walking each other home

“We are all just walking each other home” Ram Dass

I’ve just come across this quote and love it!!!! For starters it conjours up Elbow lyrics about how our loved ones are the stars we navigate home by. It has the imagery of companionship and ‘being alongside’ – a concept I find really important given that I think a lot of us sometimes feel isolated in our struggles. It combines the notion of journey – that it’s the travelling that’s important – as well as destination. I know “home” is used as an idyllic representation when for many it’s not a place of refuge, but a place of much hard work, maybe even abuse. But here I like to think of home as that place where a person feels fully at one with themselves, a sense of moving towards fulfilled potential. And so that’s what we’re doing – we’re being alongside people (and they’re being alongside us walking us home too), being a sounding board, providing light relief, offering to help carry the plastic bag maybe. A vicar did that with me once. I had, as usual, purchased far more from Morrisons than I could comfortably carry home, and as we met and were heading in the same direction, he wordlessly held out a hand and took one of the bags from me. I wonder if he knows that that act spoke more to me than his words from the pulpit?