Tuesday 22nd May
Porlock Weir – Culbone – Embelle Wood – Glenthorne
Somehow during the night I slid off my mat and rolled down a slight incline – it wasn’t such a flat piece of land after all – and I wake up curled around my backstop rucksack like a swagman cuddled up to his matilda, my nose full of pungent, earthy, woodland scents. My body feels well rickety and crotchety and cramped. It takes me a couple of minutes to get my bearings – Who am I? Where am I? Why is it so green? – yawning and stretching the night’s knots out of my various systems. And then the surrounding beauty quickly dawns on me. Everywhere I look, a delicious mix of oak and beech and holly greens fill my field of view.
I crawl out of my sleeping bag, pack my kit, do my morning chi kung, have a sylvan dump, and rejoin the coastal path.
And what a beautiful, lush, verdant, fecund coastal path it is. Maybe this is what British coastal rainforest looks and feels like? Maybe this is actually a rainforest? I don’t know what species the oaks are, but they’re particularly slender, and their trunks and branches twist and turn in such fluid fashion that they look like they’re all dancing to the same – silent to humans – music. And even though the sun’s already up and beginning to get hazily hot, the sylvan air down here is sweet and cool. And even though I can’t see the sea, it’s good to know that it’s accompanying me, not too far away. I’m sure that if I wasn’t so deaf, I’d be able to hear its rhythmically lapping presence. Ah, it feels good to be away from the road and all its human hurly burly. And it feels good to be walking, rather than standing around hitching. I guess today I’m gonna put the hiking back into hitch-hiking.
I find myself walking nice and slow, and whenever the gradient increases I walk even slower – shifting down those lower perambulatory gears, from strolling to ambling, from ambling to bimbling, and then from bimbling to dawdling. Even though I travel with a copper hare, I fundamentally a tortoise by nature. I drive my hare friends nuts. But whenever I work with a fellow tortoise, we both breathe a sigh of relief. I won’t remind you who always crosses the finishing line first.
Thây’s prayer once again arises:
Breathing in I calm my body
Breathing out I smile
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is a wonderful moment
The first three lines I have no problems with, but the fourth – do I really know that this is a wonderful moment? I stop in the middle of the path, and repeat the prayer. I would say that seventy to eighty per cent of me knows that this is a wonderful moment – but I can definitely feel that part of me that doesn’t believe it.
As I walk and ponder, I realise that there’s part of me almost constantly looking for a different moment to this one – a better moment, just around the corner, over the brow of the hill, on the other side of the fence. And I also realise that there’s quite a big part of me holding out for a better me too – a version in which I’m more peaceful, less anxious, more integrated, less loony, more whole, less scatty, more successful, more enlightened, sexier, wiser, and so on. And so forth. Ad infinitum.
Holding out for a better moment. Holding out for a better me. And then I’ll give my all. And then I’ll realise that this moment is truly a wonderful moment. All the way to my grave – and then I’ll find peace. I find myself chuckling at the absurdity of this never-ending pursuit.
I’m sure this is a fairly common human pastime though – holding out for a different experience to the one we’re having right now – but it does feel like a kind of slow-motion madness. Oh, but it’s a madness with so much momentum inside me. Both individual momentum and collective momentum. Isn’t modern society – with its pursuit of perpetual economic growth – also founded on this very madness? To truly know that this moment, right now, is a wonderful moment, a sufficient moment – wouldn’t that be the death knell of rampant consumerism? Not to mention the death knell of most of my existential habits and strategies.
None the less, as I plod along, the peace of the woods is with me, and my sense of presence slowly deepens, and there’s enough of a breeze in the air to carry my sweat away. I might not be in touch with the inherent perfection of this moment, but it’s wonderful enough. And this one, too. And this. And this...
