Sunday afternoon Flamenco Sketches, reading Annie Proulx eating strawberry icecream, water in a wineglass, watching the wee strong spirits at the feeder outside the window this morning i wept at the color of a lady cardinal.

Last night all but ready to go this hard drawn-out transition and the hint of collapse the word Enough on my lips.  but this morning he brought me reassurance and water and im saved at least for now. 

when the light from the lighthouse turns away, i despair.

after a morning of watching squirrels spicy breakfast with coffee and yogurt a shower Bushwalla and the Pips im good to go.  being off the meds is easier Here, but still it gets wooly and im easily discouraged, the emotional rodeo, the incredibly broken inner child that i realize This is all about.  making this decision, having made any decision at all after thirty-three years on angel-pilot, drove a bulldozer over the rubble of my life.  and now on the bare ground i can build a house, grow a garden.  but the dozer has also exposed the weak raw heart of that abandoned baby girl thats done nothing but play with lighters and knives behind my eyes my whole life.  she is one hot mess (thanks to a.d. for the term).  and theres no excuse now not to get to healing.  which i realize is what This is all about.  neither meds nor mad distractions.  this is The Work.  this is the Conscious Evolution, the Teacher appearing (ive had Great Teachers all my life, and for them i am eternally grateful, but This Teacher is not someone i sit before, This Teacher is the completely wrecked, traumatized and broken essential aspect of me thats been avoided, evaded and ignored for decades waiting for the student to be ready.  waiting for me to be strong enough to Reclaim her.  

I see now This is my Reclaiming.

Blessed Be.

1.  i love the hats

2.  im extraordinarily inspired

3.from where i was last night, i wake on  the other side of the world

stepping down from the gallows, i utter, "Bushwalla"




"this dudes like a calculator and im like a rotary phone." 

"...For the late bloomer, the path of the fully formed man of action may seem enviable — the glamour of an instinct-driven life ensconced in an attractive exoskeleton, the imagined lives of square-jawed muscular types stepping out of glossy magazine pages and action films — and yet there is much to be said for being a mutating introvert, not yet identified with a glossy exterior on a path of unhesitating action.

But some highly individualized mutants retain the metamorphic aspect of adolescence, and have not fully formed. Some inner will for transformation will not allow them to rigidify into a finished adult form even though it might be decades since biological adolescence should have ended. This type of late blooming has its painful drawbacks, but also its developmental advantages. The longer and more labyrinthine the path of developmental, the more individualized and novel may be the results.

The world is overpopulated with finished exoskeletal types. The exoskeletal folks have already been locked and loaded with fundamentalisms and absolutisms that tell them everything they think they need to know. Exoskeletal folk are busy scuttling forth, acting out. But the world also needs more interiorized folk, the personifications of evolution's attempts to experiment with the human form, those who live in prolonged states of metamorphosis.

Consider this a propitious time to allow the painful metamorphosis of prolonged adolescence, and honor the path of the late bloomer."

-J.Zap

(always carry confetti under your hat)

i certainly ain't losin' all my highs and lows...

i woke up this morning thinking about the Pips, of all things.

or, how the interwebs saved my life, again

kill a halfhour on this for me.  its sunday.

it gets harder and harder to tell the difference between them though.


'I don't know. Listen to Jim Croce, play darts... whatever the hell else you white people do.'

"and i think im all done, you can switch me off safely."

                                                                                                                                                  god.damn.it.

for Beloved, in the name of Guess and Check

"being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose...doesnt frighten me."

