So, I’m making a fresh pot of coffee this early AM before picking up Catherine for Mass. I had just been sitting at the kitchen table wondering about what to write on today’s post. In that zone of uncertainty when this little mosquito flys by me. Sort of odd really and caught my attention. Wrong season, right? It’s November and well into it. He is flying zigzagie as in looking for something or uncertain about where to land, kind of tentative. And then I think OK does this little guy have a big lesson for me, like things have been occurring lately? We’ve had little spiders and a little bean with big lessons.

He really didn’t talk to me but the lesson started when I tried to capture him with a word and came up with “stranger”. He was showing uncertainty, was out of place or better out of time. This stranger thing snapped me back to a walking conversation I had with Dana recently about the origins for the word pilgrim being that very idea a stranger or a foreigner as my dictionary has. Either way same thing. It says from the Latin “peregrinus” meaning foreign.

Dana was talking about the idea that being a pilgrim is supposed to be or puts one in the position of stranger. Aside from the striving for the goal stuff the basic experience is one of experiencing strangerness and that is the space intended for you. In other words it is supposed to be a facsimile of life in a Christian sense where one belongs in heaven but we are temporarily wandering on this earth. A stranger as viewed from worldly perspective. Being in and not of, I have heard it expressed.

Reading the short book “Pilgrim’s Progress” written in the 1500rds I think, talks of this. It was a book that was required reading until maybe mid twentieth century when we became too cool for such stuff. But my little mosquito is still onto it.

Hey have to go. Off to a luncheon potluck. So stranger loves to you today, Felipe.