Canvas "Secret Garden"

THE MOST INTERESTING JOURNEY

Gintarė has been wandering the world for twenty years - Bali, Nepal, Thailand and India, temples and silent camps - she travels with a dirty backpack and ragged clothes, lives in cheap rooms and drives around in rented cars, makes hundreds of short-term friends, fellow wanderers.
"Did you understand anything?" I ask.
And she just shakes her head: "Almost, almost, sometimes it seems like I've caught my Meaning by the tail, but in the morning it's escaped again."

Arūnas travels along mushroom routes - not boletus and ceps - different types of mushrooms. He invites me: "You have to try it, this trip will change your perspective, you will see through it" - but what I see is just a short-term dream, from which Arūnas wakes up and is again the same as before: a twisted man, a schemer of all sorts of obscure businesses.

Rolandas has been cycling around the world for three years. He stops wherever there is internet, works a day job (he's a programmer), falls in love with a woman (he's good-looking and has a good tongue), and keeps going. He never knows where he'll sleep the next night, or when he'll stop.
- And what did you understand, what did you learn about life? - I want to know too.
Rolandas just laughs and says that you need to constantly move, you need to drink in the world without being attached to a place or people, take pleasure and don't look back.

But he's only thirty.

And recently I met the same sixty-year-old wanderer. American Tom is no longer so fast and no longer so handsome. Women no longer want him - a bald head, long greasy hair, withered skin on dark tanned arms and a white belly over worn jeans. Tom spends the night in hostels, sits for a long time in the communal kitchen looking for company, but there are only young people there, he and his grandfather are not very interesting.

Brother Pius is a priest in Liepaja, he searches for himself in prayer, he raises his eyes up to the plastic awning with the image of Jesus. There he finds answers and tries not to doubt them.
Because to doubt would be terrible: then you would admit that for thirty years you had been talking to a printed picture. That no god had heard you, and that voice of answers was you.
But who knows, maybe Brother Pius is right: the answers you hear - if you listen sincerely and listen carefully - those answers are the most important truth.

Going deep into yourself, into the mysterious garden within, smelling brightly colored flowers and scratching yourself on thorny vines, stumbling over gnarled roots and discovering the sweetest fruits - this is where the best journey lies.
In that mysterious garden, you never know what you'll meet - somewhere deep in the thicket, eyes sparkle - you might call it your soul.
It's good to meet her.

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