Reentry problems of the Transcending Self

This is the title of one of my favorite sections of Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos:
The Orbiting Self: Reentry Problems of the Transcending Self, or Why it is that Artists, Writers, Some Technologists, and Indeed Most People, have so much Trouble Living in the Ordinary World.
Also referred to as: Why Writers Drink.

I have been a Walker Percy fan for years, and I have read Lost in the Cosmos several times, and this problem of reentry is a real thing.  Particularly when you do something that is self-consciously seeking transcendence like pilgrimage, you need to be prepared for reentry problems.  Reentry, in the best possible scenario, is a controlled crash; in the worst case it's an all consuming ball of fire.
The warning lights started flashing while I was still in Santiago.  As I mentioned yesterday, the reality of a modern town, with people going about their ordinary world business, and tourists going about seeing the sights, was a bit of a shock to my system that had been regularly transcending physical, spiritual and emotional boundaries for over four days (I can only imagine what it's like after a month).
As badly as I wanted to get home to see Michele and the kids, I wasn't sure that I was going to be able to just snap back into Dad and Husband mode.  I really wondered how I was going to put my shoulders back in the yoke of being a Pastor.  Aren't things like this supposed to make you better?
From orbit, the realities of the ordinary world seem small and insignificant, without a focused mental effort, you tend to forget that they are, in fact, the dominant reality of your life.  Pilgrimage puts you in orbit, as do most intense spiritual practices, or engaging in art or another focused exercise of human expression.
You would think getting into orbit is the hard part, it's not though.
A few years ago, I heard an interview with a man who had climbed Everest several times, I forget his name now.  The interviewer asked him about the rather peculiar fact that many people die on the way down from the summit.  He said something to the effect that successful mountaineering is not just about climbing, if you don't get back down, it doesn't really count.
Indeed, somehow you have to get back from orbit.  I was already wondering how I was going to successfully negotiate the reentry process.
Unfortunately, my body was going to give me some rather unpleasant assistance.  Mechanical failure of the waste processing system, aka a kidney stone, that began it's own pilgrimage to my bladder the morning we were leaving Madrid.  I made it home, spent two nights sleeping in my own bed and then began my pilgrimage to Civista Medical Center, where I was pumped full of fluids, antibiotics, morphine and percoset.
I had gone from being a Peregrino, walking the Camino, covering 25 miles in one day, to a man whose major challenge was making sure his IV tube didn't get tangled up as he moved five feet from the bed to the bathroom.
Cue the shot of a fireball burning through the stratosphere, thank the Lord for morphine.
Now that I'm back to health, I'm beginning to be able to process the effects of my time in orbit, but I still find that, when people ask me how it was, I can usually only come up with a rather insufficient: "good."
I don't exactly know how to tell people about the transcendence of self and the nature of pilgrimage without sounding flaky or downright frightening.
If you read this blog in the coming days you are going to have to put up with me processing the experience.  I'm done with the narrative of the journey, now begins the analysis, and the adjustment to living in the ordinary world.