Guided Meditation: A Pilgrimage

The video has two sections, and opening talk that last until the 5:50 mark of the video and then the guided meditation. I titled this pilgrimage in memory of Annie Dillard and the impact her book, "A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," had on me when I first read it back in 1983. In one of the many pieces about her I have read since I heard of her death, one seems to hit the correct tone: "Annie Dillard spent her career staring at things most of us walk past: insects, water, trees, darkness, silence. The second part of the talk discusses the upcoming Yom Kippur holiday, and the sense I remember from the "Neilah" portion of the service, the very end, when everyone has not eaten or had any hydration for 24 hours. This, I sense, moves our conscious experience away from how we normally perceive our world as we implore, in what always felt like a quicker and perhaps more desperate cadence, to be written in the book of life. The praying is a meditation, a mantra. These two pieces may seem like an odd pairing, but all things are connected, and for me, so are these.