“Will you think of me and wonder if I'm fine?
Will your restless heart come back to mine,
On a journey thru the past.
Will I still be in your eyes and on your mind?
Now I'm going back to Canada
On a journey thru the past and I won't be back
till February comes…”
-Neil Young
Still up tonight! Not sure how to describe today, “…all in all it wasn’t bad, all in all it wasn’t good…” might come close. Does anyone else ever feel like in some little way you have been creeping forward and going in somewhat of a direction, any direction, but at least in a direction? And then wham! You are sent reeling back into a place you did not want to be, a place you thought that you had moved out of or away from. Yet, there you are right back there again. Maybe that was what Paul was talking about in Romans; “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do." This must be a universal lament and struggle and it must be why there is grace. For these times of failure or doubt or self hatred – all of what we wrestle with as humans and yet grace comes along and whispers to us, “it’s o.k.” there is enough grace to deal with anything and enough love to heal anything. The real secret in life is to keep moving, “keep pedaling” and know that you are not alone!
All this to say that I believe that I must go on a journey through my past – I wasn’t exactly sure about this, but tonight I am resolved to embark on this journey. T.S. Eliot was correct that, “…what we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from…” and “…we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at where we started and know the place for the first time…” This place is in a mysterious way in our past that we get to by remembering and also in our future but the only possible route to it is by journeying in the now, the moment, and catching and piecing together glimpses of where you are and where it is you are to be. Eliot describes this place as, “…not known, because not looked for but heard, half – heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea. A condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything) and all shall be well when the tongues of flame are in – folded into the crowned knot of fire and the fire and the rose are one.”
I will write more about this journey in the coming weeks, and see where each day takes me. In some way I hope to find the answers to many questions about where my life is going and that, “…most of the time people meet, they become friends. They spend more time together…” but what do you do when it may not be so and life seems unnatural? Eliot again I believe in some sense answers this, “…as we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated.” Hemingway wrote about these moments of hurt and wanting to move backwards and feeling not natural in these sentences, “You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.” So, it is the awareness that there is always spring, and hope that there will always be someplace for things to go just as there is always a place for the river to flow when it thaws. In life also, “…to move backwards, away from people…” is like dying – it is in the embracing of the possibilities that you become alive on the journey together!
Once again I hope this late night rambling makes some coherent sense in the morning. Good - night!
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