Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Sunday Friends & Refugees, Early Birds & Later Dayers, Conversants & Lurkers, Phamily, Dawn Patrol, Day Walkers, Triggeratti, Fascinating People & Merry Bigots, ADD Irregulars & WSN Vagabonds, Seekers of Sanity & Civility, and all you Members and Supporters that visits the homesteads at Locals.

How about a visit with Consolations - The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words? David Whyte invites us to ponder meaning and experience, some of the best medicine to the insanity of this current chapter of self-destructive lonely individualism that pushes us to the absurd in search of self we have always possessed by barely explored.

PILGRIM is a word and a name that every human being might be given, at least temporarily, as an accurate assessment of their essence: a stranger to be waved at in passing, or met along the way; a someone always passing through very quickly; a someone on their way to somewhere else, never quite knowing whether the destination or the path stands first in importance; someone who underneath it all doesn’t quite understand from whence they came or quite where they are going, and many times from where their next bite of bread will come; someone dependent on help from other strangers and from those who will meet them along the way.

Travelling toward a place over the horizon, a pilgrim is almost by definition someone abroad in a world of impending revelation, where something is always about to happen or be revealed, including, most fearfully, and as part of their eventual arrival, a strange rehearsal for their own disappearance.

The great measure of the pilgrim journey of human maturation is the increasing understanding that we move through life in the blink of an eye; that we are not long with the privilege of having eyes to see, ears to hear, a voice with which to speak and arms to put round a loved one; that we are simply passing through. We are creatures made real through contact, meeting and then moving on; creatures who, saying hello and saying goodbye, strangely, never get to choose one above the other. Human life is a contact; a getting to know, and then a moving beyond which is never ceasing, from the transformations that enlarge and strengthen us to the ones that turn us from consuming to being consumed, from seeing to being semi-blind, from speaking in one voice to hearing in another.

The defining experience at the diamond-hard centre of reality is eternal movement as beautiful and fearful invitation: a beckoning dynamic, asking us to move from this to that. The courageous pilgrim life is the life that is equal to this unceasing tidal and seasonal becoming: and surprisingly, beneath it all, stillness, a friendship with silence being the only proper physical preparation for joining the breathing autonomic exchange of existence. We are so much made of movement that we speak intuitively 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. We are still running around the house packing our bags and we have already gone and come back, even in our preparations; we are alone in the journey and we are just about to meet the people we have known for years.

But if we are all movement, exchange and getting to know, where a refusal to move on makes us unreal, we are also journeymen and journeywomen, with an unstoppable need to bring our skills and experience, our voice and our presence to good use in the eternal now we visit along the way. We want to belong and be useful as we travel. We are creatures of movement, but we have something immutable in the flow: an elemental, essential nature that gives a person a name and a voice and a character as they flow on. We take our first bubbling source and our broad, subsequent confluences and grow in the conversation between them, all the way to our dissolution in the sea.

We give ourselves to that final destination as an ultimate initiation into vulnerability and arrival, not ever truly knowing what lies on the other side of the transition, or if we survive it in any recognisable form. Strangely, our arrival at that last transition along the way is exactly where we have the opportunity to understand who might have made the journey and to appreciate the privilege of having existed as a particularity, an immutable person; a trajectory whole and of itself.

In that perspective it might be that faith, reliability, responsibility and being true to something unspeakable are possible even if we are travellers, and that we are made better, more faithful companions, indeed pilgrims, on the astonishing, never-to-be-repeated journey by combining the precious memory of the then with the astonishing but taken for granted experience of the now, and both with the unbelievable, and hardly possible, just about to happen.

A few thoughts from your friendly Neighborhood Friar ✝️

The great measure of the pilgrim journey of human maturation is the increasing understanding that we move through life in the blink of an eye;

Memento Mori - Remember death - not in some morbid fixation but rather with an appreciation for the transitory and unpredictable nature of life. Measuring our days aright is not an easy thing in an age of distraction, we can travel and never observe, talk and never communicate, hear and never listen all contributing to the emptiness of our living and dissatisfaction with it all.

The courageous pilgrim life is the life that is equal to this unceasing tidal and seasonal becoming: and surprisingly, beneath it all, stillness, a friendship with silence being the only proper physical preparation for joining the breathing autonomic exchange of existence.

Becoming and stillness - our dance partners for meaning. The becoming has already transpired by the time we realize that stillness invites us to reflect upon the whatness of it. The autonomic exchange of existence - hmmm, hardwired into our very flesh, permeating our nerves and knocking on the door of reflection and inviting us to open it.

We want to belong and be useful as we travel. We are creatures of movement, but we have something immutable in the flow: an elemental, essential nature that gives a person a name and a voice and a character as they flow on.

Movement and immutable - our becoming and remaining - that kernel of us that sprouts when we first begin processing meaning and experience before we even have to the words to give it definition. The us are the core that acquires and dispenses with experience, that in some way governs what we give weight to in our experience and what we choose to ignore. Are we ever fundamentally changed or are we rather fundamentally refined in our pilgrimage? I tend to think it is the later, I am who I am even if I never bother to discover and meet that interior person behind the active and engaged one in life.

Strangely, our arrival at that last transition along the way is exactly where we have the opportunity to understand who might have made the journey and to appreciate the privilege of having existed as a particularity, an immutable person; a trajectory whole and of itself.

I believe the arrival it is meant to be a personal home coming, to Ultimate Reality, to meaning and surprisingly enough to self (that elusive enduring us behind that is only discovered in silence, reflection and often prayer.) Many are unhappy with the bread crumbs that Divine has left us along the path, and often scoff at such an interpretation. I am happy with the invitation to seek and find, to knock and open the door, to ask and receive in the silence. It is a joy to be an immutable person, to be the only me that will ever be. (There are many thankful people. 😉) Everyone we meet is that same immutable uniqueness, amazing when you really think of it.

we are made better, more faithful companions, indeed pilgrims, on the astonishing, never-to-be-repeated journey by combining the precious memory of the then with the astonishing but taken for granted experience of the now,

Thank you to so many by their posts, their comments on others posts and their interaction with my ramblings that have made me a better, more faithful companion on this pilgrimage of life. Have a great day my fellow pilgrims, know of my appreciation and prayers for all of you.