During the week we were being encouraged once again to see ‘the walk’ – any walk – as ‘a journey’. Poetic sensibilities being what they are, we extended that into a discussion about any walk being a pilgrimage if we chose to see it that way.
We talked about how far a couple of us had got, separately, in terms of planning actual ventures onto the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. We skimmed over our reasons for not actually setting out, because we were more interested in why – after the why-nots had subsided – we somehow didn’t feel the need to do it anymore. The moment had passed, we said.
I think it’s deeper than the moment. I think it’s more like the ‘need’ had passed. Whatever it was we had hoped to get from or to leave behind on the camino, we’d found another way of dealing with it.
We talked about other potential pilgrimages…all those sites in the British Isles as possible destination points. I recognise in myself that they also no longer call to me. I start to wonder why.
Why did they, originally? Why do they no longer? How have I changed?
I suspect I was looking for ‘something profound’. I wanted ritual. I wanted to prove I didn’t need friends so much as I needed the kindness of strangers. I wanted miracles and enchantment. I wanted a walk to have a purpose. Maybe I just wanted proof that I was capable of a very long walk.
No matter what it was I wanted - and I still don't know for sure what that was - the more interesting questions are: Why don’t I want that anymore? What is the soul-level change?
I don’t know yet.
What I do know is that I have oodles of half-done writing projects anchored in incomplete walking projects. They got started; they got abandoned. Intellectually, I am still interested in the concepts, but I’m in grasshopper mode. I’m failing to settle to one thing. There are too many interesting things, too many enticing paths to wander down, without knowing where they lead. Not that grasshoppers wander down paths. At the moment they’ve taken up residence on my drought-stricken, crackling lawn and seem to be having some kind of reproductive orgy right outside my front door. But that’s a poem for another day.
I’m still curious about my linking writing projects to walking projects – and which of the two isn’t working for me when I put them into hiatus? Something I’ve yet to give the level of consideration it deserves. Finding the answer might help me find my way back to one or other of them.
When we spoke about seeing each walk as ‘a journey’ or even as ‘a pilgrimage’ I remembered that neither of those things can apply unless there is a destination. We all know the cliché that it is not the destination but the journey that matters…but that omits the fact that without a destination, there is NO journey, there is only a wandering in the wilderness.
Were all my ‘walk/write-projects’ merely attempts to impute a destination on what were really simply days in the desert?
Each walk was a thing unto itself, but the entirety of them would remain unpurposed unless I imposed a rationale from outside. For so much of my life, I have walked for the sake of walking, without taking the time to figure out, precisely, what the point of it all was. Is. I still go walking. I still do so without giving enough thought to what I’m doing when I set out.
I’m not on pilgrimage anymore. That much I can say. I still love a sacred site, and I’m sure I will still take time to visit them and sit in their stillness and resonance when I come upon them, but I have gone beyond the “need” of them. Whatever wound needed healing, has been. Whatever gap needed filling, has been. Now I want to visit such places – forgive me if this is crass – almost out of curiosity – to see what else they can teach me in their silence. Always assuming there is still silence to befound in the over-marketed pilgrimage sites…always assuming there ever was.
Perhaps I’m confusing pilgrimage site with sacred site. The latter which have had the good fortune not to become the former are the places I want to stumble upon, sit within, and pray for their remaining just as they are. Perhaps I feel there is a level of desecration in the commercialisation of 'destination' pilgrimages, but what, then, does that mean for the very idea of pilgrimage - and am I not undermining my own idea that the destination is integral to the journey as a journey.
Meanwhile, what continues for me is a need to walk from a ‘getting fit’ perspective, and a need to walk from that sheer curiosity perspective, and a need to walk from a mental and spiritual wellbeing perspective. I suspect I have sought a complicated answer because the simple one somehow felt inadequate. I walk simply because I feel better when I have walked than when I have not.
Sometimes, perhaps, it is not about the destination, and also not about the journey either.