The more it snows                             

(Tiddly Pom)
The more it goes
(Tiddly Pom)
The more it goes
(Tiddly Pom)
On snowing.

snow.  tired, between worlds, put it all in boxes and shift.  gypsy canticle in my dreams, a wedding for the RH.  bone weary, the kind of weary that wants to go out walking in deep snow and sleep.  
to trudge. 

the squirrels and the cowbirds are fed, thinking on my poor goldfinches by the creek in the valley wondering where all the Love has gone.   this last week ahead of active labor, the long hour of doubt of why did i do this i cant do this please someone just pull the thing out of me and set it quietly aside because animal fear of death has fallen on me and this load is far greater than i can get across.  roll quietly the boat to one side and set me over no farther can i go.  maybe its just all the snow.  the deep sleep of those that live by wits and deep wisdom passed down without words.  deep wisdom has no words.  but stupefied.  all this static and no satisfaction of blood, no relieved release of unnecessary energy just this incessant revving that makes me prickly and foreign to myself.  nausea and ache, 
no breath no rest everything hurts like day-after whiplash.
i remember at The Show with lots of paper angels exploding inside me and the Snake Charmer and the Ice Bear and the silver chiming balls i rolled between my fingers until there was blood on the ground.  the hot rush of relief like a contact negative of birth, the wombs small fist abandoning its latest dream.  this my latest dream still squatting over the bowl of my bones, awaiting afterbirth, awaiting anything that will put this travail behind me. 

i sit here blank behind the eyes and watch him do things.  he forgives me my broken self my blackhole damage brings me gentle milk and eggs lets me watch the snow plays his rambling guitar lets me listen to the sad songs that send me off into dense elsewheres and waits.  
well, there you go, utters Time laughing,  have at it.  
call it salvation or sanctuary or the synchronicity of second chances.  call it a mire, a mirage a midlife crisis a mistake.  its just a name, a shirt to throw over the nakedness, a box begging deconstruction.  coming out of the desert my brain is a dune in the moonlight struck dumb after oceans leave only pulverized bones behind.

i will admit to lightning strikes of worry, panic, the satisfying urge to flee, to be going.

but he feeds me secret words between courses of compromise and ice cream and i breathe through the electrocuting impulses and i hold on to his hand in the whirring dark and without words he says he sees me.

 but my lungs are stumbling with the grief and uncertainty,the pressure of reentry, The Bends, the thin air of the threshold, i left the big guns behind and hobble behind the parade of days with a puff of a crutch my scrips run out but a cowboys charity keeps me on the dole for meds until middle summer when i return to my familiar precarious nature floating free falling the celestial trajectory of Spirit unencumbered by obligations and triplicate forms.

i dont have many rules to play by so i adjust to foreign parameters, try them on like learning a language.  who shall i be now?  if i turn my head this way and not look directly at the figure between the trees will she let me see her?  if i sit quietly in dappled shadow for hours infinitum will she come toward me telling her truth?  i assume theres truth to tell, and that may be my greatest flaw.  so i crouch down beneath the lintel my entrails fornicating snakes sweating venom waiting for cool moonrise and a chance to close my eyes.

happy birthday to the man whos motto was 

ad astra per alia porci

amen.

"A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying."
-Lawrence Durrell

 ok ok one more, for the Cowboy and Louise.
"And I aint even got a garage, you can call home and ask my wife!"

another beautiful texas troubador.  like hubbards version (blasphemy!) but this was better audio and i wanted to make a connection to The Last Picture Show by Mr. Larry, his pa.

god bless all the Indians that ever cut me slack.
Thanks to the Cowboy for this mornings devastating eloquence.
Great Love.

"and the good parts better if youre movin' when its happenin.'"  
and against what passes for my better judgement, a thick slice of nostalgia:


(...but tonight, youre a walleye...)

from Red Ryder, to Little Beaver, or the other way around.

Blessed Be

(i had ryan adams singing Two but couldnt bear the hitch in the audio)

Happy Birthday to My Favorite Beatle

 

“The biggest break in my career was getting into the Beatles in 1962. The second biggest break since then is getting out of them.”

"Love one another"

so many beautiful people in this world.

living ever closer

"Love that will not betray you, dismay or enslave you,
It will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be.
There is a design,
An alignment to cry,
And my heart to see,
The beauty of love as it was made to be."

