“We’re all just walking each other home.”
Ram Dass
Ram Dass describes life as a walk. That image feels right. It’s a terrain I learn about by moving though. There are easy stretches where fields explode with flowering brush and insects buzzing in the sunshine. There are rough patches where soaking rains have washed away the trail. The distant hills might slope gently, convincing me I have the strength to meet them, before turning into mountain cliffs that seem to want to break me. It’s all there for me to learn from as I go. I pray the joys outweigh the woes, but I know, whatever comes, I am stronger for the walking.
And it’s true, my walk is leading somewhere; I am walking home. I’m trying to find my way through the wood, guided by the lessons I’ve been given. My learning has not always been pretty. I’ve made mistakes that hurt people, as many times as I’ve been hurt. But when the lesson took, I advanced another step, my inner goodness brightened, and my actions from that point were better.
Isn’t that how we all proceed along this road, learning, laughing, cringing, crying, finding our way through the flowers and the mud? We’re all trying to figure out how to make it through with a minimum of harm, under motivations we only partly understand, all of us wanting, desperately, to feel love, and trying stunningly stupid ways to find it.
For some, the moments on the cliffs are too much. I can’t know how the alchemy of pain works inside another, or why it is that fear sometimes warps the sapling more than it strengthens. But I know that at the low points on my road, when I was bitter or confused or in despair, I was uplifted when someone slowed to walk beside me. I’ve benefited from the grace of those kindnesses, surely I can do the same in return.
Where is home, this place I’m walking to? The memory I am following is sometimes vivid, sometimes vague. The signal comes and goes, but I can hear it when I turn my head. It comes from a dip in the horizon where the tender spot in me intersects with the tenderness of the world, a place so vulnerable, I’m afraid to approach. But when I move in that direction, all that pain, all that joy, are able to hold their shape and morph the elements of earth into light. The signal from home is clearest when I’m in the company of someone reaching out a hand, or taking mine extended. The light grows.
What indescribable luck to find myself in this human life, this radiant gift. I’m grateful for the chance to encounter its abundant beauty, experience companionship, struggle for answers that are not meant to be easy, and to participate in the most humanly exquisite gift of all, the ability to give and receive love. That is why I’m walking, walking with you, and countless others.
Photo by Rafael Garcin on Unsplash
Beautiful, Steve. No matter what is going on in the world and no matter what we choose to do about it, we can’t let it all take ththis share journey away from us.
Yep. I think that is what Ram Dass was pointing to.