the Start of the Journey

We find ourselves in the midst of lent.  Lent offers us an opportunity to look back and reflect at who we are, where we have been, where we would like to go.  The 40 days of lent can be used intentionally to access our spiritual well being, to re-center ourselves, to regain focus.

For those of us who find ourselves on the left handed path, far away from home, or even those of us who have been on the left handed path, and returned home, or settled at a new home, there is something we share in common, something that is useful during this time of reflection.

When we set out away from home, we were confident in our journey, we were confident in ourselves.  Being out, truly away from home, exposes that confidence quickly.  In other words our egos are beat down, our confidence may be shattered, we may have felt like the entire journey was a mistake.  We become deeply humble, often humiliated at some level.  Yet being that we are so far away from home, and are most likely alone, we are forced to face the challenges alone, without the support system of the village at hand.    

In the face of hardships, we learn to let go more readily.  We begin to understand at some deep level what it means to be led by God.   We are able to see, to some extent, the internal steel framework of the universe, we can see how we fit in, how we were formed and created by God.    Admittedly i am using a fairly judeo-christian understanding here, but i hope that it is translatable to other traditions.  It comes to us in our most fearful moments, the moments when we don't have anywhere else to turn.

Yet as time goes on, and our comfort increases, we forget the fear of our journeys, and the humbleness we acquired.  It is easy for our fear to transform into a perverted confidence.  The stories we tell gloss over the true fear of the moment, the humility and loneliness we felt, the sense of failure.  Our reflections only recall our success, we forget the ways in which we turned to God, the ways in which, by practically no work of our own, we made it through in one piece.  We forget we found our survival in God.

As lent progresses, we can reflect on the most difficult times of our journeys away from home, and remember that we made it through, we made it through by letting go of our own egos, and finding comfort in a higher power.  We have to be able to pass those lessons along, not just as distant stories, but as emotional experiences.  We must not shy away from expressing the loneliness we might have felt or the humility we experienced, for surely others know what that feels like, and we are in the position to show that when we let go, we can make it through.