The Return

Tuesday, July 1, 08
Returning, as leaving, is always a difficult transition. With them come opportunities as well as longing, sadness, excitement... One is never the same, life is not static, and to recognize this, not ignore, bringing forward the energy, is a trick, a process.
There are cultures which understand such shifts and see each doorway as a threshold into something new. This doorway, St. Ives, UK, is such a point. To step out of the past months into the up-coming brings with it an affect on my body and psyche - my skin is dry and a cold sore indicates a chemical change.
To bring what the walk-about continues to teach me, not cling, not abandon, developing a synthesis of the two worlds, is the work of many years, a lifetime. To do otherwise is to be stuck in the netherworld of not in and not out. Beauty, as well as horror, rests in both worlds. As does contentment and struggle, humidity and dryness, fractures and joining... This is the IT of Life - two sides of the same coin.
Quickly, the sharpness of the experience dulls and fades, which is our lot. Yet, I bear all the feelings of vistas, heat, flowers, waiting, illness, friends, hunger, solitude... These are never far away.
So, I close my last entry with portions of a poem by Walt Whitman:

"apart from the pulling and hauling,
amused, complacent, compassionating,
idle, unitary... both in and out of the
game and watching and wondering at it all..."