The end of my fellowship journey is very near. I can feel it in my skin every time a song transports me back to a moment of the last 18 months. It is not a rare occurrence for me anymore, to travel back in time, that is. When it is about to happen, my forearms feel it first. A shiver runs up and down my body before my mind brings me there, once again.
Today I travelled once. I travelled back to a snowy evening in downtown Grand Rapids. I can see the snowflakes falling under the lamplight. I can see my friend leading the way into St. Cecilia Music Center. The song keeps playing in my room in October 2015, but my mind and myself are in November 2014. When I came back, I was overwhelmed with the realization that I might not see her again after I depart in a couple of weeks. It seems like so long ago, yet I lived that moment today the same way I did eleven months ago.
Last week I travelled too. The music took me to a rainy and warm evening in my front porch. My housemate was there. We had just come back from a wedding and decided to sit back, talk and watch the rain of that June 2014 dusk from our sofa. She was my first friend in this city.
I cannot help but think of a book nearing its last pages. I can feel the right side getting lighter every day, and the left side growing larger simultaneously. I know that any moment now I will find a page with a blank space at the end, indicating the end of the chapter.
Do I want it to end? Am I afraid of it? Am I looking forward to it?
I do not know.
All I know is that life is made up of cycles. They begin, they end. Repeat. Begin and cease. Repeat. Commence and close. Repeat. Greet and leave. Repeat.
As I near the end of this part of my journey, which has been so dear and impactful for me in so many levels, I am in awe of the power of goodbye, of ending the chapter. I am so small and the universe is so vast. I am truly grateful and admired by the immensity of the lessons life has taught me this last year and a half through so many masters I have encountered on this road. I feel the pain of saying goodbye, and I am comforted in knowing I can travel back to them.
Whether I see them again in the future, or in the past, I take these masters with me everywhere I go from this moment on. Perhaps I need not travel; they never went away.
Color season in Arashiyama, Japan. I will never forget this trip I did in November 2012. It remains with me.