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1 " Sometimes, you need the ocean light, and colors you’ve never seen beforepainted through an evening sky.Sometimes you need your God to be a simple invitationnot a telling word of wisdom.Sometimes you need only the first shyness that comes from being shown thingsfar beyond your understanding,so that you can fly and become freeby being still and by being still here.And then there are times you want to be brought to ground by touch and touch alone.To know those arms around youand to make your home in the world just by being wanted. To see eyes looking back at you,as eyes should see you at last,seeing you, as you always wanted to be seen,seeing you, as you yourself had always wanted to see the world. "
― David Whyte , Pilgrim
2 " And after you were up, when the light had come and the moon had gone, you found the path again waiting through the open window, the faces at the table gazing with you, as you sat with your coffee, silently letting the sense of rest seat home, the body ready to walk, in rhythm and in rhyme, with the given, unspoken source. "
3 " Let the apple ripenon the branch beyond your needto take it down. "
4 " SantiagoThe road seen, then not seen, the hillsidehiding then revealing the way you should take,the road dropping away from you as if leaving youto walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,when you thought you would fall,and the way forward always in the endthe way that you followed, the way that carried youinto your future, that brought you to this place,no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,no matter that it had to break your heart along the way:the sense of having walked from far inside yourselfout into the revelation, to have risked yourselffor something that seemed to stand both inside youand far beyond you, that called you backto the only road in the end you could follow, walkingas you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voicethat by night became a prayer for safe arrival,so that one day you realized that what you wantedhad already happened long ago and in the dwelling placeyou had lived in before you began,and that every step along the way, you had carriedthe heart and the mind and the promisethat first set you off and drew you on and that you weremore marvelous in your simple wish to find a waythan the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach:as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a citywith golden towers, and cheering crowds,and turning the corner at what you thought was the endof the road, you found just a simple reflection,and a clear revelation beneath the face looking backand beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse:like a person and a place you had sought forever,like a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond;like another life, and the road still stretching on. "
5 " THE WELL Be thankful now for having arrived, for the sense of having drunk from a well, for remembering the long drought that preceded your arrival and the years walking in a desert landscape of surfaces looking for a spring hidden from you so long that even wanting to find it now had gone from your mind until you only remembered the hard pilgrimage that brought you here, the thirst that caught in your throat; the taste of a world just-missed and the dry throat that came from a love you remembered but had never fully wanted for yourself, until finally after years making the long trek to get here it was as if your whole achievement had become nothing but thirst itself. But the miracle had come simply from allowing yourself to know that you had found it, that this time someone walking out into the clear air from far inside you had decided not to walk past it any more; the miracle had come at the roadside in the kneeling to drink and the prayer you said, and the tears you shed and the memory you held and the realization that in this silence you no longer had to keep your eyes and ears averted from the place that could save you, that you had been given the strength to let go of the thirsty dust laden pilgrim-self that brought you here, walking with her bent back, her bowed head and her careful explanations. No, the miracle had already happened when you stood up, shook off the dust and walked along the road from the well, out of the desert toward the mountain, as if already home again, as if you deserved what you loved all along, as if just remembering the taste of that clear cool spring could lift up your face and set you free. "
6 " PILGRIMI bow to the larkand its tinylifted silhouetteflutteringbefore infinity.I promise myselfto the mountainand to the foundationfrom whichmy future comes.I make my vowto the streamflowing beneath,and to the waterfallingtowards all thirst,andI pledge myselfto the seato which it goesand to the mercyof my disappearance,and though I may beleft aloneor abandoned bythe unyielding presentor orphaned in some farunspoken place,I will speakwith a voiceof loyaltyand faithto the far shorewhere everythingturns to arrival,if only in the soundof falling wavesand I will listenwith sincereand attentive eyes and earsfor a final invitation,so that I canbe that note half-heardin the flying lark song,or that tinton a far mountainbrushed with the subtlegrey of dawn,even a river gone bystill lookingas if it hasn’t,or an ocean heard onlyas the sound of wavesfalling and falling,and falling,my eyes closingwith theminto someundeserved nothingeven as theygive up theirstrengthon the sand. "