Aporia or the Imaginary Journey

I have traveled wide and long, over many years no place felt like home.  Now, since a couple of years, I have stopped.  In this place, Catalunya, that I now call home.  Other climbers make me feel a little more justified in my choice - here is Sharma talking about his choice of home, friends, and family.  Imaginary or not, the journey goes on, we choose where we want to be, and we go.  Or we don't.  For me one of the benefits of this new age of freedom of movement is the possibility of choosing - I want to live near the rocks, so i do.  I want to define my identity through climbing, so i do.  Have i finally reached port?  I don't know, but sedentary life is not necessarily an unimaginative one. The journey can be real or virtual, dreamed through or real to the core.

Identity is so fluid, so good - and so wrong.  It is not there, or it is.  You would die for it, and than it is all empty.  A journey is an escape, escape from self that never gets it right, always looking for the zen - the stone master who wanted to be the sun, the wind, the mountain - and then the stone master all over again.  More years means just more circles - there is no more first time, only a deja-vu, an again and another retaliation of the same tune. Purification, authenticity - or all lies, all pretending, all artificial intelligence, artificial flavor.  Only color, only smell, only concentration, only way is up.  Another route, another project, another repetition of same old routine.  Even climbing succumbs to it, gets dragged into the mud - the cold, the body, the head, all the same, all over again.  Imaginary journey, a different setting - or all the same, all over again.  Making sense of it, finding meaning, giving meaning.  Lines, rock, relationships, conversations - needs and necessities, nothing real, all imagined, all of it in the head.  Images - the boy with lama, the dying girl, all of it sensemaking, making sense, giving meaning to the world, in search of an innocence, the forgotten island of the past, the never-ending journey to the future.  Why would it matter?  There are no more rats, only ravens - crowing on the tombstones, tombstones of the dreams, the ones we've never been free to dream.

Viatgi Imaginari is a 40-meter feet of imagination indeed, orange, grey, bouldery, slopery, holdy.  It has a roof, it has a pillar, it has a slab.  It has a run-out, it has a hidden save-me bolt.  It even has three key heel hooks to get the pressure down and give your arms back the needed strength.  A route to imagine, a route to climb. 

Not exactly related, but an example of another parallel imaginary journey, Oksana started to make Lyalkas, or dolls in Ukrainin, when she broke her leg and did not know what to do with herself for several months.  Now her dolls are a success and a pleasure to look at.  There is always  more to be imagined, the journey that goes on...