Arriving Home

Spending the past month traveling [on the road, pilgrimage, walkabout, however one names it], I've been fortunate enough to make a couple of pauses back home again. Several thoughts and insights arose from those pauses.

Foremost is gratitude for those who remain behind and continue to make that place from which I started a home. It's a place to which I'm happy to return. Not only the physical place, but also the comfort of family and friends. I recognize that everyone in it ~ from the baristas at Starbucks who know my name and my drink preferences to the musicians and other friends who follow me on social media to former co-workers asking for details ~ everyone reaches out with recognition and comfort when I return.

This particular T. S. Eliot quote has stirred my soul since I first read it in high school. Exploration includes travel, yet that is not all that it is. It encompasses much more than that. It's also the exploration of our surroundings in other ways. We step out into a new form of the world. We examine and try on new ideas, new thoughts, new identities. We watch ourselves grow and change into adults, partners, parents, friends. We move through our physical, mental, emotional, spiritual worlds ~ sometimes filled with care, sometimes crashing and burning, sometimes on quiet tiptoe. Even so, there is for each of us a resting place, a place from which we rose and a place to which we return. We may return to it as a different, changed person ~ but it remains deep within us nevertheless.

I used to think it was about returning to a particular place, home, neighborhood, city, whatever. As time continues to move forward in its ever plodding way, I believe it is more about that spot deep within us in which resides our personal and/or collective Still Small Voice. We can define It, name It however we choose: God, Goddess, Universal Mind, Creator, Higher Power, Allah, Great Spirit or even Lebowski. I doubt that It is particular about how we call It. Yet I firmly believe that It, that incredible Ineffable One, is the place from which we come and the place to which we eventually return.

What/How do you name your Still Small Voice? What are you currently exploring? What have you recently explored? Have any of the places you've explored changed in the recent past? Do you expect any to change in the future? Where did you start from? How do you feel about returning there?

One Perspective

When I was twenty-nine, I discovered a book titled An Interrupted Life and its author Etty Hillesum. A small, paperback volume. The diaries of a woman who died in Auschwitz at twenty-nine. She spoke so eloquently of life in its day-to-day messiness as well as its deeper mystical qualities.

For me, this quote is a reminder as much as an acknowledgement. It is a reminder to breathe. To notice my body taking in deep breaths. To acknowledge the pause, the rest, between the breaths. In those moments can lie the entire universe. It is in that place where I meet the Divine, where all Creation comes together with the Creator. Not the place where I might hold my breath, but the place where my breath naturally shifts from in to out and from out to in. The place where I don't know in which direction the air is moving. As another mystical writer, T.S. Eliot, put it in Four Quartets, "At the still point of the turning world."

Sometimes, when the world seems at its maddest point, noticing that resting point can return everything to its essential perspective. It doesn't have to be as mad as the Holocaust. It can be overhearing the neighbors argue ~ again; or losing an important paper for work; or waiting for the results of a test. All of those moments are madding. Each speaks to me, to us, of fear or loss or overwhelm. When I can return from those moments, slow the world to more reasonable pace, pause and notice my breath, the madness pauses with it. Although the breath flows both ways, the madness passes and I relax.

How do you read this quote? What do you see/hear in it? What creates madness in your life? How do you recognize the madness? When was the last time you noticed the rest between your two deep breaths?