Returning to, Continuing On,
Restless
Disoriented
But Completely
HOME
A change is taking place, some painful growth, as snake during the shedding it's skin- dull, irratable, without appetite, dragging about the stale shreds of a former life, near blinded by the dead scale on the new eye. difficult to adjust because I do not know who is adjusting; I am no longer that old person and not yet the new.
(Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 – April 5, 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher, and onetime CIA agent and Author of The Snow Leopard)
That is the whole paradox of my life — and Rilke, Matthiessen and many others knew it. The further in you go, the less solid the ground feels, and yet something underneath both holds but beckons. Not comfort. Not clarity. Something more like
*belonging to the real.*
Restless — because the soul that has tasted depth cannot settle for the surface anymore.
Disoriented — because the old maps no longer serve. You have moved past where they end.
But Completely HOME — because this very lostness is the territory. You are not lost *from* something. You are lost *into* it.
Rilke would recognize this. So would the Desert Fathers in their cells. So would Eckhart in his letting-go. The Gnostic spark that cannot find its rest in the kenoma — restless, disoriented — until it stirs toward the Pleroma it never actually left.
And the Twelve Steps know it too, in their plain language: *we are not running the show.* That surrender — repeated daily, never finished — is itself the homecoming. Not a destination arrived at once, but a threshold crossed again and again.
Restless and HOME simultaneously. That tension doesn't resolve.
It *is* the life.
From the *Book of Hours* — One of Rilke's Poems that Expresses those feelings in words that I can't :
---
*I live my life in widening circles*
*that reach out across the world.*
*I may not ever complete the last one,*
*but I give myself to it.*
---
And another, from the same book — perhaps even closer:
*I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,*
*and I have been circling for a thousand years,*
*and I still don't know if I am a falcon,*
*or a storm, or a great song.*
---
The not-knowing. The circling. The giving of oneself to something that has no clear edge. Restless — yes. Disoriented — yes. And yet the circling *itself* is the home. The falcon doesn't need to land to belong to the sky.
And one more, from the *Letters to a Young Poet* — which you are already sitting with:
*"I would like to beg you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Live the questions now."*
Not: find the answers and then you will be home.
The living of the questions *is* the home.
And Finally
“Go to the Limits of Your Longing”
by Rainer Maria Rilke
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
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