The Wanderers (Part I)

So I'm big into "mystical" journeys of late, which is just to say I pick up and walk in some direction. Who knows what the wide city holds for me: astral vibrations? Power animals? Bush souls? High-contrast constellations? Wise Old Man archetypes? Talking flora and fauna?

CATLAP: Hey, let's go to High Park!
DOGLEG: Isn't it a bit far? And didn't our bicycle get stolen?
C: So? We'll walk.
D: And so we proceeded to walk. The first uneventful hour through Littaly taken with phone calls--business to finish. Meaningful chunks of itinerary to blast away. Buttressing my sweethearts and reassuring the parents. Catching up on the fortunes of the family: strokes, birthdays, gossips, overworked mothers and domestic abuses. After that was done we looked around to find ourselves atop a hill, looking down off a cliff (fenced for safety, of course). It was sad to realize this cliff was made because exactly half of a hill had been flattened to accommodate a big-box retailer.
C: I said that! Did you tell them?
D: Catlap saw it. And we had out what-the-fuck conversation, there on a bridge over railway, the bridge shaking with the passing of a streetcar, both of us half-blind from neon Gas Station adverts. We fled onto a side street and walked by parks, children and artists' lofts and studios. This whole area is losing its quiet hopelessness. But so it goes.
C: Did you tell them about the song stuck in our heads?
D: Wait a minute. That didn't come until the highway. first I have to tell them the story of The Robin.
C: My bad.
D: So on one of the impossibly tall west-end oak trees we saw a robin alight. And I remember telling Catlap that I read somewhere people thought a robin was the prototypical bird. I wouldn't have said that. I can count on one hand the number of robins I've seen. My prototypical bird has to be the sparrow. Or some combination of pigeon and sparrow.
C: Pigeon-sparrow!
D: And then we came onto the highway, headed due west until we noticed high park. And that's when the song came unbidden. Consider it providential, what you will. I won't.
C: A song-cycle about lost islands where human feet tread only with trepidation. A trap-island populated by monsters hidden in the reeds and the waves and even the constellations. An island with magic anima-song to entrap would-be adventurers, crones throwing children into caultrons, herds of centaurs roaming the dells inland, fire-drakes guarding fantastic treasures, their lidless, waking eyes watching small hamlets where only wizened old shepherds venture outside to tend the flocks. It spoke of wanderers, rogues, heroes, kings and princes who tried to tame the island--each with their own motives on the sliding-scale of nobility. What all of them failed to take into account were the ramblings of old Jacob, the shaman of one of hte hamlets. Nobody heeded the interruptions to their plans from the ancient race of pig-people who emerge only in spring, or the thunder-monsoons of the early summer, never mind the flesh-stripping chinooks of the winters. Or that's what I took from it, anyway.
D: What was the song called?
C: I'll not tell.
D: And it was around this time that we found the south end of the park. And we walked through what was hilly terrain until we realized it was some sort of mountain bike course, and we tried negotiating it, though it was obivously not made for pedestrians. We followed the crests of the odd-shaped hills until standing on the tallest one, we saw the pond. We looked at it briefly, and realized "this is not the pond we seek". How that came about is still a bit of a mystery, but we followed the voice up a path. We hiked along this path for a while, until we were stopped in our tracks by a specific tree.
C: You see, as we were scrambling down an untrodden hillside we held onto its trunk for stability, and chanced to look up. And then we felt the vibration from some forgotten, unused part of the psyche: a part of us that has not really played a major role in life (feeding, growing, reproducing) for about three million years. What is three million years? And what were we to make of this Australopithecene idea of "safety", a confused mess of thoughts balsted apart by three million years on the ground. And yet the germline trembles. This tree is safety. It is holy. It has been solid ground for about as long as ground itself. It's an odd valuation to us moderns. But we have the same kind of response to diving, except that is ls even further. It's bittersweet; a feeling of sundering. Here the lineage floundered. Here were homes and hearths we abandoned. Here all that was familiar. Here the concepts that made sense of this flux we deign to call a unitary thing: a universe. But we also struck new paths, and we did it, despite all.
D: We decided not to scramble down the hillside again. We came upon a lodge in the middle of the woods. Some parking lots and plaque signs explaining a rich British man's love for nature. Amid paving and litter and all the various sundry things.
C: But here we found the path to the largest pond, a staircase framed in wood. We stood by the pond for what seemed like hours, watching the ducks, trying to imagine what it's like to be a duck, watching the tiny ripples on the surface of the water, thinking about the unbroken membrane that separates all the world's oceans from all the not-ocean parts of the world. We looked at the reflections of the trees on the pond: identical and blurry. Here was similarity, but different enough to make you think there is some sort of curious lidless eye watching you. That is how we felt, at the very least.
D: We grew bored of this as well, as we do. After reading about the source brook that feeds the pond on a plaque, we decided to go on a journey into the woods to find this spring.
C: We moved north through a wetland that grew more and more fantastic the further north. We reached a land of gigantic marsh plants. There was grass twice as tall as a man. We wandered there, the mud sticking to our feet, making suction sounds with each passing step. We could not go too far in, because there was no clear demarcation between the pond and the marsh. Any farther, and we'd have fish rubbing up against our legs.
D: Night was beginning to fall at this point. And it occurred to me that I normally don't attach any significance to the arrival of night. The colour of the sky is at best a neutral datum I have to deal with.
C: The path was beginnign to disappear.
D: Anyway, we came across the remnants of a Russian drinking party. How did we know it was a Russian party? Because of the piles of vodka bottles and candy with cyrillic markings. If we wanted to be charitable, we could have assumed it was a Czech drinking party, or a Polish one, or Lithuanian, or (least likely) pan-Slavic.
C: At last, with the last rays of the dying light, we found the source. It was a canal carved into a hillside, a rusty grate out of which an almosy unnoticeable trickle of water flowed. We gave our respects to this quite unremarkable artefact, and hiked up the hillside, whereupon we were immediately starteled by the high-speed neon specters of Bloor Street.

Consider: "The foundation of all mental illness is the avoidance of true suffering."