To know where you're going, you have to understand where you've been

"And the end of all our exploring will be to return to the place where we first started and know it truly for the first time." -T.S. Eliot

I don't know how many posts on this blog I have started with quotes from Eliot. He's kind of my I-Ching for life and change and everything else in between. Google him. You'll see.

Eliot seems to put my questions into words in a way that I never thought that I could.

I'm really restless lately, trying to figure out a lot of life plans and possibilities, and understand my part in the bigger world. I feel so lost sometimes, because there is no real source of direction, I think I'm just making a shot in the dark. I suppose I can stop anxiously searching for the "right" path, and just BE. . . .

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

And as I was googling the text for that poem, I stumbled upon this sermon transcript. Very, very much worth reading and pondering:
http://www.stjohnsuu.org/sermons/20030511.html