Only a Hobo

“Listen to me Aaron, everything you see under the sun and stars owes its very existence to the Balance. The wind and seas. The powers of earth and Light. All that these do is well and rightly done within the Equilibrium. But now, men hold the power to control the world. Man must learn to do what leaf and whale and wind do naturally; it is for us to keep the Balance. Everything that exists has its true name." - Sparrow Hawk, Tales from Earth Sea

I’m a hobo in this world, a traveling vagabond that arrived in a train station where the passengers wore no faces, only their bright colorful spirits. I’m heading up North to find a hill, filled with the presence of those whose soul I’ve passed and loved.

I’ve grown to admire vagabonds. Wanderers of the Earth who trek from place to place with no incentive but to live. I’m romanticizing huh, with their burlap sacks hanging off wooden rods containing all their worldly possession. It’s easy to be in awe of homeless travelers when I rest cozily in my own home. I mean something else entirely however, the spirit of a hobo, is truly a marvel. It can be a lonely life of constant necessity, surely, they travel from city to city in search for a bed to sleep in or food to eat. If this world’s governments and buildings were to collapse back to the nursing grounds of humankind, I bet things would be different. In that world a vagabond would be the ruling spirit of nature, because then and now, they are primarily moved by freedom.

The Hobo is passing through in this life, a pitstop in a material world occupied by a grand Illusion, a world they visit just as easily as they depart from. A Hobo has to travel light, out of necessity or choice, a hobo only carries their essential nature; they leave behind all things that weigh them down. For a Hobo, little of what society has elected as important is useful. Accolades don’t keep them fed, respect, honor, power don’t quench their thirst, money and sex don’t warm them for very long. The more they carry, the heavier the load, for a traveling Hobo, that matters! Whether they travel to escape, for adventure, to find something they’ve lost, or to return Home, their path towards the horizon is weighed down by attachments and greed.

To keep their spirits light, afloat and in motion, the Hobo has no choice but to seek out the lifeblood of this world, in their own veins, in streams of this lifeworld. To travel with their hearts full of love and strife, their eyes light and dark, to travel empty and void so that the spark of creation can ignite their spirits again and again, so that the waters that fall from the forge of life can course through them without resistance. Only surrender to the elements. At the gates of our own Death, our souls have a long journey back to the One they came from; a Hobo knows better than to cling onto the orbit of Creation when returning Home.