Welcome to your season of returning light! First off: this is not the "death-themed issue" that some of my friends had assumed it to be. Perish the thought! Rather, I'm wondering what threads bind past to present, departed to living, and ethereal to corporeal. The threads themselves, rather than simply the reality of either condition, are what I'm out to explore. The connective tissues. The bridging bodies. Our writers and artists of the Greater Southwest

(and beyond!) reveal these threads/connections/bridges in the lives of owls, horses, children and mountains. They also attend to the physiological connection between the living and the dead made by our participation in the food chain and our dependence on fossils and trees for our own lives' fuel and shelter.

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How can I stay alive knowing so little? (
(Mary Crow, p. 4)

What is the cure for air that slows the breath with sheer impurities…?
(Blanche Farley, p. 42)

…will there rather be cause for simple trust in the Santa Ana winds?
(elena minor, p. 81)

These are among the several questions poets construct in this issue, questions that serve as a rope swing for the reader to seize in a leap out over the atmosphere of wonder.

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Human bodies, alive and in crisis, command the spotlight in the nonfiction books that have held my attention for the last 18 months. As distinct from the dying body, these bodies turn and tear within and without, with no end in sight. In particular, the books Mad in America, The Cure Within, and Walking Nature Home became absolute page-turners for me, in which I devoured accounts of both failed and successful treatments for various maladies. The drama of “treatment”—its paradoxes, shadowy unknowns, tensions and victories—became the story I couldn’t get enough of.

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TELLING IT REAL:
THE BEST OF PILGRIMAGE MAGAZINE

(VOLUME 34 OF PILGRIMAGE)

In lieu of new issues in 2009, we put together a Best of Pilgrimage anthology. This anthology has been sent out to all current subscribers and is now available for purchase. Here's a little more information on the contents of Telling it Real: The Best of Pilgrimage Magazine 2003-2008 - click here.

Volume 33 Issue 3 Listening

Contributions to this issue explore various dimensions of listening: in an exchange with someone whose political views are very different, in the silence of a Quaker meeting, in the midst of challenges, like parenting, which can be anything but contemplative. Some of the voices you will encounter in the pages that follow talk about the physical act of listening, others delve into the kind of inward listening that has more to do with discernment or just being present. Deep listening requires attention, persistence, and lots of practice, but the rewards, as Gene Hoffman and other writers point out, can be rich indeed.

What do you think of when you think of the 1960s? Maybe, the first man on the moon. Maybe Civil Rights marches. Maybe you flash on Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, or the Grateful Dead at Merry Prankster acid tests, or Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire at Monterrey. Masters of War. China Cat Sunflower. Purple Haze. Maybe something else. This issue of Pilgrimage doesn’t intend to include all the events and voices from such a complex decade, but it does offer a few snapshots.

You can’t have a light
without a dark to stick it in.?
~Arlo Guthrie

In the physical realm, you can’t know the light without the shadow. On a personal level, I don’t think it’s any different. Dwelling only on the light in an attempt to avoid the shadow, distorts what is. The stories and poems that follow suggest a more integral view of shadow and light, one in which they might even be understood as “dependable companions.”

~Peter Anderson
Editor

I If the way of peace is a way of being that is chosen, it is a choice is that is made from moment to moment. It would be naive to think that it is made easily; it would be ignorant to dismiss the wide range of challenges and tempations that get in the way of the Way. The spells cast by our own personal and cultural mythologies are more than enough to encourage our allegiance to other paths. Take, for example, the insistence of the politically powerful to sustain the same military industrial complex that an unlikely prophet (Dwight D. Eisenhower) warned about more than fifty years ago. Kat Meade takes us to the heart of the beast in her tour of the Nevada Test Site. Annie Dawid observes that the intertwined icons of militarism and masculinity are, at times, difficult to name and expose.

In the stories that appear in this issue, one form of passion often leads to another. In Mary Sojourner’s story, “Officer Magdalena, White Shell Woman, and Me,” a passion for place (the Grand Canyon and the Colorado Plateau) inspires the narrator to witness against a uranium mine in solidarity with those who experience their homeland as nothing less than holy. And in the process of this witness, the narrator senses a deeper, perhaps even spiritual, bond with those she encounters in a jail cell. Bearing witness to another man’s passion for place and prayer, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher feels led to consider the absence and presence of such passions in his own life. Simmons Bunting follows his daughter’s passion into the urban desert as they search for the lovely handcrafted bells, hung randomly throughout Tucson every year, to celebrate the life of a child that died much too soon. In the case of Ben’s Bells, grieving parents found a way to passion, and brought light and grace into their community as a result. I hope that these and other explorations in this issue may, in some small way, invite our own expressions of passion and compassion along the way.

In practice, I believe that being-at-home is always a work in progress. The Spanish word querencia describes that inward “place” where we are most at home—a place that is always present, though sometimes elusive. We feel it, we leave it, and then we want to find our way back. In his essay “Waterworks,” philosopher and writer Reyes Garcia, whose family has lived on the same southern Colorado ranch for generations, writes about the delights and challenges of living into one’s home place: “It is not simple to be so located, enfleshed in a concrete locus, nor is it easy to live up to its beauty.” Being at home, in this sense, is like any long-term relationship; it takes commitment, devotion, and work to keep the connection fresh and alive.

In this issue of Pilgrimage, David James Duncan writes about restoration as it applies to moving water, the movement of the Spirit, and sustenance for potentially lost souls. Susan Tweit describes a restoration project that reminds us we can do good work in small ways. Michelle Nickol hints at the kind of restoration that is needed on both sides of a prison wall. Nancy Leigh Harless tells the story of a good laugh that suggests the possibility of rehabilitation for a community of women in the war-torn Balkans. Amy Frykolm describes a turn toward the restoration of dignity that she witnesses while working in a high country soup kitchen.

The pursuit of happiness takes many forms in Volume 31 Issue 2 (Summer 2006) of Pilgrimage. In “Poets in America,” Robert Dawson recalls his own calling as a poet and some of the complexities that came with it. In “The Blue Beacon,” David Ray considers the economic gravity that pulls a young man north from Guate- mala to the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Brenda Liebling- Goldberg considers the plight of a romantic Francophile in Alvin, Texas. Kim Stafford (“Highway 83 North / Out of Liberal / 5am”) takes us out on the road in pursuit of connection with family.

The stories in this issue take place in a variety of circumstances: on an expedition to a hidden valley in the Himalayas, in an encounter with a good Samaritan on a plane journey coming home from Korea, at an AA meeting in Santa Barbara, in a numinous moment on an island in the North Pacific, in the reveries that come while playing nocturnes on the piano, on retreat at a Zen center in the ...

“To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.”   

Every bristling shaft of pride church or nation, team or tribe
Every notion we subscribe to is just a borderline. Good or bad, we think we know , as if thinking make things so! All convictions grow along a borderline...

...I recalled being taught to go outside in the gray dawn
before sunrise to receive blessings of gentle spirits
who gathered round our home. Go out, we were told,
get your blessings for the day

~Luci Tapahonso

At night make me one with the darkness
In the morning make one with the light

~Wendell Berry

Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me. I want people to know why I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and some of his roads weren’t paved.

~Will Rogers

When the snake decided to go straight, he didn’t get anywhere.

~William Stafford

The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner
journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meaning and
signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other: it is best to have both.

~Thomas Merton

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