August 2020

Monday morning – well, okay, it was noon when I left – I took myself down to the river. It’s a little less than seven miles round trip, about 400 feet in elevation to descend and ascend again coming home. My plan had been to be up early (this never happens) and start before the heat woke up. But I was done putting off this journey. I left at noon.

This journey was a pilgrimage. A micro-pilgrimage, perhaps, but a pilgrimage all the same. I did not know exactly what this pilgrimage was for; I only knew it was necessary. I had become a pilgrim, and this is what pilgrims do.

I am in the middle of a big shake up in my life (who isn’t? It is 2020, after all…), stumbling through the most significant transition since taking my first breath. It’s a multi-layered transition. I won’t fall into the details here. Navigating this transition has involved a lot of feeling stuck, being paralyzed, asking for help, getting great help most of the time, getting injured a couple of times. But the transition is non-negotiable. It must be navigated: it is what is happening.

Preparing for this journey I learned things. On this pilgrimage certain things, insights, experiences, were impressed upon me. Afterward my perspective shifted and my experience changed.

I began listening to Stephen Jenkinson’s Come of Age while I walked. I stopped to take a picture of a beehive in a tree which some thoughtful people had marked off with caution tape and a sign indicating a plan was afoot to safely relocate the hive rather than doing what is more often done in the name of public safety. While I framed the shot, Jenkinson said, “The bees have long since been driven into their hives by the cold, and you’ve blanketed and tarped them in a way that will never keep them warm it seems, or alive.”

A quarter of a mile later my eye was caught by the sun glinting brilliantly, glaringly off a double width aluminum slide in a trailside playground. As I framed the shot, I heard in my ears, “Well, here is what is becoming glaringly obvious: there is nothing inherently ennobling about aging.”

Another quarter mile down the path, finally into the beginnings of the shaded portion of the trail that follows Woods Creek, a place where I’m really fond of being a pilgrim, Jenkinson says, “So I set before you a task, a pilgrimage of a kind.”

When I encounter synchronicities like these, particularly when they come in a cluster, I take it as a nod from the rest of Creation that I am vibrating in sympathy with something important.

When I came to the river, I went first to the site of the old dam, the one that was removed last year, originally the site of the covered bridge that spanned what was then the North River. Heading down the bank to the shore I was brought up short by the sight of a hummingbird flitting about amongst helianthus and the like just below me. First time I had seen a hummingbird in a natural setting (not a feeder) for years. Muddy water made up the river, swollen by recent rain, and a series of standing waves stood above the site the dam once occupied.

I walked downstream a ways, back up atop the bank, into the park at Jordan’s Point, and found a secluded spot where I could drop below the park and into the river, sheltered by layers of overhanging sycamore branches, now hanging low enough to caress the steadfastly roiling river. The current was strong – this was not a place for swimming – but I sat there in the water for a while and eventually baptised myself, after a fashion. Then I found a fishing line beneath the surface and decided my barefeet would be better off on dry land. I never go into rivers around here without something on my feet, but this time it was nice to feel the sand between my toes.

I walked home a different way, through town. I wanted this to be a circuit, always new terrain. Walking uphill now, almost entirely in the sun, facing south, I had not been looking forward to this part. But I had just been immersed in the rain-cooled Maury, my clothes were still wet (I hadn’t planned on going swimming), and now I found there was a stiff, cool wind blowing straight in my direction all the way home. I didn’t mind that it was a headwind, it was keeping me cool in the sun.

I came home complete. All of me. I had sacrificed the day to a pilgrimage, letting go of the perceived need to be “productive.” But that evening I followed through with two items of correspondence I had not had the emotional wherewithal to address for days and weeks. Just like that, without even thinking about it.

Completing this journey was important. In so doing I completed a gesture, a sequence. In pre- and perinatal somatic psychology there is a discussion of sequences. The basic model is Intention –> Preparation –> Action –> Follow Through –> Integration. Get stuck in one part of this sequence during your birth and you will likely get stuck in that same phase of other sequences later in life – unless or until you find a way to resolve that pattern, that imprint. I don’t know what part of the sequence I tend to get stuck in – it might be more than one. But Monday I made my way through the entire sequence, uninterrupted, in less than four hours. It took time to prepare, an hour to walk to the river, an hour to be at the river, an hour to walk home, and some time to recover.

Since then I have found myself living in a different nervous system. Instead of feeling needy, being needy, speaking needy words, asking for help every chance I get, this week I have been resting in my own enoughness, in faith in myself and the rest of Creation. I’ve not been bringing the past into the present. I’ve been letting the present flow through me. The world is responding differently to this new nervous system, and that’s a good thing. New opportunities, new insights, breakthroughs, new completions.

I wanted to share some photos, and maybe I still will, but none of them turned out very well, and my phone battery doesn’t like taking pictures very long. But I learned a long time ago that recording is not always allowed. Just like with UFOs, crop circles, and Wolfgang Pauli, in the presence of the Sacred, cameras don’t always work. Tape recorders mysteriously fail. I think of these as electronic libations – just like the Greeks would always offer their best wine to the Gods before imbibing, when it comes to the best things I want to capture, to record, I must be prepared to let the Gods have them. After all, there is plenty to go around. There is always more where that came from.