The playfully chaotic sounds of a nearby stream slowly cross-fade into my awareness, and then, through the trees and slightly below me, on my right, I catch my first glimpse of Culbone church. Wow, it looks proper tiny. I’m not too sure if I’ve ever approached a church from above before, but, from just one glimpse, I know that I’m in for a proper ecclesiastical treat. I pause on the bridge that fords the stream, and admire the church from a distance: the nave is as small as a little cottage, with a tiny little porch, and just one modest window; the chancel is little more than a dozen feet long; and a short, slate-tiled steeple rises from the north end of the church roof, slightly askew, and missing its point. If ever hobbits were of a mind to build a church, this is the sort of church they’d build.
I walk down into the churchyard, drop my bags in the shade of the resident yew, and – with Christmas-like excitement – open the church door.
It feels even more hobbit-sized inside than it does from the outside. The pews are all three-quarter size – I guess to squeeze in as many worshippers as possible – and there’s still an old box pew intact, presumably for the local dignitaries. A simple piece of rope is knotted between the two panels of the simple chancel screen. The walls look freshly whitewashed, and the atmosphere is gentle and clear and charming.
With a full congregation, it would have been quite an intimate place – priest, squire and family, peasants and plebs, all within praying and smelling and coughing distance of one another. You definitely wouldn’t want any farts or farters in here on a damp and muggy autumnal Sunday morning.
A church leaflet informs me that Culbone is a corruption of Kil Beun, or the Church of St Beuno, who was a famous Welsh saint born in the late sixth century. Beuno’s main claim to miraculous fame seems to be the restoration of St Winifred’s head to her body, after King Cardog had her decapitated for becoming a nun and thereby thwarting his unwanted advances. Those were the days, heh?
I sit in one of the dinky pews, and find myself wondering why I’m still attracted to Christianity and its churches, and yet still slightly repulsed at the same time. Jesus, God, the Bible, all that intricate doctrine and all those earnest creeds – they all used to mean the world to me. I was really evangelical and pious in my teens – and I mean pious also in the good sense of the word. Earnest. Thoughtful. Devoted. I remember when – in my mid-twenties – I finally admitted to myself that I no longer believed in God, I felt utterly miserable. I never really let go of Jesus, but I sure grieved God’s passing for several years. I can’t say I was a happy clappy atheist.
And now? What do I believe? Do I believe in God? Not in that old school way – God as a separate being, even though I sometimes like to talk to God in that old school inter-personal fashion. I could be clever and say that God isn’t a separate being, but is the ground of my being and the ground of all being, and all that sweet-sounding mystical malarkey – but I don’t really know that. I’d love to know that – to know that in my bones. To know that I am actually at one with the Divine. But I don’t. Often I feel as separate from the Divine as I did when I was a convinced rationalist atheist materialist scientist.
The church door clicks open, and breaks my reverie. A man and woman enter – I guess they’re in their early sixties – and we soon get talking. They’re walking the southwest coastal path as far as Bude, with some sort of package where someone delivers the bulk of your luggage to your next B&B. Nice way to travel. When I mention pilgrimage, both their faces lit up.
“Oh, we go on the Easter pilgrimage to Walsingham every year,” she says, “carrying one of the crosses from Ely. We’ve been taking part since we were both students. It’s quite marvellous – the sense of community along the way.”
“And then when all the different walks and crosses converge!” he adds.
“Yes! And then when we reach Walsingham and celebrate Easter together – such joy!”
I really appreciate their warmth and enthusiasm, and find myself envying slightly both the longevity of their faith and the longevity of their relationship. Walsingham is already on The Map of Possibilities, but I reckon it’s a definite now.
They take me around the back of the church and shows me a very small, narrow window. “Do you know what that is?” she asks. I don’t. “It’s a leper’s squint. So that they could see the altar and the host during mass.”
I go slightly dizzy. It’s strange to say this, but for the first time in my life, leprosy feels real – because it feels near. I’m actually standing where lepers once stood – human outcasts still allowed a glimpse of salvation. Human beings just like me. A diseased version of me, looking through a narrow window, desperate to glimpse the raised chalice or raised host, desperate for both divine and human mercy.
