confusion enough

wikipedia: “A pilgrim (from the Latin peregrinus) is a traveller (literally one who has come from afar) who is on a journey to a holy place.”

i’m in the “everything is holy” camp, so we can just cut the last part of that definition, and get a good summary of how travel felt (actually, how i remember it feeling): i was a pilgrim on a journey. the journey ended when i came back to seattle, and began: living in a place, waking up every morning in the same bed, working 5 days a week, looking forward to week-ends, and seeing the same lovely people on a regular basis.

the journey has ended – but so suddenly that my mind is still half-operating in pilgrim mode. in other words, i am stuck seeking, even though i am realizing daily & hourly that i have everything i have ever wanted.

i have everything i have ever wanted?! ok, mind, “do i want anything else?” a resounding SILENCE. what can this mean? having everything you have ever wanted & wanting nothing else should, theoretically, lead to contentment. however, i am feeling an inner squirminess. when i look at it, it resolves into the image of me-shaped dude, astride a horse/train/plane, in perpetual forward dive. it is the inner pilgrim, still operating, the off switch invisible, yelling g-d-things at the inner porch-&-rocking-chair aficionado.

what was it like to be one of the pilgrims in the far-away days of their prominence? i imagine men & women, covered in yellow dust, finally arriving at some holy site at the top of a murderous mountain. they kneel, they pray, their hearts elope with g-d’s, and, having done exactly what they set out to do, they turn around to go home, minds aglow with the all-glow, faith & love tattooed for another decade onto their consciousness.

this did not happen to me. lots of things were tattooed on my consciousness, but i do not know what they are. something happened, but i understand it poorly because i explicitly forbade myself any goals & expectations before & during the trip. i sought only to understand seeking, and moved because staying still made no sense. there was no holy site to finally arrive at (even though i reached plenty) because i am committed to the idea that the holy is a congenital halo – everyone’s got one & it’s always encircling your head.

where does a pilgrimage of my sort end? my zen-pilgrimage was a contradiction in terms – wandering around looking for the holy, and at the same time convinced that the holy is everywhere. maybe the point of the trip was to viscerally convince myself that holy IS everywhere; turn that idea into a knowledge. have i done that? i don’t know (yet)!

all i know is that i’m home & i have no idea how to be home. my pilgrim-mind keeps hinting that i should DO something. but when i try to fit a specific DO, i can’t find one. i can’t find one because i now believe too strongly that only when our own little-self seeking is quieted down, the big-self universe-sez voice can be heard within.

this is where it gets personal. i know what little-self (ego) sounds like, but i’m not sure i know what big-self (universe) sounds like. sometimes i know. other times, i am so filled with doubt, i want to sobbingly seek comfort in richard dawkins’s besweatered, bony shoulder. i oscillate, and it’s hard, but i suppose this is what faith is – i don’t know that when i mellow out the little-self, the big-self will just appear loud & clear in its place. if i knew, it wouldn’t be faith. i just believe in the reality of the big-self, and so i am, for the moment, stuck. half of me wants to integrate every part of my life into a bad-ass do-do-do journey, and the other half wants to completely surrender & listen for instructions from the universe. i (whoever that is) am rooting for surrender at this point, because i’ve been into the DO thing and it’s not for me (too much stress, not enough joy).