Returning - Day 9

Santiago to Madrid

A train seems to be the perfect way to emerge from a pilgrimage. Feeling its gentle motion. Watching the changing scenery speed by…countryside, cows, and crops; villages of stone homes and cobble streets; rivers; cities – where we always slow down for a stop. What a funny thing to speed through the peace and pause to get off where it is busy. Hmmm.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to observe this pace. Even as I sit still on the train, there is movement. Life carries me. Life goes on. I can choose what to embrace – where to pause and where to participate. I pause now with a poem by Dawna Markova that greeted me on my travels and leads me home.

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not go in fear of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid, more accessible,
to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as a seed
goes to the next as a blossom,
and that which came to me as a blossom
goes on as fruit.

GivingThanks for you in this season. May you receive the gift of pause in ThanksGiving and be nourished in body and soul.