Because lepers didn’t – didn’t, don’t – just have to deal with the pathology of the disease, they were also burdened by the revulsion and judgment, and the fear and shame, and the pity and projections of others. Still are. And I realise that some of this revulsion and pity and fear also live in me. I suspect that if I met a leper now, I’d probably see the disease before I saw the human being. And to think: there were saints who actually kissed the wounds of lepers. Maybe there still are? That’s someone who knows how to surrender to Divine love.
We return to the sunnier side of the church, and they let me peruse their detailed walking map. And there it is: Glenthorne! Not only does it actually exist, but it’s only three miles or so west of here. My fellow pilgrims depart, but I plonk myself down on a wonky bench in the churchyard, opposite the yew, and make myself some breakfast.
The only proper pilgrimage I’ve ever done was an Easter pilgrimage, over thirty years ago. Even so, it wasn’t a particularly proper pilgrimage, and I only joined the tail end. But it changed my life. Yes, it was definitely one of those places in the woods where I chose the path less travelled.
It was Easter 1984 – the week I turned eighteen, became vegetarian, and finally took the plunge and joined the Christian peace movement. I was living and working in a Church of England Children’s Society home at the time, and had been reading and praying about pacifism for several months. Was God calling me to pacifism? Did the Bible teach pacifism? Was Jesus a pacifist? Those questions were constantly whirring around inside me.
I’m even whirring around right now, remembering how Christian I once was, and how devoted.
That week I attended a Maundy Thursday, and the sermon happened to be explicitly about Christian pacifism – specifically about how, at its heart, the Easter story was a story of a disarmed God. As I listened to the sermon unfold – all the time taking notes – I felt as if God was talking directly to me. By the end of the service my heart and mind were made up: I was now a Christian pacifist.
But, having made up my heart and mind that I was a pacifist, I knew that my body had to do something about it too. I was aware that several Christian peace groups were organising a weeklong Easter Peace Pilgrimage around various British and US military bases – this was the mid-1980s, peak Cold War, and peak peace movement too. So, on Easter Saturday morning I packed my sleeping bag and tent into my rucksack, caught the train to Cambridge, found the Quaker Meeting House, and joined the final three days of the pilgrimage. Looking back, it was quite a brave move, because I didn’t know a soul. I was in for quite a surprise. Quaker anarchists, Catholic lesbian feminists, Lutheran trumpeters, Methodist clowns, Greenham Common peace campers, Franciscan monks, ex-nuns, young punks, priests galore – my fellow pilgrims were a delightfully motley crew, and welcomed me in with open hearts, open arms and open voices. And that night, as two Ministry of Defence police dragged me away from the gates of USAF Lakenheath, I knew – even though I was trying hard not to wet myself with fear – that I’d found both my tribe and my vocation. At dawn we all gathered – a good hundred strong – amid the runway’s landing lights, and celebrated the risen Christ with such joyful singing and praising and dancing. I was never the same again. I have a feeling that what I experienced that morning is what Martin Luther King was referring to when he talked about “the Beloved Community.” And even though I went on to lose my Christian faith, I’ve considered myself a pilgrim soul ever since.
I rejoin the coastal path, and soon settle into a meditative pace. Occasionally the coastline comes into view, and it’s fucking awesome. Giant, thickly-forested, fertile hills plunge down to the sea. I’ve never seen such epic scenes in England. It reminds me a bit of some of the places I’ve visited on South Africa’s east coast. Wow.
