Language & Literacy A Writing Life

The Blessing (Finding Measures of Peace)

The night before I left for el camino del Inca I had a dream in which Toby appeared. He was just the way I knew him, he was alive, he was smiling in that gruff yet child-like manner that he had, and I woke up because I realized in the dream that he really was gone. When I woke up his spirit was there with me, just like the first time when I dreamed of him a while ago, except this time he was close and I was not afraid. I was not afraid because I knew I was not imagining things. It was very real and very powerful and I went back to sleep almost immediately afterwards, at peace. For those of you who do not believe in spirits, wait until you are visited by the spirit of one whose death was close enough to you that you cannot push them away. I realized at that moment in the night that I had been visited before, because I knew the feeling well. But this time I was finally without fear for the first time. It felt like a blessing, and in fact throughout el camino del Inca I felt like I was carrying him with me.
A feeling I have had throughout this journey is that many things happening to me, the people I have met and the experiences that I have had, have been meant to happen. This is a feeling I've felt before my travels, but it's an awareness that's intensified in this kind of setting, where my spacial dynamics and language and social environment are constantly shifting. I feel like the more that I open myself to what is meant to happen, the fuller and more meaningful these experiences are when they occur. Por ejemplo, when I meet someone new, if I am in the kind of mindset where I am willing to suspend my expectations and am not delimiting who they can potentially be in my mind, then they open up in the immediate future with life affirming gifts of knowledge and love for me. And it is then that I sense that this person was meant to be there in that path in time just as I was meant to be. Gifts invisible at every turn, just when you gave it all away. I don't mean any of that in the sense of predetermination. I mean that there is a potentiality in everyone for god. And when you catch a glimmer in someone else you catch a glimmer in yourself, and it is then that you know and you believe and you are strong, for an instant, for a moment, and there is nothing but one blood flowing through the limbs of one tree. Then you disintegrate back into yourself and them and you move on into tomorrow with one more piece of the light shot through you.