(and one for me)

"It seems that all my bridges have been burned
But you say 'That's exactly how this grace thing works’
It's not the long walk home that will change this heart
But the welcome I receive with every start."
 

"...Make me think beautiful unexpected thoughts..."  

let me ramble in your hand

sitting quietly amazed

smiling into my bones your face the surface of the sky 

moonlight is a reflection 

sunlight feeds all our earthbound mysteries

let me move through you

the smell of us on all tomorrows fingertips

 

 

our awaited  face rising up from Time into the arms of Love

the miraculous soul-ing come from the 

crucible of my flesh 

my message in a bottle                                                

from the bottom of my sea

 your eyes seeing me all eyes open                    

 your small beautiful mouth 

 that knows the words by heart

 open the gate 

 and set free 

 what has been yours

 all along.

one day youll sit through it, just for me.

i like the ruckus version much more, but couldnt find a video.

came across this Diamond in the Rough.  last one for the night.  

this epitomizes what i love about america.  and if you know me, you know that list isnt very long. 

i was raised on bluegrass.  this was one of the tunes i loved as a very little girl, listening to my fathers Flatt & Scruggs albums.   the image is so great, just a bunch of guys in a brown living room 
Tearing It Up. 

Music is a Force, an Energy, that moves through the musician.  

when this guy changes your oil, or is out and about in his wheelchair with his wife,  or is standing behind you in line at the In-N-Out in a blue polyester shirt with his name written in white over his heart,

is this what youd think?

like the Sufi say

"when you hear hoofbeats, think of zebras."

when it gets to the point where i feel like i want to saw my own head off, and marching into the woods to die is not (ever again) an option,  i head towards the sound of a banjo

then, once i calm down a bit and the swearing subsides, i appreciate all things jerry douglas.  i looked for just the right sliver of him on the steel guitar for you, wanted something with him and tony rice, but then came across this and thought, "look!  hes playing the kokle!"

and then i remember the quiet laughing heart of Shady Grove, and im okay again.

and one for the Beloved, after withstanding a rant

breathe.

for Beloved, with Great Love and Time

i think the best music breaks your heart and heals it at the same time. 

your Smith to my Townes, and thats cool. 

("ere long done do does did")

its the year of my 20th high school reunion.  ive been skulking around the alumni site and ran across this cat i graduated with.  its really really interesting to see the trajectory of these peoples lives. 

the bed my body this world is cold without you

the heart rises like bread in the bowl of my flesh

so soon now into everything ive ever waited for

something cycling itself through its inherent form, what was the word?  

the latticework dissolving into some greater matrix

infinite original amniotic

my heart a gate

when i was little i read about a gate 

shut with a thorn and sealed with sand

what opened that gate?

Love, undoubtedly

so we sit on far sides of the same blue morning

before our distant day spent in long hours

walking now inevitably home

and the stronger i get the softer i become

until you will know me 

coming toward you

by the Light 

that shines like water

through my skin

alright, last hayes for awhile.  

but a certain someone has dropped his end of the conversation

leaving me with idle hands.

one of my goals for this year, maybe next if it takes that long, is to see hayes in the flesh.

thinkin' on the cowboy.

"It is a process of immersion and reflection that binds my heart, my mind, and my physical form together with a deeper understanding of the world and the beings that inhabit it, including myself."

more deeply Beloved every day

to help explain to Beloved why the Latvians have no word for "mine"

happy birthday to him of whom there is just too much to say

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gorey  

 singing along hitting top speeds of sixty-five into the sunset drinking high-end pomegranate fizzy water thruway to main street to back road my turkey feathers tipped over i thought someone had left them as a gift for me but it was the cat and the clutter and the wind.  the horseshoe dislodged from the deer antlers, my gold rings in twine on the floor and then the sink fell off the wall. standing in the scattered abandonment the door opens and its Golden Boy with his porkpie Da.  from behind the appliance i pull fifteen year old mardi gras beads he gave to me.  ORPHEUS in gold on a red lyre.  were planning a last supper, myself and the Beloved and the Fruit of my Womb, one co-progenitor, the issue of his loins with a bartendrix from colorado, and two of Golden Boys creepy underworld friends with whom ive discussed all and sundry driving into the west with dramatic sunsets and singing in the car.  before i hie to Higher Ground and he moves to the suburbs with my dog.  its a wonderful life.

