I am lying in a hammock listening to words that I will never be ready to hear but are inevitable. All around me the evening birds fling their final songs on the darkening valley, and away in the town the fairy tale steeples of the Church light up. It is Hansel and Gretel time, but I haven’t laid a bread trail and I will never get home again. Home is now in me, wherever I am. Currently it is unearthed, suspended in a hammock, the closest thing to the ground is my bottom and it feels like it’s getting a kicking. Bats flit between me and three purple clouds that are dissolving like gun smoke and it is becoming very chilly.

There is a time when life calls us away from the comforting certainties that grounded our existence. We don’t have to go…actually that’s not true, because if we don’t go, we come round again and again to the same bleak, night time station where we wait, and wait, and wait. Station life is not living, it is only waiting and by God, the place is crowded, some are even having dinner parties.

Make the train stop for you! Throw the luggage on the track. Wheel over the kiosks and shove them off the platform one by one until you bring the train to a stop and get on. You will leave a mess behind, and the dinner party will pause, and after a slow shake of their heads, will resume at their table, forgetting you. 

And, of course, the sacrament of life will continue to roll you along and roll you over, in the unremitting ordinariness of attending to the project of keeping the unbearable wonder of things alive in your own heart and the hearts of those you love. Feelings come and go in a kind of wild dance where you don’t always get to be the DJ. But dance or die, these are the only options.