Our last evening at a Holiday Inn.  The straight lines, white surfaces and turquoise of Holiday Inn decor palate have become familiar.  We laughed yesterday after checking into our room here at Lexington Kentucky.  The bathroom was adequately spacious, the white sink countertop and the backlit big mirror similar to the other four or five Inns where we’ve stayed, felt comfortable, each successively seeming more homelike.

Home can be anywhere, places where events, and actions-of-our own anchored our sense of self; weaving together, us and place and time.  Home is all the places we belonged and by extension — that coalesce to our present becoming.

Seated in the back corner of the breakfast room, softly lit, the murmur of fellow inn patrons enveloping me — here, now is a vast, greater than I can comprehend “becoming.”  Reality is dynamic, a composition of what happened over the three past weeks, those days at Nags Head on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, walks on the beach, walks out on the fishing pier, meals at good restaurants, brief conversations with strangers, and best of all, the extended discussions with good friends with whom we stayed at the beach house.

Add to that those days at my aunt Doris’ home in Smithfield, North Carolina; those conversations with my aunts, and with my cousin.  And I must not forget the hours with Fox News in the background, which repulsed and intrigued us.

Then the days in Greenville South Carolina, the meals enjoyed with my wife’s Brother and Sister-in-law. and our walk together along Main street on a Sunday afternoon, which concluded with a viewing of the spectacular Falls Park with the suspension bridge over the Reedy River,…   Children played on the rocks surrounded by swirling rapids, some 300 feet below us.

All of this and more than I can tell here, was “real,” The appearance/presentation of Being like the surging (and ebb) of a tide carries me to this moment feeling the keyboard at my finger tips, the glow of a LCD screen, language and syntax emerging from consciousness to fingers, to screen….  I just heard somewhere in the room, a female voice, almost certainly that of a Holiday Inn staff member say, “You have a blessed day.”

Could I say that reality is ever-changing, impermanent, the transformation of polar opposites: being and non-being, life and death, male and female, wet and dry?  My reason affirms that reality is a cosmic weaving, change in so many provocative patterns, without beginning and without ending. T. S. Eliot made the same point more concisely:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

— excerpt Burnt Norton

Old Heraclitus of Ephesus said it even better:

ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή
I. p. 89 Fr. 60.
The way upward and the way downward
is one and the same