Arrival is Attention
By Andrea Lingle
And then there is the moment that gets put on the brochures. The weary steps have arrived at the moment of the soul’s deep longing. It is the zenith of the parabolic flight when all seems weightless and frozen in time. It is in arrival that the liminal and the corporeal merge.
Only, Arrival is not always where you think it is. It might be geographic, but, just as often, it is alarmingly hard to pin-point. This is why Simone Weil’s insistence on being deeply, persistently, aggressively attentive has given my thoughts on pilgrimage so much more coherence. Arrival, the third (ish) part of pilgrimage is a bit of a tease. Sometime she shows up right when and where you expect, and sometimes you are sitting on a crowded beach on the Gulf Coast, trying to keep your fair skinned children from becoming a dermatologist’s retirement plan when you are engulfed by love. Deluged. Swamped. The kind of love that is clearly coming from somewhere else. An irrepressible kind of love that gets right into your cranial nerves allowing you to see the world as beloved. Even the stranger baking on the beach. Even the seagull stealing her popcorn. Even the sand made of a million, million bits of life.
You have to be paying attention.
I recently downloaded a plant identification app—and I am ok with that because I abandoned my hopes of being an enigmatic, Renaissance polyglot whose only acquiescence to normalcy is to speak, if only in public, the languages of my citizenships when I found out just how practical minivans are. Anyway, this app has changed my understanding of attentiveness. No longer am I walking along the road just to improve my cardiovascular health, I am discovering Lyre-leaf Sage and Bugleweed. I am discerning between Solomon’s Seal and False Solomon’s Seal. I am peering at my surroundings now.
Arrival is the stuff of attention. Pilgrimage is a process and container for paying attention, so pilgrimage is littered with moments of arrival. Arrival is a wild goose whose cry can be heard above the waters, but doesn’t take well to the coop.
If you feel inclined, comment with one word or one sentence that answers: What do you see when you really look?