It takes a couple of hours to reach a fork in the path, where the south-west coastal path carres on to the left, and Glenthorne beach is signposted to the right. I begin my descent, passing through a well-established and unruly old Victorian pinetum. A very weathered information panel informs me that I am in the presence – among many other species – of a Western Red Cedar from North America, a Chinese Cow’s Tail Pine from China, a Sawara Cypress from Japan, a Bhutan Pine from the Himalayas, a Glaucous Atlantic Cedar from North Africa, and, somewhere or other, an indigenous Yew. This feels like a slightly topsy turvy part of England, a parallel universe that seceded sometime in the 1850s or 1870s – roughly the same time as the steampunk universe made its evolutionary deviation.
The path runs alongside a merrily-racing stream, and I find myself picking up pace, fuelled by both gravity and excitement. Round a bend, past some intriguing ruins, and then there she is: Glenthorne beach – all pebbly and rocky and open and free. A seal is playing in the water, really close to shore. I don’t need to make a decision about camping here. I put my tent up straight away, and then go and plunge head first into the sea, offering my salty body to its salty waters. You can see why some churches go for full immersion baptisms. My whole being sings Alleluia!
Thus refreshed, I lie down on a rock, and as the light and heat of the descending sun soak through my skin and begin to re-warm my sea-chilled bloodstream, I drift into liminal ponderings...
I crawl out of my sleeping bag, pack my kit, do my morning chi kung, have a sylvan dump, and rejoin the coastal path.
And what a beautiful, lush, verdant, fecund coastal path it is. Maybe this is what British coastal rainforest looks and feels like? Maybe this is actually a rainforest? I don’t know what species the oaks are, but they’re particularly slender, and their trunks and branches twist and turn in such fluid fashion that they look like they’re all dancing to the same – silent to humans – music. And even though the sun’s already up and beginning to get hazily hot, the sylvan air down here is sweet and cool. And even though I can’t see the sea, it’s good to know that it’s accompanying me, not too far away. I’m sure that if I wasn’t so deaf, I’d be able to hear its rhythmically lapping presence. Ah, it feels good to be away from the road and all its human hurly burly. And it feels good to be walking, rather than standing around hitching. I guess today I’m gonna put the hiking back into hitch-hiking.
I find myself walking nice and slow, and whenever the gradient increases I walk even slower – shifting down those lower perambulatory gears, from strolling to ambling, from ambling to bimbling, and then from bimbling to dawdling. Even though I travel with a copper hare, I fundamentally a tortoise by nature. I drive my hare friends nuts. But whenever I work with a fellow tortoise, we both breathe a sigh of relief. I won’t remind you who always crosses the finishing line first.
Thây’s prayer once again arises:
Breathing in I calm my body
Breathing out I smile
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is a wonderful moment
The first three lines I have no problems with, but the fourth – do I really know that this is a wonderful moment? I stop in the middle of the path, and repeat the prayer. I would say that seventy to eighty per cent of me knows that this is a wonderful moment – but I can definitely feel that part of me that doesn’t believe it.
As I walk and ponder, I realise that there’s part of me almost constantly looking for a different moment to this one – a better moment, just around the corner, over the brow of the hill, on the other side of the fence. And I also realise that there’s quite a big part of me holding out for a better me too – a version in which I’m more peaceful, less anxious, more integrated, less loony, more whole, less scatty, more successful, more enlightened, sexier, wiser, and so on. And so forth. Ad infinitum.
Holding out for a better moment. Holding out for a better me. And then I’ll give my all. And then I’ll realise that this moment is truly a wonderful moment. All the way to my grave – and then I’ll find peace. I find myself chuckling at the absurdity of this never-ending pursuit.
I’m sure this is a fairly common human pastime though – holding out for a different experience to the one we’re having right now – but it does feel like a kind of slow-motion madness. Oh, but it’s a madness with so much momentum inside me. Both individual momentum and collective momentum. Isn’t modern society – with its pursuit of perpetual economic growth – also founded on this very madness? To truly know that this moment, right now, is a wonderful moment, a sufficient moment – wouldn’t that be the death knell of rampant consumerism? Not to mention the death knell of most of my existential habits and strategies.
