Be Both Lost and at Home

Sometime this past year, this phrase came to me:

Be both lost and at home.

That's where I find myself this year––in the familiar and the foreign.
Some of that is Covid-19, of course, making the whole world seem strange for many of us.

The uprisings after the police murder of George Floyd a mile from me physically changed my city:
burned buildings reshaped the landscape;
my workplace was broken;
seeing convoys of troops rolling down the street, I felt like I was in Beirut. (Beirut? Why did that particular city come to mind?);
closing the intersection where Floyd died and creating George Floyd Memorial Square changed the neighborhood around it for blocks--this is ongoing.

And I was already feeling displaced since I'd moved in Sept. 2019 to this neighborhood (quiet, residential, not far from the Mississippi river) after seventeen years in a very different one (busy, noisy, near the chain of lakes).
I still felt myself a stranger in new place when Covid hit here six months later.

But it's more than those exterior, public changes.
I'm not sure what all is going on. Lots, I'd say.

To Be a Pilgrim

When I'd moved, I'd said I wanted to live as I did when I was a pilgrim on Camino. It's about being--and wanting to be––less fixed in my orientation to the world. Traveling lighter. Being my own North Star.
That feels good and right, even though sometimes I am a bit scrambled.

Leaving, One Day

Aging is part of being lost and at home too:
at sixty, I am aware I won't always be here, now.

Social Revelations

At my job, I work with and am friends with people from a different social group than people I've known before. People who don't read books, and never have. At work, my social compass is off--my cultural references don't hit home.

I've learned new references, which is great. That's a big point of traveling, eh? It's eye opening.
Positively apocalyptic:

"The original word in Greek— apokalypsis —means an unveiling, a revelation.

'It’s not just about the end of the world,' said Jacqueline Hidalgo, chair of religion at Williams College. 'It helps us see something that is hidden before.'

'Apocalypse is a flexible script'."

www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-apocalypse-religion.html