Life itself offers up many opportunities to embark on a pilgrimage journey. Sometimes these are events that don’t feel very welcome in our lives, such as illness or loss of a job or a relationship. When something challenging arises in your life, embrace the perspective of a pilgrim as a way of meeting it in a new way.
Cultivating this as a regular practice helps us to open up to peregrinatio in our daily lives when we are called to release our grasp on the life we think we need and open to the sacred possibilities being offered to us.
~Christine Valters Paintner
don’t want to let go….want to throw a fit and a tantrum and deny and dig my heels in…
inquiry for today~ spring is coming……and what happens if you’re not ready?
All day the flicker
has anticipated
the lust of the season, by
shouting. he scouts up
tree after tree and at
a certain place begins
to cry out. My, in his
black-freckled vest, bay body with
red trim and sudden chrome
underwings, he is
dapper. Of course somebody
listening nearby
hears him; she answers
with a sound like hysterical
laughter, and rushes out into
the field where he is poised
on an old phone pole, his head
swinging, his wings
opening and shutting in a kind of
butterfly stroke. She can’t
resist; they touch, they flutter.
how lightly, altogether, they accept
the great tasks of carrying life
forward! In the crown of an oak
they choose a small tree-cave
which they enter with sudden quietness
and modesty. and, for a while,
the wind that can be
a knife or a hammer, subsides.
they listen
to the thrushes.
the sky is blue, or the rain
falls with its spills of pearl.
around their wreath of darkness
the leaves of the world unfurl.
~Mary Oliver