                  "it joined them at breakfast and presently ate all the syrup and toast and part of a plate."

our weekly propaganda.  this goes out to all the church ladies at school, with Great Love.

so good to see my Golden Boy again.

hayes is playing at marchs midnight ramble.  in case you got invited.

a girl, mad as birds.  a boy, pixie led. 

out through the briar and over the road, coffee and milk in an old cranberry wine bottle, wind whipping into our bodies feeding lonesome hungry cells the strength of a beautiful Now.  everything is reduced to its simplest self.  sometimes he leads and sometimes hes behind me, but the knowing that just over the hill his familiar form will come to view, waiting.  silence and laughing, everything offering itself to us up and over into this blessed wood a little stream from which i plucked a heartshaped rock and drew the cross on my brow asking to come and come again for countless seasons.  this quiet magnificent place that binds us together with the breath of clouds and wildrose canes bending into bowers biding til bloom in soon springtide.  

rosehips and crabapples red against the black and white of late winter.  stopping often to see, he sees me.

and i pray for the strength to stand still and be seen and not to run.  and i pray this isnt some gorgeous elaborate hoax on the part of the gods to speed my expiration.  and i pray with my secret heart at the offering left where we turned to turn back and i pray with my hand in his on the hill where silent wishes were made and i pray turning away again heartsore down the highway until im granted the gift of returning.  because never in my long life have i loved like this, been loved like this before. this simple acknowledgment of True Being, of my Being as something beloved, gentle blessed, and Worth the While.

after a lifetime of waiting,  i pray for a lifetime of together, us. 

Blessed Be.

 just you

sunday morning.

quiet darkness speaking through us jagged rocks residue of mustard gas through morning Dresden up and across the wasteland we turn toward and away and toward again the sound of water running and a guitar.  he makes saffron rice with pistachio, gentle curry with portobello and yogurt from Toms, sweet milky earl grey and grapefruit and nan.  something playing quietly behind it all, we watch the Raven hoard peanuts, Fat Squirrel digging in the snow.  the kitten skitters.  it is late february and we wonder at the weaving of Love and Time that affords us this morning that will slip into the afternoon the moment i leave him going back to what has been and will never be and toward the time of no long leavetaking, counting the days.

DFWs birthday and i cry into a rag with him sitting witness to the storms. non judgement non invasive just Steady Quiet Presence, all ive ever wanted.  This is the sanctuary my whole life has been a search for.  this is what i did not die to live.  something as fragile as Life and fierce as Time.  we eat mint ice cream out of tiny glass cups.  how completely am i fed.  how tended my wound we both know will never heal and its okay.   

the roads of Dresden are shifting and conceal toxic pockets, sharp hungry edges.  but with his hand in mine i stop and look up into the open sky we both look up into the sky standing in the rubble and waste and waiting and we breathe.  we walk.

happy birthday to the woman who told us

"The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others."

 

and we celebrate the life of  D.F.W.

"a futurist novel about addiction, tennis, and separatist groups"

rereading the posts i came this upon and fell in love again.

A Meeting

She steps into the dark swamp
where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package
drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it
between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature
like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together
like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a field
thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.
I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,
the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly
wild. 

-Mary Oliver 

  
and another for Beloved

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find your mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love. 

"Lullaby" by W.H. Auden, from As I Walked Out One Evening.

 

 

(painting available for admiration at Clinton Pottery)

At the top of the mountain we are all snow leopards. -- Hunter S. Thompson

 

 seeing the set they superimposed on the world for us to walk on, say our lines, and leave, he had the 

Wisdom to take Life on his terms.

couple years ago yesterday

Long Live Beauty and Truth.

