for courage

Somewhere in the past year—a summer spent orcharding along the Columbia, a seasonless fall/winter/spring in my Santa Barbara home; a year full of trips to Bellingham, Seattle, Whidbey Island, Pasadena, Costa Rica, Mississippi, Alabama, New York, and now London; somewhere between two fires, two evacuations, and one graduation—I realize all the sojourning has poured exhaustion like milk into my bone marrow.

And while this is to say nothing of Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, or quite how much I have loved our good, good earth and the many thousand faces and lands to which it has endeared me, the tent must still be pitched, and in mercy I will continue to build and abandon and rebuild nest after nest. But why not moderately? Why not with reservations, with jaded caution? I am not naïve, nor stranger to suffering, and I know You have melted my heart of stone, but does wisdom not demand a holding back of spirit? And yet this very practice remains foreign to me!

All this movement from friendship to friendship, from place to place, fills me with too much longing. How many more women can my heart be opened toward? How many more men? What else can possibly be grafted into my already deep and tangled roots?

Oh it's been years since I chose a (sometimes) lonely adventure over any storyless, comfortable life. But the work and joy of pilgrimage, or pilgrimhood, begs someone to walk beside.

These are days of relearning [that You are my closest friend].