Pilgrimage

This business of living, what is it?

I look back in my memories and it’s all hazy, a blur of sorts. I can no longer swiftly recall names. I have never had what you would call a photographic memory so I do not recall faces as well, only traces, features, minor distinguishing characteristics. I do not remember events in detail either. Sometimes I question whether things really happened the way I remember them or whether my perception at the time was warped like a star's light as it is affected by a planet’s gravitational pull. I sometimes wonder if it isn’t all an invention of my subconscious. Did it happen in a dream? Was it all a dream?

And so I ask myself, what is this business of living after all?

I come from long ago. There is a date I shall remember because it is recorded on a birth certificate. I have travelled in time. The body has grown older, the mind more mature, and the spirit…the spirit, timeless.

I have memories of my parents’ tenderness: four eyes looking down at my minute stature, the feeling of safety in their nearness, the life lessons that my young mind easily disregarded. I remember a rebellious youth: didn’t grandmother say to question everything and find for myself what the world was to me? After all, I was just following that advice, I tell myself.
Yet, mother always managed to light a fire and start boiling water as she saw me approach every time I came back home. She knew my favorite meal was steamed rice with beans, queso fresco and jalapenos.
And then there were departures. Each time it seemed a chip of heart was left behind on the side of the road. I left them there hoping that I would one day go back, collect them all and have a whole heart again. Instead, paradoxically, I created a void, an emptiness that’s full of emotion and longing.

And on this winter solstice, in which the light returns, I don’t find myself returning to all that other than in feeling, in thought.

Animals migrate, they travel distances following their natural instincts. They look for food, a place to reproduce, better climate; in a word, survival of the species. Part of that migration is a return and so their journeys have been recorded in popular documentaries and books. One of the longest annual migrations being that of Sooty Shearwaters, which nest in New Zealand and Chile and spend the northern summer feeding in the North Pacific off Japan, Alaska and California, an annual round trip of 64,000 km (39,800 mi).


We humans, being part of the animal world, migrate too. We leave our homes, our families, our towns, and sometimes our countries but not all of us return. A lot of us who don’t return recreate the life we had, our setting and community elsewhere. We surround ourselves with our customs, our culture, and the social life we can’t leave behind. We do that perhaps because we understand that we can never go home; not the home we left anyway. We do that perhaps because it’s our identity. It is how we chose to identify ourselves.

Have I migrated?
Am I a seeker?
Am I after survival?

I have not migrated. I have been shedding my past, my life, my family, my home, my country, my religion little by little the way a vibrant flower loses its petals one by one in the sun, the way a joyful bird leaves multiple feathers on its flight path, the way a tree drops its leaves in the fall allowing them to be carried by the wind. Best of all, I have no desire to return.

No, mine has not been a migration.

Am I a seeker?

Those who call themselves seekers are not seekers if they don’t know what they are searching. If they know what they are looking for, they must have found it at some point in time, at some stage in life. How did they lose it, how did they get away from it, how did they depart?
I don’t know where I am going not because I am lost, but because I do not believe in destiny or destination. I don’t even believe in going anywhere. So I am not a seeker either.

Am I after survival?

S-u-r-v-i-v-a-l, I don’t like the ring it has to it.
I learned long ago that there are two ways to do dishes. You can do dishes to get them clean or you can do dishes to do dishes. In the former you focus on the result, in the latter you focus on the present, the task at hand, the doing. Being after survival to me has this connotation of focusing on the end result instead of the actual living. Therefore no, I am not a survivor.

I am more an explorer. An explorer knows that there is a pursuit, an experience at hand, a reality to be coded. I know the reality I choose to explore and because that reality is this continuous experience of living, this exultant worshiping of the Absolute, what I have been doing is not a migration, it’s a pilgrimage.
That is the business of my living: a timely recognition of the way it all is.

Belief in Spirit

"The definition of spirituality should be 'that which is its own evidence'"

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since I was a child, I have maintained this belief that there is something that transcends the ephemeral in life, the temporal in time, and the apparent solidity of matter. I do not know how I arrived to such conclusion; I do know that I have put effort in maintaining and deepening it.
As a young man, disenchanted with the religion into which I was born, I started pursuing different religions. As a common denominator, in all of them I saw this unquestionable, unquenchable thirst to understand our relationship to everything around us and the comfort we find in believing there is more to existence than what meets the eye.

One diet I am very fond of is that in which I carefully select the quality and originality of what nurtures my mind. I enjoy reading spiritual writings, Eastern thought, religious writing, comparative religion, philosophy and science; all of which can be poetic or not.
It was while reading Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, in which she makes a call to re-examine our religion and our belief in God, that I found my call. In a chapter entitled “The death of God?” she concludes with a Holocaust account in which a group of Jews put God on trial in which at the end, after considering His trespasses, they find Him guilty and the Rabbi pronounces Him worthy of death. Then he looks up and states the trial is finished: it was time for the evening prayer.
That short ending paragraph had a huge impact on me. It taught me once and for all that this need we have to continue practicing what brings us solace in the midst of our sometimes bleak existence is not to be ignored and I decided to participate in this ongoing conversation we have about Belief and Spirit. I set out to writing, not for myself only, but thinking as well of helping others, of what empowers me, motivates me, and inspires me to regard the blissful life as a precious endeavor. It was this need in me to nurture the peace and comfort I find in reading that resulted in this blog.


The spiritual life is not one in which you kneal and recite some formula over and over again. It is one in which every breath you take celebrates the variety of life's experiences, the exultant, the grotesque, the ugly and the beautiful. It is one in which you are able to find a connection to a greater through the minor, the minuscule and the particular. The spiritual life is one in which eternity is not a question of if, when or how.

I challenge you to go beyond dogma and find in everything around you the essence of Spirit. We need to learn how to respect and regard other people’s belief systems as genuine and valid if only it helps them to participate in the mystery of life more fully, in a healthier way, and in a joyful manner. Belief doesn’t have to be homogenous, we each have our individual way of sensing the mysterious and we should guide ourselves by that unique internal compass.

It is necessary though, now and then, to sit in silence with your own thought and listen to what arises in it.

The Believer in Me