I'm back again scrutinizing the Milky Way
           of your ultrasound, scanning the dark
                       matter, the nothingness, that now the heads say
           is chockablock with quarks & squarks,
gravitons & gravitini, photons & photinos. Our sprout,

who art there inside the spacecraft
           of your ma, the time capsule of this printout,
                       hurling & whirling towards us, it's all daft
           on this earth. Our alien who art in the heavens,
our Martian, our little green man, we're anxious

to make contact, to ask questions
           about the heavendom you hail from, to discuss
                       the whole shebang of the beginning & end,
           the pre–big bang untime before you forget the why
and lie of thy first place. And, our friend,

to say Welcome, that we mean no harm, we'd die
           for you even, that we pray you're not here
                       to subdue us, that we'd put away
           our ray guns, missiles, attitude and share
our world with you, little big head, if only you stay.

                   "The Alien" by Greg Delanty, from The Ship of Birth

for the cowboy, after everything.
black dogs, automatic shotguns and four-wheel-drive. 

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense.

                                                                   Rumi - 13th century

(Clinton Pottery, Utica Street, Clinton, New York)

 

seventeen hundreds.  flowers and water for children.  i couldnt read my own writing on the sheet laid down to show.  a red register and i think i stepped on the green paint.  forgive me.   housebones made from the woods about it, ankle deep in the snow he allows me to wander up close and down theres just so much to see.  come this summer and throw a pot, a cup, a bowl, something defined by the space it makes for something else.  come this summer and find yourself gently engaged in the matter of being Alive. 

  

 couldnt read my own writing, erudite doodle to fill the page, a blue field with oak trees did you see the star?  the sign of chalice well?  i critiqued his mithers handiwork and couldnt read my own pen on the page.  what i meant to say was how monsters and angels are one and the same, we are monsters and angels we are atomic and cruel, the impossibly sharp teeth obsolete in the skin of a red berry arranged on a plate.  the chocolate is gone i cannot eat it anymore the white bed duvet thrown back to morning standing before the window before the chair regarding the day the water running through.  

ankle deep in snow feeling like id been gone a long time.  effortless, or maybe its my total lack of social graces the little room upstairs window open to february evergreen thaw looking out on the wrought iron table and chairs looking out past times grit in the eye into something under the skin hes been throwing clay long as ive been alive.  are you you?  i stood there awhile in the toxic crimson particulate before i knocked on the inside of the door.  thank you.

came home and had ty-phoo in the cup with soymilk and local honey, ate from the bowl with my silverhandled ebony chopsticks.  thought of the Beloved, underloved and overwhelmed, how i must be Too Much and Not Enough, like they all say i am.

 

is the baby here?  did she turn toward her mothers hand?  last night Solitary Circle to Call the Baby Down im still running on that Dark, that Light.  sometimes i think Dresden is easier to navigate alone, youre not distracted by the Others distress, you get farther.  but if the object is Reunion, why would Together be a second choice?  without the Boon the words come plain, but they come at all and i am grateful.

 pledges have been made but in my broken heart i doubt them.

forgive me.

 but i repeat myself.

 

Thrift store cowboys
Five and dime junkies
Red dirt plow boys
Asphalt monkeys
Holly rollers
Signal callers
Truck stop angels
Backstreet brawlers
Van Zant groupies
Guitar slingers
Hallelujah
Gospel singers
Freight train mommas
Pistol shooters
My first girlfriend
works at Hooters
Beans and biscuits
in my cupboard
Listen to Ray Wylie Hubbard
All gone down the road tonight

Drunken angels
Blacktop racers
Holly rollers
Whiskey chasers
Lone Star drinkers
Midnight ramblers
Dirty road divas
Highway gamblers
Moonshine mommas
Panty droppers
Dalai Lamas
Old pill poppers
High school heroes
Back road preachers
Pool hall hustlers
Tantric teachers
Teenage cuties
Politicking
Hare Krishna
Feed me chicken
All gone down on the road tonight

