A Blessing for those who Journey
Last week I got a sweet facebook message from an old friend. This friend, Jen, used to work with us in India. She knows the life we lived. She’s lived it. She also has made return trips back to visit. Jen understands full well that a return to India is also a return to self, to memory, to pain, to old joys and old sorrows. She deeply understands that this is more than a trip. It’s a journey back.
At Communicating Across Boundaries we know about loss and longings and the particular lonelinesses associated with leaving. Travel and Transcience is our specialty –we might not like it, we might not enjoy it…but we’re good at it. It’s what we do. We also intuitively understand the raw vulnerabilities that surface as we step off airplanes into spaces that unearth so much of who we are. Or who we were.
Jen’s message, together with the O’Donohue poem she quotes, are my new prayer for all of us.
We travel together at Communicating Across Boundaries. Journey well sweet community.
A blessing for you, my friend, in your journey deep into the sorrows, joys, newness, memories, and baffling moments of India . . .
Every time you leave home,
Another road takes you
Into a world you were never in.
New strangers on other paths await.
New places that have never seen you
Will startle a little at your entry.
Old places that know you well
Will pretend nothing
Changed since your last visit.
When you travel, you find yourself
Alone in a different way,
More attentive now
To the self you bring along,
Your more subtle eye watching
You abroad; and how what meets you
Touches that part of the heart
That lies low at home:
How you unexpectedly attune
To the timbre in some voice,
Opening in conversation
You want to take in
To where your longing
Has pressed hard enough
Inward, on some unsaid dark,
To create a crystal of insight
You could not have known
You needed
To illuminate
Your way.
When you travel,
A new silence
Goes with you,
And if you listen,
You will hear
What your heart would
Love to say.
A journey can become a sacred thing:
Make sure, before you go,
To take the time
To bless your going forth,
To free your heart of ballast
So that the compass of your soul
Might direct you toward
The territories of spirit
Where you will discover
More of your hidden life,
And the urgencies
That deserve to claim you.
May you travel in an awakened way,
Gathered wisely into your inner ground;
That you may not waste the invitations
Which wait along the way to transform you.
May you travel safely, arrive refreshed,
And live your time away to its fullest;
Return home more enriched, and free
To balance the gift of days which call you.
~ John O’Donohue ~
