Pilgrim

 

The defining experience at the diamond-hard center of reality is eternal movement as beautiful and fearful invitation; a beckoning dynamic asking us to move from this to that. The courageous life is the life that is equal to this unceasing tidal and seasonal becoming: and strangely beneath all, stillness being the only proper physical preparation for joining the breathing autonomic exchange of existence. We are so much made of movement that we speak of the destination being both inside us and beyond us; we sense we are the journey along the way, the one who makes it and the one who has already arrived.

David Whyte, Consolations

 

I am a pilgrim now, on a pilgrimage to the sacred place, away from the place of knowing to the land of unknowing.  I have left my shelter, a small firelit cabin of hospitality in the snowy woods where I lived alone but not without friends, a livelihood, fresh water from the well.  My cabin a retreat and then refuge from the battle kept me safe and purposeful.  After my wandering across breezy fields, through stony rivers, up the long mountain passes, I returned to the steaming kettle, soft feather bed, book on the bedstand. 

 

The longing to go came when something more than my own comfort became precious to me.  Love for the world and a longing to be part of the healing.  Not as a warrior as before but a witness, like a lover, of tenderness, birdsong, ocean currents.  I travel new ground everyday no longer seeking the familiar and known but the new path, the other riverside, the temple where the old woman feeds the goddesses with saffron rice.  I am out in the weather now, weathered, but not without enough to keep me warm.

 

This journey is not measured in miles but prayers murmured, hearts opened, thoughts surrendered.