Sometimes it is simply about the movement, about being outside and being in the body at the same time.
Sometimes it is about the string of moments; sometimes about each moment rather than the string.
And so, I went for a walk.
I would walk into the City and do a familiar loop of the Riverside Walk, I decided. Taking a random right turn, I found a stretch of river walk that I did not know existed. As a result, I got to spend more of my time under the trees, which in this overheated summer was a good place to be.
On this day, calling it a riverside walk, might not meet the trades descriptions act criteria. The side creeks are either clogged with algae or completely dry at surface. The iris spears, past flowering, are holding on though, so I’m hopeful that there is subsurface dampness, enough to draw up into
leafage, but where I would have expected a flowing stream is something looking more like an alternative footpath.
The Himalayan Balsam is in flower. Non-native, invasive…we use the same hideous language of plants as we do of people. Crowding-out. Doing little to stabilise… these thoughts send me down the rabbit-warren of the internet on the law regarding such things. I have to be amused by the requirement to bury the cut waste (I’m talking plants now, not people!) on-site. I’m no gardener, but it strikes me that if I were to do a bit of guerilla action against the balsam…cut the seed heads, take down the greenery, and bury it on site…would I not just be giving its own reproductive job a bit of a helping hand? I can at least take comfort in the RHS not advocating weed-killing, even against invasives.
I find this out afterwards, at home.
In the moment…on the walk…I haven’t thought any further than I’m sure that’s balsam and isn’t it prettry? Rose-like leaves, orchid-like flowers, delicate petals in shades of white, rose and lilac.
Moments. This kind of walk is not a journey – not even a journey of discovery – it is a meander along the riverways of the city – along the creeks, the banks, the meadows. It is a stroll through young woodland. It is a bearing witness of a drought year. Not a journey of discovery, but a stumbling across things I did not know were there, and things I'd forgotten were, and things that didn't used to be. There’s a subtle difference. The paths are well-walked. Some are even paved. This simple chain of moments. Sights. Sounds. Thoughts. In another place I compared it to a rosary. Each bead is separate. Each bead is linked. Everything is very specifically itself. Everything is merely an intrinsic part of the whole.
There is a moment on a walk when you back-track because the well-walked path leads to a picnic bench and a high fence, keeping you from the path just beyond it.
There is a moment on a walk when you start stopping: to watch the dragonfly, to photograph the flower.
There is a moment when you realise you are focussing-in on light and shadow: how an algae’d surface provides a canvas for chinois script shadows of overhanging branches, where still water becomes the altar for reflected plane leaves, where water-lilies are only just breaking surface, uncertain whether to open their yellow globes to a harsh sun, the long moment of trying to catch the translucence of a single leaf.
There is the half-hidden staithe – mooring rates of interest carved into it – and your wondering if they were offering or enquiring – the footbridge over a ditch seen as an enticement to the hidden path beyond.
There is the desiccated meadow that you have avoided for over thirty years because of that one time you were groped, in passing, by a mere boy, an incident that you still pretend never affected you. There are many more people today than there were that day. Families, picnicking. All of them in the scraps of shade under the trees – unless they’re actually in the river, splashing and laughing. Can we still call this straw-dry, mud-cracked, aching place ‘a meadow’?
Then you’re back on familiar ground. The moment when you realise that this is too long a walk for this day, when you start to focus on getting to the end of it. The moment you wish you’d been sensible and brought water, when you start thinking about de-watering opportunities and bus times.
But even now there are other moments: an intriguing graffito – an image of Kali perhaps, or from some African myth? - youngsters swimming in the river pool by Cow Tower, more laughter.
The Cathedral clock chimes the three-quarter hour and the bus-stop is within reach, you want the people on the path ahead of you to either hurry up or step aside, but you’re still caught by leaf shadows on walls and paths, and the light on the water.
You’re tiring, but still not – not really – wanting to stop walking.
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