Tomorrow morning I am taking off to visit my friend Steve in Maryland. I have never actually been to Maryland, that I am aware of, except maybe through it on an AmTrak train. And I am very much looking forward to it. Baltimore, Annapolis, and then a trip south to Isle de Smith in the Chesapeake Bay where he lives.

This, of course, brings my mind back to Hermes, who I am currently trying my best to meditate on, but, as one might expect, he is a slippery one. Always in motion, kinda like Athena, but unlike her always in a kind of motion that doesn't always make sense.

As someone who did a fair amount of traveling for pleasure when I was younger, and crazier, I have to wonder if maybe I might be coming back around to that part of me that was much more adventurous, much more willing to explore. Is this what Hermes has been trying to teach me all along? Is he trying to push me to step out of myself now and into myself then in more than just a thoughtful or philosophical way?

Of course, the real question is, is this something I really need to do right now because I have become far too ensconced in my ways? I think the answer to that is yes. I am at a point in my life now where I am starting to notice myself  act old, and I don't like it. So, maybe what I do indeed need is to reconnect with the me that took off to Europe all alone. Of course, I had more money then, and less of a burden, but if I can't do something as grand as walking the Ramblas to clear my head, maybe I just need to look a little closer to home.

In my attempts to understand the influences of Hermes in my life as I make my way through his time in my life, I am having a tough time. Hermes is hard to pin down, always in motion, always changing, and, it seems, always pushing me in ways that I don't like. Ways that make me crazy and force me to recall the times in my own life when I was rather unstable, crazy, and unable to really handle even the smallest amounts of stress.

See, I am not usually superstitious. I don't really believe the Gods throw things at me, over cook my pot roast, make my bicycle tires flat, or anything like that. I just don't believe myself so important that the Gods are busy playing tricks on me. I do, however, have to admit that when it comes to Hermes, I do wonder if it isn't him behind some of it.

Last weekend, last Sunday, to be exact, I had a day that will seem rather a bit unbelievable to you. I woke to no internet and a leaking coffee maker. As I write this, my internet is down again, but the coffee maker seems to have healed itself. My iPod had somehow managed to corrupt its database, something easy enough to fix, but time consuming. And when I decided to take a bike ride to ease my building tensions, I discovered the front tire was flat.

Well, OK, I decided to play a game, I am not much of a gamer, but I do like Sim City, a game I have played on and off for years, and so I put the CD in the DVD on my Windows machine. Well, it spins up and then I hear a very loud bang and the DVD drive stops. I try to open it, fail. I then open the computer up and remove the DVD drive. The CD had disintegrated in the drive, and spinning at such speeds, it had literally destroyed a great many parts of the drive. The drive was dead, and I had replaced that drive only about three weeks before.

All this, and it was yet morning. I am speaking of these things rather calmly here, but I assure you, my inner self was in a rage. I was torn to pieces wondering just WTF was going on. And, to be honest, it occurs to me that this is exactly what Hermes wanted. He wanted me to fall to pieces. He wanted me enraged. He wants me to learn something from this, and perhaps it is to help me learn to better deal with these things, to avoid the whole tantrum experience that comes with rage, but I can't be sure of that.

Why? Because it occurs to me that I am also a bit stuck in my ways. A bit complacent to the world around me. Maybe Hermes is trying to enrage me to remind me of the way I used to be so that I can learn to use these chaotic emotions to make a difference in the world. Maybe I need to take a more active role in the pushing of the charities I support and the things I find important. Maybe Hermes is pushing me to be more angry toward injustice.

Of course, trying to divine the will of a god is not exactly a science, and I do not buy into the divinatory arts (is divinatory even a word?) and I have spoken at length in previous postings about my reactions to things like tarot, auguries, psychics, etc. I simply do not believe in them because, quite honestly, they seem like hokum.

But one does have to sometimes wonder, even when one is so incredulous, if perhaps those things do not simply give one a focus so as to be able to search one's own soul in search for the meanings of things. If so, I can certainly see nothing wrong with that. So do I flip a coin and abide by the answer? The god is simply reminding me of what I was so I can be aware that it still lies inside me, or the god is forcing me to experience all this in order to push me to be more aggressive and proactive with the full backing of my emotional states behind me?