i’ve been living in Asheville, while i prepare myself and get things in order to move to Brooklyn—i hope in the Spring. in the meantime, i’m in a group house with old friends and dharma companions, brothers and sisters on the spiritual path. i am blessed by their company every day.
one of the things i’ve been sitting with here in North Carolina is grief. my pilgrimage was a happy and beautiful and painful and incredibly growthy period of my life, full and abundant and blessed beyond measure. i loved living that way and i was sad to end it. and i found it hard to say goodbye.
i learned so much on my pilgrimage, from so many people, in so many places. i wanted to write something, to document some of the things that i learned, to keep a record for myself and posterity.
i learned that i often feel sad, depressed, and lonely on the first night in a new place. i started calling this the “first night effect.”
i gained the ability to sleep on nearly any surface, to nap with just a few moments, to sleep through loud noises if need be or to summon alertness at the blink of an eye.
i learned that i can do six or seven Zoom calls or in-person meetings a day, day after day, in seeming perpetuity.
for someone who loves SOP’s, i learned, far too late, the value of having a packing checklist, a ritual for going between places. i’d started leaving things behind by accident and resolved never again. i found that when i stopped to collect my things with care and precision, i also gathered my heart—i left blessings for my hosts, and began to orient towards my next chapter
i was kicked out of a stretching class and bit by a dog. i was asked not to practice Tai Chi outside of a library, and welcomed into the homes of countless saints.
at the close of my pilgrimage, there were 128 people in cities and countries around the world willing to host me, to put me up on their couches or in their guest rooms—everywhere from Brooklyn to Vienna, Sydney to Sofia. i came to see that having a place to offer is an underrated form of owned power.
i learned that cities have personalities or characters or spirits, fields and egregores.
i found myself typing or categorizing cities as head or heart or gut cities.
i learned that i found it useful to oscillate between city mode and rural mode, between weeks or months with many in-person meetings and weeks or months with far more quiet, stillness, slowness, and nature. it was like maker and manager schedule, but for pilgrims.
i learned that there was often an explicit, conscious reason that i wanted to go somewhere, needed to be there—and that while i was there, a more subtle reason would reveal itself, an implicit mission and an emergent quest.
i heard from someone that they saw me as the most extroverted person they’d ever met, and heard from another person that they saw me as the most introverted person they’d ever met. i fell in love with seeing people’s souls and struggled with my ability to understand groups and social dynamics.
i learned that meeting new people or going to new places advances the plot. that talking to many people solves problems and cultivates genius.
i learned how to be a good guest and, by inversion, how to be a good host.
i learned about the word “dyspraxia,” a learning disability, and a number of my friends helped me to cultivate praxia instead.
i learned that it was possible to have short term relationships, that these helped me to grow and flourish, and were often neater and cleaner and more straightforward than indeterminate indefinite relationships.
i learned that i was on a self-assigned recovery program, a post-monastic integration exercise, escaping the bubble of Buddhism and rural vermont to see the world, encounter a thousand different people and even more perspectives, ways of life, worldviews and orientations.
i learned to see the world through the lens of the life force, to sense that the life force was calling me somewhere or asking something of me. i learned the joy of being at the right place at the right time, and the sorrow and pain of being out of alignment with the life force.
i learned that people find me brave for things that feel intuitive, come naturally, and that i have gifts that few see but bless my life and this world nonetheless.
i learned that i have a tremendous capacity for enduring awkwardness.
i felt my heart as one that loves everyone at first sight yet bleeds from papercuts.
i once believed myself weak and unvirtuous. i have disabused myself of that misperception. i saw that i am resilient beyond my own measure.
i began to view life as having chapters, and myself as a protagonist, one of many heroes in the grand story of God’s endless multiverse—a view that allowed me to let go of being an involuntary subject of the whims and tides of life, and instead become an active participant in the shaping of its seasons.
i met the greatest love of my life (so far), experienced excruciating heartbreak, learned the hard-earned skill and life-long boon of the capacity to grieve.
i met lifelong friends and onetime lovers, a thousand teachers and a million strangers. i taught a homeless man the dharma on a park bench and argued with a security guard about the sovereignty of my own body.
there’s much more than this that i learned. but that’s what i remember for now. and i am glad to have written of it, and to have shared it with U.
to be on pilgrimage, to wander from here to there, is to constantly be saying goodbye and hello–to constantly be confronting the fact that we will not have infinite time together, to constantly be rejoicing in the gift of the time that we do have alive, alongside the ones we love