--Sam Keen, American author/philosopher
It’s being called the summer of the great return. This summer of 2021, when so many of us are returning to our favorite places in this world, to visit our favorite people in this world, to experience again, that which we lost to COVID.
Sometimes the return won’t be so dramatic or even obvious. After wearing a mask for so long in public, in everyday places like the grocery store or Starbucks, after just one visit back to these familiar haunts, maskless, it felt normal for me to not have my nose and mouth covered. To not have to phone ahead for a contactless pick-up. To not rush through a store to minimize my contact with the potentially infected.
Nope: I slid right back into those routines easily.
But some other returns I’m finding weird, profound, emotional even. Take the airport. After having been grounded from air travel for almost a year and a half, my return to Logan Airport in late June was surreal and even a bit foreign. As a travel junkie I hadn’t missed being on a plane for such a long stretch of time since childhood. One of my favorite feelings in the world is the moment the airplane’s tires leave the earth and the plane tilts upwards and the ground drops away and I know I am free somehow. Removed, if only for a little while, from all my problems on the ground.
So, to walk into the airport, my rolling luggage in tow, mask affixed, to see all the folks lined up for a security check, to feel the buzz and excitement that marks a transportation hub, well, I got a bit teary. I hadn’t realized just how much I missed the gift of going away, getting a change of scenery, kicking the dust off my sandals, and leaving town. I even gave thanks to God for my cramped, narrow seat that I’d paid $30 extra for! (How much more stacked up could the seats be? Bunk seats perhaps?!) At least for my next few plane trips I’ll put up with the hassles of flying. I was just so overjoyed to be back, look out the window, watch as mother earth flew by.
The ritual of pilgrimage is central to many faiths: to travel to a holy place for the first time or for an annual time, a sacred space where we experience the divine. Muslims claim Mecca. Christians Jesus’ birthplace, Bethlehem. Jews the Western Wall in Jerusalem. But you don’t have to be a person of faith to know the gift of pilgrimage, of returning to some blessed place that blesses you back. In its familiarity. Its unique geography. Its special place in Creation. The folks there you love and who love you.
Think of all the wonderful returns this summer: to a sandy beach we’ve missed or a family cabin that’s been empty or a family reunion with folks we’ve not seen for so long: these too are absolutely pilgrimage. To stand again on holy ground. For me, it was my return just weeks ago, to Minnesota, a place I’ve visited every single summer, and many springs too, since 1993. I return because of my many old friends there and I return because it suits me: the hundreds of miles of bike paths and the farms and fields that stretch out to the horizon and the loons on the lake that cry out at sunset and even the Minnesota Twins, who have broken almost as many baseball hearts as the Red Sox!
When I am there, it just feels like home and so to miss that second home of mine for two years: well, that absence made my return to the North Star state so much sweeter. As I sat at table with loved ones I’d not seen since 2019, we went around and each of us shared in prayer, something we were thankful for. We all thanked God for one another and then the tears started. As Joni Mitchell sings, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?”
You are right Joni.
So, my prayer and hope for all of us, is that in the days and weeks and months ahead, we might each savor the returns that we will make. The pilgrimages that call us forth: to return again. Return to…the old friends we’ve missed. The family members we will hug even harder in the knowledge of how much they mean to us. And the special places that call forth to us, heaven on earth, some space that for us, embodies the holy, the transcendent, and the good.
Hello old friend. I’ve missed you.
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