Blue jean babies
Old heart breakers
Had a party
with some Quakers
Heartworn highways
Country singers
Radios full of
old right-wingers
  Session players
Duct tape dealers
Outlaw country
Hubcap stealers
Aint no money
in my wallet
Broke again is
what they call it
My grandmamma's
name was Spiller
Michael Jackson
peaked at thriller
All gone down the road tonight

Jukebox gypsies
Mustang Sally's
Don't go walkin'
down dark alleys
Needle pushers
hornrim glasses
Rhinestone jumpsuit
Backstage passes
Blue plate specials
LuAnne platters
Japanese is
all that matters
Broken arrows

Gulf coast kickers
Who's your daddy
bumper stickers

da da da da
da da da da
da da da da da da
Oooh yeah
Oh uh uh uh

I'm outta words people
That's all I got
Americana woman
Hip shake with me baby

dance that baby down

from now on.

CV

Let not my love be called idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show,
Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.

Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,

Still constant in a wondrous excellence;
Therefore my verse to constancy confined,

One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument,
Fair, kind, and true, varying to other words;
And in this change is my invention spent,
Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.
Fair, kind, and true, have often lived alone,
Which three till now, never kept seat in one.

such a difficult thing for me to do dry.  trying to explain what the Pilgrim sees on a cold road waiting for signs and trying to lay it down in words it deserves but the words are behind glass i can only stand apart from and ache for hungry for bread and wool blankets behind midnight streetlight defenestration.  i crave the alterations that turn my cubes of words to water that wash and reflect my heart to the world it was given to.  the feel of the clay between my fingers as it spins on the wheel instead of this rolling and pinching with a chisel and half the face falls away after all.  the words dont come theyre demanding burnt offering for an unclenched hand that frees the tongue.  its just me here in the clearing a hollow reed with nothing to say.  lay me down and look through me, far things will seem closer.  the emptiness may guide you but for me its a cold road, waiting for signs to light the way.

in rags and feathers dancing down the new town my little silky thread behind me a root beneath the handshake and hello something left listening the imprint of me on  a million surfaces for so long i have been without.  and forced to face this world head on falling through the ice and not being allowed to drown ill accept the clarity but afford me my words! why is it one or the other?  i know.  both times i birthed my babies it was called a dry labor.  the water breaks at the onset and theres no buffer, no gentle making of the way.  so here i am again, working to be born, with nothing between me and pure experience.  of course the midwife was right.

i couldnt tell him why i set her there on the screen in gray robes and sad eyes, the wand and the cup, and all i could bring myself to say was i really like that name.  and in my secret heart one day i hope i can turn to him and say it again, and then he will understand.

 

when he talked it painted pictures on the drive-in of my mind.  i saw myself in a hundred happy scenes, skirting the edge of whats happening like a firefly, dressed in cloaks and wings, summer nights between scenes him leading the Fey into twilight, the feel of grass beneath my feet the sound of water over rocks the smell of the world mountains and oceans and a thousand small fires to dance to.  i was being led and loved it.  or maybe its just the hallucination of a hungry heart, the weary pilgrim on the Threshold of Home the home the soul swims in before that black river, that darkest of rooms.  cups and bowls, sieves for magick making.

ive left my laughter everywhere to bind me, each breath a stitch red thread weaving between the keys of a piano and under drums made from historys fire.  you showed me the beautiful room a red chair and a photo of your father, the talking water that brings snowmelt ducks and leaves in their seasons sleeping under the heartshaped hole in a hat you wore beneath a million suns thinking mad beautiful thoughts of Bringing Together what had been cast away.  The Box long dissembled for planks and nails, the empty space inside it buried under an arc of trees leading the pilgrim to the next gently lit and waiting stage.