Day 149s: Endings & beginnings – as the Two become ONE … (September 25, 2019)
And then, as the Sun was waning alongside the length of The Walk itself, I finally succeeded in rising up and over White Oak Mountain to descend joyfully down into the outskirts of Chattanooga proper – arriving essentially alone to not a single whisper of communal fanfare, and yet overjoyed to have been able to Love my community so powerfully & purely anyway …
“Because we cannot repair or replace the loss of years away, homecomings are almost always conflicted. For the road makes us all grow and shift and change, and it is never the same self who returns after having been away. As such, the pilgrim is no longer fully ‘at home’ in his or her familiar place once he or she returns there. None of us can properly live between two or more cultures, and yet the pilgrim returns alive and well in two or more. He or she is thus neither fully away, nor fully home. And in the discomfort of this potent tension, there is a strange blessing; a nudge that helps us to realize the fundamental sojourner status of our human existence; the deeper knowing that life is ever moving towards death. And for the more spiritually inclined, there is the sense that this world as it is now is indeed our one & final final home, and as such we are doubly called to treat it with according gentleness & honor … We are most ourselves, the most human, when we unabashedly immerse ourselves in the world with love and compassion and gratitude and kindness … It is the route of a pilgrimage that serves its primary spiritual goal – one that may be simple or manifold, and yet one which ever partakes of at least one of six conglomerated aims: the atonement for past wrongs done, an appreciation of all wonders present, compassion for all well-met, self-sacrifice for any in need, a Soul-deep Love for all one’s sentient cousins , and a willingness to joyfully serve and care for the same … Amen – Let it ever be so!” ~ inspired by Charles Ringma, John S. Doyle & Lois M. Bujold
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