None the less, as I plod along, the peace of the woods is with me, and my sense of presence slowly deepens, and there’s enough of a breeze in the air to carry my sweat away. I might not be in touch with the inherent perfection of this moment, but it’s wonderful enough. And this one, too. And this. And this...
The playfully chaotic sounds of a nearby stream slowly cross-fade into my awareness, and then, through the trees and slightly below me, on my right, I catch my first glimpse of Culbone church. Wow, it looks proper tiny. I’m not too sure if I’ve ever approached a church from above before, but, from just one glimpse, I know that I’m in for a proper ecclesiastical treat. I pause on the bridge that fords the stream, and admire the church from a distance: the nave is as small as a little cottage, with a tiny little porch, and just one modest window; the chancel is little more than a dozen feet long; and a short, slate-tiled steeple rises from the north end of the church roof, slightly askew, and missing its point. If ever hobbits were of a mind to build a church, this is the sort of church they’d build.
I walk down into the churchyard, drop my bags in the shade of the resident yew, and – with Christmas-like excitement – open the church door.
It feels even more hobbit-sized inside than it does from the outside. The pews are all three-quarter size – I guess to squeeze in as many worshippers as possible – and there’s still an old box pew intact, presumably for the local dignitaries. A simple piece of rope is knotted between the two panels of the simple chancel screen. The walls look freshly whitewashed, and the atmosphere is gentle and clear and charming.
With a full congregation, it would have been quite an intimate place – priest, squire and family, peasants and plebs, all within praying and smelling and coughing distance of one another. You definitely wouldn’t want any farts or farters in here on a damp and muggy autumnal Sunday morning.
A church leaflet informs me that Culbone is a corruption of Kil Beun, or the Church of St Beuno, who was a famous Welsh saint born in the late sixth century. Beuno’s main claim to miraculous fame seems to be the restoration of St Winifred’s head to her body, after King Cardog had her decapitated for becoming a nun and thereby thwarting his unwanted advances. Those were the days, heh?
I sit in one of the dinky pews, and find myself wondering why I’m still attracted to Christianity and its churches, and yet still slightly repulsed at the same time. Jesus, God, the Bible, all that intricate doctrine and all those earnest creeds – they all used to mean the world to me. I was really evangelical and pious in my teens – and I mean pious also in the good sense of the word. Earnest. Thoughtful. Devoted. I remember when – in my mid-twenties – I finally admitted to myself that I no longer believed in God, I felt utterly miserable. I never really let go of Jesus, but I sure grieved God’s passing for several years. I can’t say I was a happy clappy atheist.
And now? What do I believe? Do I believe in God? Not in that old school way – God as a separate being, even though I sometimes like to talk to God in that old school inter-personal fashion. I could be clever and say that God isn’t a separate being, but is the ground of my being and the ground of all being, and all that sweet-sounding mystical malarkey – but I don’t really know that. I’d love to know that – to know that in my bones. To know that I am actually at one with the Divine. But I don’t. Often I feel as separate from the Divine as I did when I was a convinced rationalist atheist materialist scientist.
The church door clicks open, and breaks my reverie. A man and woman enter – I guess they’re in their early sixties – and we soon get talking. They’re walking the southwest coastal path as far as Bude, with some sort of package where someone delivers the bulk of your luggage to your next B&B. Nice way to travel. When I mention pilgrimage, both their faces lit up.
“Oh, we go on the Easter pilgrimage to Walsingham every year,” she says, “carrying one of the crosses from Ely. We’ve been taking part since we were both students. It’s quite marvellous – the sense of community along the way.”
“And then when all the different walks and crosses converge!” he adds.
“Yes! And then when we reach Walsingham and celebrate Easter together – such joy!”
I really appreciate their warmth and enthusiasm, and find myself envying slightly both the longevity of their faith and the longevity of their relationship. Walsingham is already on The Map of Possibilities, but I reckon it’s a definite now.
