook page, feel free to check it out). But even if it wasn't foremost in my brain, this incongruity with life back home did creep in. Often.

This first step back, the inching closer to the surface, more than anything it made me realize that I'm not ready. But that's not a negative realization. I touched on something in Chiang-Mai, in one of those gorgeous wats we visited, this one in the middle of a forest compound that had an unavoidable déjà vu to something Colonel Kurtz ran in Apocalypse Now. Most images of the Buddha in temples are the same. They are generally either the meditative or reclining one, usually gold and androgynous, with a nearly robotic smoothness to his body. These are so prevalent because they depict him either near or (in the reclining position) at the exact moment of attaining total nirvana. It is the miracle upon which the dogma of Buddhism is based, why he is worshiped at all. But in the middle of the woods by the large chedi of the Wat Umong forest temple sits the life-sized black statue of the still-very-human fasting Buddha. Each rib is visible, as are veins that weave across the top of them. His eyes, still peaceful, are bulging from his emaciated face- his stomach nearly caved in upon itself. More than any other gold-leafed or jade carved statue in Thailand, more than any image of Christ I saw in my twenty years as a devout Catholic, or in the cathedrals of Europe since, this image permeated me on a spiritual level. Vitally, I think I began to understand. I've complained about my muscle and weight loss on this trip because it eats away at my outward self-image or how I think others will view me, but maybe it just means that I'm on the right track. I've spent nearly four months wandering three continents, but I've spent that same amount of time journeying within myself. It's not that one is more important- they're interlaced. I could have taken this same amount of time and wandered just India, or South America, or even the United States. But I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the same results. It's the comparisons that I needed. I read Dante at the Vatican, faced Mecca on my knees at a mosque in Bahrain as a Muslim man talked me through the steps of prayer in detail, walked through temples and shrines dedicated to Ganesh and Vishnu in New Delhi, and I visited Wat Umong in Chiang-Mai. I know which spoke to me the deepest, which eternal voice resonated most profoundly.

This does not mean I'm now Buddhist. Upon returning to the States, I am planning on reading the holy texts of each major religion, more out of an academic's curiosity than a pilgrim's devotion, and we'll see what decision I make from there, if any. But for now it does underscore to me the fact that I'm not ready to come back yet. And it's not the depression that a return to the American workforce, or to more consistent surroundings will probably bring. It's the fact that right now I feel close to something I cannot define. I said that I touched on something in Chiang-Mai. It did not fully impact me, not to the point that I think it is capable of. And while I can't logically describe it, I feel something beckoning me from Cambodia, from Laos. Of everything I was to see on this trip, Angkor Wat was always the most anticipated. But there's more to Cambodia than a complex of temples, and I need to explore what that is. And I will. Beginning tomorrow when I land in Phnom Penh. A step back away from a more Western world like Thailand. A step back away from home.

One cannot anticipate an epiphany, and the most profound ones happen when totally unexpected. But I feel like I know myself vastly more now than I did four months ago. The dream I had in Berlin about meeting myself, the one in Istanbul that predicted my father's death days later. This is proof to me that I'm gaining a greater wisdom about who I am and what I am capable of, and maybe even that I'm reaching some deeper level of knowledge in the world itself. And in going to some of the rural towns in Cambodia and Laos that I am planning to, I feel like I'm capable of finding there elements of existence that are raw. Not primitive in civilization, but primary in our humanity. I feel like I can just make out the outline of a lesson, maybe my lesson, hanging heavy in the shadows before me.

There's one last step in the Hero's Journey that I think applies to me on this trip.

Approach of the Innermost Cave.

Probably just that lingering only-child self-importance. But just imagine with me, for one second:

What if it's more?

Bangkok, Chiang-Mai and northern Thailand:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2112162&id=35804394&l=e005427d01

Phuket and Ko Phi Phi:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2113946&id=35804394&l=041eb13e8a