What goes home with me?

For today and tomorrow the literal question is, what goes home with me? Those things which have given great pleasure to my daily life will likely go to Courtney, my French press and thermos and aromatherapy spray. The time for final sorting is here on the material plane. I have five large boxes packed and ready to go, a big duffel bag, a suitcase, and a backpack. And I have already sent off three boxes of teaching materials. That's a lot of stuff. Surprisingly, I don't have the sense that I really shopped too much, as I thought I might. And I don't have more than the US Customs limit either. Perhaps I will sing a different tune when I see the shipping tab!

What else, though? What else will I take home from going around the world? A sense of the aloneness, the essential 'I-ness' of life, the way birth and death are "I" events, at least from the self perspective. Because going around the world in a ship is hard to articulate, much less to 'get' as a listener. Yet I question this interpretation even as I write it, because we are not born alone but born to a minimum of a mother and a world. And so, though I am enculturated to think of indescribable experience as belonging in a lonely way to me, it is actually all held together by the communal nature of reality, the web of existing in relationships. And that is probably what I will take home, an enriched self who, to the extent that she gives it away, will share the enrichment in rather subtle ways.

A not so subtle reality for me is that I have done something I really wanted to do in life; I have taken time from what I must do in order to do something I want to do. And I feel very energized by that....

"If the world is to be healed by human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear. People who can open to the web of life that called us into being, and who can rest in the vitality of that larger body." (Joanna Macy)