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?

for all that will be missed

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