Strangers and Pilgrims

“And they confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims
  on the earth.” ~Epistle to the Hebrew, chapter 11

Only through estrangement

and pilgrimage

do we come to know

that we have always

already arrived;

that the journey from our

lost and far-flung star

to the center of the galaxy

is but a trillionth of a hair’s width

sparkling in the neuron

of this thought.

Love asks no image or belief

but merely to dissolve

the myth of distances.

I think we orbit one another.

You find your center in me,

I find mine in you.

And this kaleidoscopic turning

of all through all

is the Great Stillness.

Light that swells the East

and melts the West

is only breath-mist

coming and going

on the mirror-like mind.

I am the glow that floats

about an inch above

your diaphragm.

And when it is soft enough,

your inhalation fathoms

my sky, overflowing

the rim of night.

Through estrangement and

pilgrimage we come to know

that there has never

not been unity.

Do you want to heal the earth?

Massage the chrism

of awareness

into the wounds of God.

Root down in the loam

of the ancestor's body.

Embrace your aloneness,

and you embrace mine.

 

 

'Love Among The Ruins' by Edward Burne Jones