Exploration

I am going to Texas to spend time with friends, climb, and learn a little. Although I am excited about this trip, I have a bit of homebody longing to stay around Asheville. (My roommate talking about baking cookies is not helping my desire to get in the car...) I know that part of it is that feeling I get even when going out on Outward Bound trips; it's a dread of the unknown. As Wendell Berry put it in The One-Inch Journey:

Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a
new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a
little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your
first bond with the wilderness you are going into. What you are doing is
exploring. You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, but of
yourself in that place. It is an experience of our essential loneliness; for
nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have
discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond,
and we cease to be alone.

Part of it is excitement about life here in Asheville right now. I know that with every transition and adventure, I feel hesitant at first. Then, once I am out and back, I feel they add more colors and textures to my world.