The Sauntering Pilgrim

Stepping back for a few days from my normal routine with its occupations and preoccupations left me unguarded and vulnerable. Plenty of distractions lay waiting to fill the void, including Ozzie (i.e., Ozymandias, from Shelley’s poem of the same name, [aka Trump]), and in they rushed. Abetted by a growing number of history lessons illuminating the extraordinary risks we face under Ozzie’s administration, the intrusion might have spoiled the perfectly good beginning of some time away, but it turned out to be the motivation I needed to detach from it and listen to the seasons of life instead of to the current news.

And it brought me back to historian, sociologist, and literary critic Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), who in his desire to withdraw from the demands and distractions of the external world, particularly the constant pressure to engage with social causes and public discourse, wrote, “Henceforward, I shout to the heavens, I shall deliver no more lectures on behalf of good causes: I am the good cause that denies the need for such lectures. Avaunt, importuning world! Back to my cell.”

One needs regularly to retreat even from good causes in order to renew one’s strength and reopen channels of connection with one’s source, and that’s what I intend to do. I need it now more than ever. We all do, I suspect. So avaunt, importuning world! I’m off to my cell.