They take me around the back of the church and shows me a very small, narrow window. “Do you know what that is?” she asks. I don’t. “It’s a leper’s squint. So that they could see the altar and the host during mass.”
I go slightly dizzy. It’s strange to say this, but for the first time in my life, leprosy feels real – because it feels near. I’m actually standing where lepers once stood – human outcasts still allowed a glimpse of salvation. Human beings just like me. A diseased version of me, looking through a narrow window, desperate to glimpse the raised chalice or raised host, desperate for both divine and human mercy.
Because lepers didn’t – didn’t, don’t – just have to deal with the pathology of the disease, they were also burdened by the revulsion and judgment, and the fear and shame, and the pity and projections of others. Still are. And I realise that some of this revulsion and pity and fear also live in me. I suspect that if I met a leper now, I’d probably see the disease before I saw the human being. And to think: there were saints who actually kissed the wounds of lepers. Maybe there still are? That’s someone who knows how to surrender to Divine love.
We return to the sunnier side of the church, and they let me peruse their detailed walking map. And there it is: Glenthorne! Not only does it actually exist, but it’s only three miles or so west of here. My fellow pilgrims depart, but I plonk myself down on a wonky bench in the churchyard, opposite the yew, and make myself some breakfast.
The only proper pilgrimage I’ve ever done was an Easter pilgrimage, over thirty years ago. Even so, it wasn’t a particularly proper pilgrimage, and I only joined the tail end. But it changed my life. Yes, it was definitely one of those places in the woods where I chose the path less travelled.
It was Easter 1984 – the week I turned eighteen, became vegetarian, and finally took the plunge and joined the Christian peace movement. I was living and working in a Church of England Children’s Society home at the time, and had been reading and praying about pacifism for several months. Was God calling me to pacifism? Did the Bible teach pacifism? Was Jesus a pacifist? Those questions were constantly whirring around inside me.
I’m even whirring around right now, remembering how Christian I once was, and how devoted.
That week I attended a Maundy Thursday, and the sermon happened to be explicitly about Christian pacifism – specifically about how, at its heart, the Easter story was a story of a disarmed God. As I listened to the sermon unfold – all the time taking notes – I felt as if God was talking directly to me. By the end of the service my heart and mind were made up: I was now a Christian pacifist.
But, having made up my heart and mind that I was a pacifist, I knew that my body had to do something about it too. I was aware that several Christian peace groups were organising a weeklong Easter Peace Pilgrimage around various British and US military bases – this was the mid-1980s, peak Cold War, and peak peace movement too. So, on Easter Saturday morning I packed my sleeping bag and tent into my rucksack, caught the train to Cambridge, found the Quaker Meeting House, and joined the final three days of the pilgrimage. Looking back, it was quite a brave move, because I didn’t know a soul. I was in for quite a surprise. Quaker anarchists, Catholic lesbian feminists, Lutheran trumpeters, Methodist clowns, Greenham Common peace campers, Franciscan monks, ex-nuns, young punks, priests galore – my fellow pilgrims were a delightfully motley crew, and welcomed me in with open hearts, open arms and open voices. And that night, as two Ministry of Defence police dragged me away from the gates of USAF Lakenheath, I knew – even though I was trying hard not to wet myself with fear – that I’d found both my tribe and my vocation. At dawn we all gathered – a good hundred strong – amid the runway’s landing lights, and celebrated the risen Christ with such joyful singing and praising and dancing. I was never the same again. I have a feeling that what I experienced that morning is what Martin Luther King was referring to when he talked about “the Beloved Community.” And even though I went on to lose my Christian faith, I’ve considered myself a pilgrim soul ever since.
I rejoin the coastal path, and soon settle into a meditative pace. Occasionally the coastline comes into view, and it’s fucking awesome. Giant, thickly-forested, fertile hills plunge down to the sea. I’ve never seen such epic scenes in England. It reminds me a bit of some of the places I’ve visited on South Africa’s east coast. Wow.
