Paths Unfound

an invitation to travel lightly

In the unresolvable 

When you have sipped a cherry red night sky

in the middle of the day 

and you feel scars stretch with each breath

and every untended bridge is falling

and borders are blocked

When fear contaminates

and you cannot press your body against another

and mold on the baseboards is traveling black

up the walls

and arctic lakes are bubbling

and autopsy tools and tables glare 

and green leaves are felted with ash

and your guard has been up so long

When you have seen your neighbor’s face in flickering

torchlight, spit flecked words aimed

at what you love 

and the last Pyrenean Ibex joins its family

in exhausted death

and the clock is moved forward 

and still these endless debts

and hope needs to become something new now

and you are abiding in the unresolvable

Let your heart be a wilderness

with paths only apparent 

by bushes lightly bent by warm furred shoulders 

passing through 

trembling

            lift

suddenly aware 

of transparent wings

be nameless

                        and unfound

                                    and home

            (Melissa Fritchle, 2022) 

This week I invite you to consider how you can travel lightly. Make space for yourself to be a temporary visitor in this place, wherever you are, whether you call this place you are in home or not.

Become curious about the liberating quality of being unnamed, undefined, unseen. Move like a mysterious stranger seeing all of this for the first, and perhaps last, time.

Open up to the largest conception of Home you can imagine. You belong to a vast wilderness so far beyond what is familiar.

Offer gratitude for this wild and sacred path forward into the unknown and to all those beings who are traveling beside you, seen and unseen. Bow to the Earth that has taken you in, that holds you wherever you are.