The Only Place to Go is Here

This world is lost,
but the last thing it needs
is a sense of direction.
We can't trust maps anymore,
not when we put them and the table
and they just lie... there.
It's time to think outside:

pretend you could fly--
if you flew east as hard as you could, far enough
to circle the world, would you ever come home again?
Yes. But from the West.
If you go North enough, over the pole, and you are
heading South, until you fly over the pole,
and you're heading North again. You're spinning in circles

because this world is bipolar
and maps are part of the problem.
It's not that they don't lead us places,
but there are things we think maps are telling us,
like, here is better than there, so
we must be better than them. So we have wars
of North against South, and East vs West,
as if Right and Wrong were just
"location, location, location..."

Maps trick us into believing
we don't belong to the land,
that the land belongs to our territory.
We've forgotten our hearts know what home looks like.
We keep fighting over real estate.

And we're just as confused about "Up"...
we mistake plans to conquer space for spiritual ascension;
think if there's a perfect place
we'll only find it in our Heaven,
but then we will find it, map it and it will be ours.

But if someone else, even
from a culture I'm told is my enemy,
sought their own Heaven,
following different cartography;
even if they took off from the other side
of the world from us, guess what?
They'd still be heading "up".
So it won't matter who wins this race.
Once we're out there in space
the only place left to go is "farther away".
If we humans can't agree,
not on where we came from, but why...
the only perfect place we could have reached
will be lost.

This is how maps lead us
off-course, and their promises of a home
we can call our own, will only trick us
into losing our way if they get us to forget this:
That person on the other side of my world
is just like me: another human being, just trying
to find their way home.

It's time we think bigger than maps
and treat the words like Us and Them,
Me and You...
as gradations, not absolutes.
We'd see the differences between us
are false illusions, like the borderlines
on a map or a globe: they're not really there

unless we choose to see them,
and treat them as more important
than the maps we carry here. In our hearts,
we are already home
where "X: marks the spot
because you are here. Now,
where ever else you go in life,
here is where you begin.

If the world can discover this someday,
it won't be maps that save us.
What will matter is that, if we follow one,
we treat it as a guide
not another Bible God gave us.
What matters if the people who believe,
even if we don't know where we're going  yet,
we can all get their, together, if we all try.
Crazy right? Crazy like people who believe
that people could fly.