It takes a couple of hours to reach a fork in the path, where the south-west coastal path carres on to the left, and Glenthorne beach is signposted to the right. I begin my descent, passing through a well-established and unruly old Victorian pinetum. A very weathered information panel informs me that I am in the presence – among many other species – of a Western Red Cedar from North America, a Chinese Cow’s Tail Pine from China, a Sawara Cypress from Japan, a Bhutan Pine from the Himalayas, a Glaucous Atlantic Cedar from North Africa, and, somewhere or other, an indigenous Yew. This feels like a slightly topsy turvy part of England, a parallel universe that seceded sometime in the 1850s or 1870s – roughly the same time as the steampunk universe made its evolutionary deviation.
The path runs alongside a merrily-racing stream, and I find myself picking up pace, fuelled by both gravity and excitement. Round a bend, past some intriguing ruins, and then there she is: Glenthorne beach – all pebbly and rocky and open and free. A seal is playing in the water, really close to shore. I don’t need to make a decision about camping here. I put my tent up straight away, and then go and plunge head first into the sea, offering my salty body to its salty waters. You can see why some churches go for full immersion baptisms. My whole being sings Alleluia!
Thus refreshed, I lie down on a rock, and as the light and heat of the descending sun soak through my skin and begin to re-warm my sea-chilled bloodstream, I drift into liminal ponderings...
If these rocks could speak
would they confirm who once
came this way
– who beached their boat
upon this pebbled shore
and spoke in foreign tongue
offering thanks for the safety
of their journey?
And was it as spring-like a day as this
– the hills as green and fertile as those of Lebanon –
or did they arrive
on some damp, autumnal, British tide?
And did anyone welcome them?
And what were they wearing?
And was the young man on board tired to the bone
or were his eyes wide, wide open?
would they confirm who once
came this way
– who beached their boat
upon this pebbled shore
and spoke in foreign tongue
offering thanks for the safety
of their journey?
And was it as spring-like a day as this
– the hills as green and fertile as those of Lebanon –
or did they arrive
on some damp, autumnal, British tide?
And did anyone welcome them?
And what were they wearing?
And was the young man on board tired to the bone
or were his eyes wide, wide open?
Ah, it’s time for bed for this sea-salted pilgrim.
I stand on the beach and say my evening prayers. Not with words though – with deep breaths, and with a touch of wonder too. And a slightly comical sense of: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t even know what this means. Fuck, I’m knackered.
I climb into my tent, zip up its door and shuffle down into my sleeping bag. There’s still quite a bit of light in the air, so I rummage in my bag for my literary travelling companion: the wonderful Soul Food collection from Bloodaxe Books. I flip through its pages and my eyes settle on a beautiful, tender poem by Joy Harjo, which fills my heart with yearning – for something I don't even know exists.
I lie in my sleeping bag, listening to the gentle lapping of the waves, and just the possibility that the young Jesus and his uncle Joseph once walked upon this beach makes me smile from sleepy ear to sleepy ear...
I stand on the beach and say my evening prayers. Not with words though – with deep breaths, and with a touch of wonder too. And a slightly comical sense of: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t even know what this means. Fuck, I’m knackered.
I climb into my tent, zip up its door and shuffle down into my sleeping bag. There’s still quite a bit of light in the air, so I rummage in my bag for my literary travelling companion: the wonderful Soul Food collection from Bloodaxe Books. I flip through its pages and my eyes settle on a beautiful, tender poem by Joy Harjo, which fills my heart with yearning – for something I don't even know exists.
I lie in my sleeping bag, listening to the gentle lapping of the waves, and just the possibility that the young Jesus and his uncle Joseph once walked upon this beach makes me smile from sleepy ear to sleepy ear...
Eagle Poem
by Joy Harjo
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear,
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
by Joy Harjo
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear,
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.