Ends and beginnings

[Elyn Aviva]

Rosina,
I am so glad you are staying with us! I would have missed you deeply.

As to the end of the pilgrimage being the beginning: I have heard that too,
and I thought I understood it, but maybe I didn't. Let me with all humility
try to describe what it means to me now: I picture it all as a wheel, a giant
wheel, a circle of eternity that keeps moving, moving from ending to
beginning to ending, from life to death to new life again. We finish the
"Camino" part of the pilgrimage, but we have just begun to take into
ourselves the experience, to make it part of our lives, to continue the
journey that we have completed on a physical plane and can now take into the
emotional and spiritual planes (not that we didn't during the pilgrimage, but
it's all a continuation). So it's not an end but a beginning, a beginning of
a new way of being in the world.

These last few weeks I have seen in such a small way the turning of this
giant wheel: 2 weeks ago, my 7-month-pregnant daughter-in-law ended up in the
hospital with a bleeding placenta. Thanks be, she seems to be doing okay,
baby seems to be okay, and we are taking it day by day. New life, new
beginning--but so close to an abrupt ending. At that same time, I learned
that one of my parents'  dearest and oldest friends--and one of mine,
too--had cancer. By the time I could get to see her, just a few days later,
she was in a coma. She died the next morning. And then the WTC disaster.
Endings, beginnings. Ends of an era, beginning we can only pray of a new era,
where perhaps we can have peace, not war... I ramble. Forgive me.

Blessings,
Elyn Aviva