Pressing Pause in Vancouver (2 of swords)

Here I am in Vancouver, I thought my next step was clear - but now it's not. It's November, but still feels like summer to me in some ways, since I was in Peterborough last November (brrr), and since I'm still not working, but just wandering around, goofing off ;)
In looking for answers, I figure if I want to go deeper I should just keep digging in the same hole. I've been wondering about the whole 'knight' concept - as I have apparently attached myself to it.
I realized today that it's not an answer, but a question. How do we live a life of passion in this world - which so readily disarms us, baffles us from our path, distracts us from anything relevant; dulls our flame?
I've been reading 'Knight' books, I guess it just seemed appropriate, some old and some new; Percival and the Presence of God, The Quest of the Holy Grail...  although enjoyable, they haven't yielded much in the way of answers.
Until now.
Chretien de Troyes Ywain: The Knight of the Lion, written betwen 1160 and 1180 AD gave me the clue I have been looking for to understanding this quest of mine. I've been trying to figure out how to live a life of passion - but within boundaries. Not of propriety or stuffy morality, but to have the limits cordoned off by, as with the path, some higher ideal. Something that embraced, allowed, understood, the flame of life,
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age
And mine, Dylan.
Today I walked through East Hastings, all over downtown, contemplating my role on earth, my fathers (again) - the fact that my grandfather lived on the streets in Vancouver in 1924 is not lost on me, I reflected today on the wisdom of that for him - that he had served in WWI from when he was 15 until he was 18, and I can only imagine a lot of wandering was needed to clear that slate. Thanks Slim, for not passing those horrors onto me.
So I know my time is not wasted. I'm not working, but I'm learning about myself. He went back to Nova Scotia eventually, was a good man, had a family, became known alternately as "Slim" and "the Enforcer of Herring Cove." He was apparently a sweet gentle man, soft spoken, but with a strong sense of justice and a short temper, and years spent on the prairies in the 1920's as a "take-all-comers bareknuckle boxer" to back him up. From the stories I've heard he dissuaded many bullies from their wayward path. Violence isn't really our tool anymore, but I know - there is a distant goal, and at the same time now is always it.
So here I am in Vancouver, pressing pause.
These words are on the first page of this book, the earliest of the King Arthur stories:
The good King Arthur of Britain, whose knighthood inspires us to be valiant and courteous, held a noble court as befits a king on that lavish feast day which men are accustomed to call Pentecost. The King was then at Carduel in Wales.
Having dined in the hall, the knights gathered at the invitation of the ladies and damsels. Some of them told adventure stories and others spoke about love, its pangs and sorrows and also its joys, which are the lot of the disciples of the order of love, still at that time vigorous and honorable even though it has few followers nowadays.
Coincidentally, it was on Pentecost that my journey also started, in a way - when I made my decision to not only go, but to make these life changes that I'm in the midst of. I find this knight story much more reassuring (also coincidentally - my grandfather's name was Arthur, as my father and brother).
This is a very different vision of knighthood, not the chaste and perfect vision of the later books, but one of men and women driven by passion, at times violent, prone to error, broken-heartedness, reaching for something beyond their grasp, both as individuals and more broadly. But it is this striving which brings them to the best expression of themselves as human beings.
In setting out to be something you can never achieve one is only making themselves the same as any other 'knight.' Here the knight and the Bhagwan meet - seeking wholeness, with love as the ideal, accepting one's imperfections.
And what does this mean for me, here, today? I'm not sure where I'm going next. Leafing through a journal from six months ago, I found a page with big bold letters  - I WANT TO GO TO CALIFORNIA!
I did that.
I've done the things I set out to do, except - figuring out what to do next.
The second time I hitchhiked across Canada I set out for Alaska. Still haven't been there. In Northern Alberta, on the "Alaska Highway," I was almost robbed and killed one night. The next morning, resolve in hand (but having had no sleep) I walked back onto the highway and continued. Again I was threatened, in a serious way, before 8am! I turned an eye to the sky and said, what's up? Was the Universe just putting roadblocks in front of me to test my resolve? Or was it trying to tell me I was on the wrong path? The answer lay within.
Once I really looked at myself I realized I wanted to go to Alaska for ego, not for me, not because I had a burning passion to be there. A friend later said, "I would have died sooner than give up on my goal." I said, "Mmhm, that's for you."
I crossed the highway, turned my sign around, wrote 'Jasper' on the back, and headed straight for Schooner Cove/Long Beach, south of Tofino - where I spent the next two moths, probably the most important and formative of my life.
The knights in this book (Ywain) tell of their defeats. And their best moves are made for Love.
It doesn't really matter if I go to the Mideast or somewhere else, I am travelling to my Self - to the best expression of me I can come up with in a few short decades on Earth.
I have a Tarot deck I lost a card from years ago. I lost the 9 of coins in 2006 - 'self-worth', sadly appropriate at that point in my life. Now I pick the cards out, give them away or carry them around and then leave them somewhere; a bankmachine, tucked in a book in a bookstore - for someone else's knock of destiny. They're little so they fit in your wallet. Yesterday I randomly picked out, for me - the two of swords. It shows a woman in white robes, kneeling, blindfolded, with a sword in each hand crossed over her shoulders. Armed and ready to fight, but waiting for her sacred order(s). Pause.
Wait.
I'll take my mixed messages from myself and the Universe and wait, as a traveller there are worse places to be in to take a breath. This weekend I will continue pressing pause on the Sunshine Coast. :) Life is hard for an errand knight...

Men there have lived who wrestled with the ocean;
I was afraid - the polyp was their shroud.
I was afraid. That shore of your decision
Awaits beyond this street where in the crowd

Your face is blown, an apparition, past.
Renounce the night as I, and we must meet
As weary nomads in this desert at last,
Borne in the lost procession of these feet.