The Single Step

I’m on pilgrimage. That’s what I’ve been gabbing at god and everyone, though I should’ve been asking what the hell that means. Concepts rain: journeying outward and inward away from the known, following ancient routes to sacred places, walking closer to knowing ones Divinity. The world faiths have their pilgrimages, and the world’s faithful follow them. Secular pilgrimages abound as well, many miles eaten by wheels for devotion to sport, music, festival.

I feel myself outside of both but I’ve left my home and my understanding of the Divine and I’m on my feet in Old Country. Where I rest today frames yesterday’s road. Meaning is distilled drop by drop, tended by the days’ intentions: open; surrender; go forth.

As soon as the plane took off into the Cascade Sky I realized I’d been sitting still too long. Too comfortable, too familiar, and now this great unknown expanse of time and continent was making me anxious. The thought of new currencies, transport, food was perfectly unsettling.

I flew out of the sunrise and landed in Amsterdam on New Year’s Eve. Euros in my pocket (thanks Mom), I stepped onto the train, found lodging in Utrecht and a delicious Dutch salad. So it begins.

We toured Amsterdam on New Year’s Day, the garbage trucklets overwhelmed with the devastation of firework husks, broken glass, cigarette butts. I knelt in a Catholic Church and sent my Reiki prayers up through the gilded steeple.

The next day I knelt in what was once a Catholic Cathedral but had been bashed and dulled into a Protestant Church during the fury of the Reformation. (I lamented the waste at the time, but visiting the Vatican weeks later I understood the rage and felt tempted to do some tearing and burning of that perverse opulence myself.)

Just a few days with those sweet pink-cheeked bike-riding sea-strugglers amidst their canals and coffee before boarding the train to Germany. Thank you Netherlands.

Prayer of Amsterdam: May the light of this moon illumine all I love and have left behind, may it show my feet their stance on this new ground, may it see all travelers to safe rest.