Diagnosed Mortal #16
Thoughts about the wandering peoples of the world and what it might mean if everyone is really homeless.
When I wrote the essay for this post I was trying to understand what Jenkinson was getting at in our being orphans and homeless....uprooted from our sense of place. I never did quite follow what he was putting down personally in this regard that summer. Reading the essay now, it seems I fell into a kind of romantic hole in my trying to process the point. It may be true that until we 'pick up the berry and better understand how to bait the hook on the thread' that binds us to our ancestors, we will have to do things over until we completely botch the entire operation of humanity.
I do not currently subscribe to the doom and gloom of popular prophesy, however. I think there is a lot more going on within the spirited hearts of humanity than what we are focusing on and are able to understand. My study of astrological cycles and influences has filled in some of my questions regarding what I once thought so arbitrary of life. But then I'm a person of faith; I've an eye for patterns, and I've seen and experienced a few things to bring me to that grounding, too. Faith, however, is an intensely private thing in the end, eh? It could be we just wish the world would end because of the painful slog of witnessing so much suffering...but no...I don't think so. We must find the strength to change our ways before we see the change begin...I'm of the belief that we must live with in this life and be the best we can.
Still, it isn't lost on me the correlation between foreign refugees and the homeless in the United States. Nor did the realization that what our nation hates like religious-political-military-terrorism is currently taken a solid footing in our own country. Eighty two point four million homeless are wandering the world*. Many, it seems to me, victims of the same sin of misplaced loyalties in their governments, bias, or the ever shifting and self-serving mechanisms of economics and power. Whether people are terrified out of their skins running from gunfire and explosions to survive or are journeying towards bettering their lives, I would bet that most of these people would rather stay home. These are the wanderers, the homeless and the uprooted. All scared and uncertain of their fate but for whatever faith they have cultivated or cobbled together for themselves; they bravely persevere.
It turns out, currently, through a series of fortuitous encounters and adventures, a friend has picked up the mantle of researching my ancestry. She loves a mystery and I've a disenfranchised, beheaded Grand Uncle with correspondence from the traumatized funeral director trying to put him back together to bury him in 1910. My intrepid friend is determined to suss out what that was about...so here I am, through serendipity and divine timing finding out all kinds of stories about ancestors while I write all of this. A gift. I will end up with a much broader understanding of my lineage to pass on to my children. Still it is not the data but the spirit of belonging only to what resonates in vibration as true that will cultivate the abundance of my lineage and legacy. I'm not sure what that means in a multi-dimensional framework, but I stay tuned...
For the video, I picked this musical rendition of W.B. Yeats The Wandering Aengus because I read it in the audio file...and it is Donovan who set me to listening to music in new ways in my youth. We fish for one thing with fire in our heads and a miracle happens to take us on a long journey. This still happens..and, it turns out, I've a bit of the old Commonwealth ancestry according to my genealogy friend. There is a comfort in this music for me. Some other part of me is listening and loves it...so I'm adding it here for us.
~For the curious: this Blogpost explains my motivation and intention for this series of 20 essays in the Diagnosed Mortal series~
* UNHCR, The UN Refugee Agency