Where you are
Epiphanies come through real things, through tangibles like walking sticks and dreams and deer antlers…
Sue Monk Kidd
Since calling this journey a pilgrimage, I have walked in some wild and high and lovely places, explored a few paths trodden by other wayfarers, encountered sacred spaces, held questions with God and found unexpected sanctuary, as pilgrims do. What I didn’t know, was how this lense of pilgrimage would make every walk now holy, in its own way.
That each path and pavement and popping to the shop would be a pilgrimage. Each journey an invitation to encounter something sacred, whether or not I accepted it. That my feet on the ground and Robin’s lead in my hand and sound of the birds in the hedgerow, would be a prayer anyway, whether I liked it or not. Each place I walk in offering its holy ground. That I’m probably stuck as a pilgrim now forever, and I’m glad about it.
Over the last few weeks, work has meant walking through busy streets and along dirty pavements. I’ve been seeing the same person who walks their dog as I go through a suburban park to get to the train each day, and making my way along the corridors of a drama school where people stop with joy when they see Robin. I’ve been wearily trudging or hastily weaving through train stations, and padding in my slippers along the hallway of a home that has welcomed me to stay for a while. I’ve made a twelve mile pilgrimage along a nearby pathway, not out in the wild I prefer, but full of wildflowers nonetheless.
One evening, I walked up a hill in South London (which has its own kinds of beauty) to the home of a friend and colleague who fed me a tasty meal and introduced me to a sauce I hadn’t tried and opened some wine he’d been saving, and we talked about creativity and how to nurture students and how to make art and what our future jobs might look like, and he asked if I had a walking stick and would I like him to make me one?
So now I will walk with a reminder of the particular grace of London and of the ways we can learn to be creative and offer our creativity to the world, and the joy and challenge and privilege of helping others grow as artists, and the goodness in finding new flavours, and the choice to sometimes take the nearest path there is.
I will feel this light wood beneath my fingers, and be reminded of the city dirt that clung to my shoes and Robin’s paws, the evening light over a city, the multitude of flowers in a hedgerow. Taking off my shoes to work. Late nights when I felt too tired to take another step and still had to walk home from the station. Walking with a friend and her new dog, noticing how our lives had shifted over the years and our friendship had grown.
Finding my way through confusing entrance of an unknown local climbing wall, and scrambling over rocks to climb outdoors for the first time, and stepping into a sprawling shared garden and then hastily retreating from a family of bold foxes. I’ll hold something of all this, of where I walked for a little while. Walking through the sting of places that used to be mine, walking through the gentleness of new places. Walking, as I still do all the time, aware of what a miracle it is to be wholly who I am in this queer skin, the pilgrimage that this is too.
There are things I walk with that I do not want, and things I have to hold which I would not, but now, too, I will carry this walking stick, made by Pav, and I am grateful.
And you? Is there a pilgrimage you make each day, where you are? Places of unexpected beauty? Pain to carry? Prayers to walk out? Something you can hold onto, as you go?
A Walk
My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far beyond the road I have begun,
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has an inner light, even from a distance-
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
Rilke