Travel is mundane – journeys can be profound, even sacred.

What makes anything sacred, rather than mundane?  The mundane, the of-the-world, can be imbued with the holy.  That’s human.  That’s divine.  That’s the paradox.

We are meaning makers, and we make holy.  So the journey is made sacred through intention.  My point at arrival is different in substance from my point of departure.  I can change any time, any where.  But why not ride the momentum of the journey to unravel what’s stuck and view what is ordinarily too close?

For a long time, the process of finding meaning through everyday events was just beside the point.  There were no everyday events.  Everything was extra-ordinary.  Everything was different.  And it still is.

I couldn’t find words that stood up to the loss.  The words that came just rattled around in my head, or formed a drumbeat too elemental to be strung together into sentences.

A season has passed, and I’ve started writing again.  The Autumn Equinox, when hours of light and hours of dark balance evenly, and during these Days of Awe, when the sum of our actions and being hang in the balance, seems an appropriate time to begin anew.

Weeding by my gate this morning, I wonder whether to pull up the volunteer clumps of grass.  The gravel that was laid in the spot is so dull – and maybe grass would be more soft and inviting?  Well, I don’t know.  And not knowing means that the gravel remains and weeds sprout up.

Amongst the “weeds” are dandelions – food plants, deliberately brought to the Americas by people who knew hunger.  And they grow even in shade and gravel (and everywhere else in my yard).

As the festival of Shavuot nears, the culmination of seven weeks of seven days of waiting for the harvest, I wonder how I overlook (or even and scorn) nourishment that comes unbidden.  I wonder how this gateway, this space I pass through on most days could better mark transition, intention and still offer up surprise blessings?

Gleaned from the recent rebroadcast of a Speaking of Faith episode, The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi, this lesson speaks to me.

We live in times of almost awesome universalism.  The wisdom paths of the ages are at our fingertips.  We are the inheritors of a wealth of knowledge, experimentation and daring.  And we are also the inheritors of a colonial legacy of skimming from the cultures of others.

A slight meander… My beloved brought me real milk.  Raw, fatty, doesn’t-last-long-in-the-fridge cow milk.  We’re warned that such milk carries a risk.  But the alternative carries a known weakness.  Sure, fat free, homogenized, pasteurized, tetra pak’d milk is safe safe safe.  But at what cost? (And safe for who? Not the cows.)

Here’s the link… Without the depth of a tradition we call our own (more so, that calls to us as its own) it can be like drinking that watery, grey flavorless whisper of cow milk.  I know that my soul needs the raw stuff.

This blog will mark the points on that journey of preparation.