A Walk That Never Ends

See With The Body Eye pt6

labyrinth brooch in pewter

It is time to write the last of these See With the Body Eye pieces for a while, and to return to the implicit over the explicit again, next week. Last night for an online talk I gave for PRI, it was both a joy and a big leap for me to be so ‘out’ about my inspirations and sources of sustenance for the work that is mine to do in the world. In a few week’s time I hope to share the recording and the resources. But for now, it is just good to know the week ahead comprises days in an ancient octagonal keep in deep work with the Philosopher’s Stone, lapis lazuli, while evenings will be spent quietly editing my next book Drawn From the Wild. One cannot only breathe out.

I look forward to meeting some of you in person for the online workshop on 3rd August, details are in last week’s post. In the meantime, let us step out, and in, together into the labyrinth which is pilgrimage.

To set out is to return

Recently, I went to my local estuary, a short bus ride from the end of my road, a place I have loved since I was a girl. I went to collect the annually moulted swan feathers. I thought perhaps I was too late this year, having been in the States when collagen weakened by the swans’ hormonal shifts allowed the huge proto-quills to slip from their follicles, like worn old oars from their rowlocks.

Happily, a fistful of flight feathers, a little green from algae, were around the shore line, so I brought them back to my bath to clean so that they could become quill pens cut by students. I thought of

Adam Wilson

‘s recent posts about gratitude,

Elizabeth Oldfield

‘s new book, and the visit I made to St Wite's ossuary with

Elizabeth Slade

last month. I considered the white swan feathers and the bones of the saint, dark night skies on the Dorset coast, bright with stars, the blood red ochre on the shoreline near Christchurch heavy in my pockets, (mainly weighty, tiny, haematite stones), and the deep green of the oak trees on Hengistbury Head.

a sketch of the pilgrimage shield that hung in my mind’s eye

The Cross In the Circle

All this shaped itself into a wheel of pilgrimage, in four colours, black, green, white and red, inlaid like stained glass on a circle quartered by a cross. It is now drawn and coloured, provisionally in pencil, and later this year I will remake it on parchment in iron gall ink, with malachite, chalk, bone black and haematite paints. This is how I see with the body eye, moving through space, allowing the mind-oars to float on the surface, not digging in and heaving into each thought, desperate to make progress. The astounding round rose window of a nave is not created by a grasping mind, even less so just one hemisphere. Superimposed upon the pale sand was a bright image, and as I tucked the precious sheaf of swan detritus into my bag, the emblem hung before me like a shield.

There are ahead four walks that I wish I could share with you all in person. Instead, here they are, in only as much detail as will permit you to walk them in your own place, without hankering after mine. It is important that while all places can and should be deemed holy, that is, whole, that only some, by repeated acquaintance and communion are by our own feet and heart made sacred to us.

Red Way

We begin at the bottom left, appropriately for me, in the south west. Here is a walk into earth and the Earth, beginning with a simple step outside our doors. Even if you are in the heart of a city of millions, outdoors is still outside, so the instruction for this pilgrimage is simply to step out. Here, when I say ‘step’, I am acutely aware of my loved ones whose mobility is compromised, who are ill, bed-ridden or unable to ‘just’ walk out their door most days. So here I am including their mobility scooters, their helping friends, their walking sticks and on the worst of their days, their imaginations, nourished by the open window, as ways of ‘stepping’. Until I was lame for a few months due to injury during lockdown, I took walking for granted. Now, I know the minor miracle of walking easily for what it is; freedom in a pure form.

To walk the red way is to really feel the earth as we go rather than giving our attention to the word-hoard in the head. This route is rarely the shortest one between two coordinates but is speckled with pause-places dear as the freckles on a lover’s arm, excellent places to gaze and wait.

Ways and gait are the technê here. Choose a route, based on - whim - and walk it. Let it speak to you and change your plans. Cross roads at the behest of an old cat. Broken brick bits seek to fill your pockets, to be given to pigment people you have yet to meet. Rusty old signs wish to be read for oracles and initiatory instructions, broken pub names missing letters, especially so. One local pub: The Commodore? Come, adore.

Red Way is out into life, it is births, beginnings, the morning, even the morning of our last day on earth. It is remembering not-self, (for when forgetting self is a step too far). This daily pilgrimage is all that takes us out of the cave of mind and into the realm of the real. It is the door.

The Door

Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there’s
a tree, or a wood,
a garden,
or a magic city.

Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog’s rummaging.
Maybe you’ll see a face,
or an eye,
or the picture
of a picture.

Go and open the door.
If there’s a fog
it will clear.

Go and open the door.
Even if there’s only
the darkness ticking,
even if there’s only
the hollow wind,
even if
nothing
is there,
go and open the door.

At least
there’ll be
a draught.

Miroslav Holub

White Way

In the south east is the White Way, like the white cliffs of Dover or the white sand beaches of Florida and Tamil Nadu. Here, we are striding, swinging our legs and arm bones, letting our mind move in a similar reciprocal motion, balanced, rotationally symmetrical, in tempo with the earth and our breath. The mental equivalent of the limbs in this settled pendulum motion is the kind of thinking that becomes the bones of future action, the foundation of a book, the firm intention that transmutes into steadfastness over time.

White Way is not just bones, it is also air, and books. Thought forms are to the mind what air is to the Earth; never completely still, always moving due to some new differential, the reason that leaves or pages move, the source of words. This path can be walked outdoors by allowing the Red to age a little, by carrying on walking into the day, by the non-doing of just not stopping. It can also be achieved between the pages of a book, by just carrying on reading and letting the mind stay in motion in the landscape of paper and ink, deeper into the book, further over the map, opened on the biggest table or the centre of the floor.

The oracles available in this pilgrimage are bones, chalk or bleached wood found on the way. Discarded books, found notes or shells can all be held up to the ear or eye, or left to jangle and crumple in a pocket, emptied on the kitchen counter and read in the manner of tea leaves, once home. The messages in this quarter are ones of gumption, rhythm, support and pace.

an oak of Hengistbury

Green Way

In the north east, the top right, we find the Green Way, water, the boreal zone, Sherwood, the forests and rivers of myth and story. This can be a walk into fruition alongside waters and underneath trees. It is not an idyll. It requires maturity and staying power. The emptied blood red mind, once properly supported by the bone white, now yields to foliate emerald and we sprout words that can be wild and real, if we have walked this way well. Here are all the walks and mental meanders which took us deeper into the plant life of Earth, into the green that is inseparable from us, given that everything we eat is either made of it, or had itself once eaten the green.

Whereas with books and bones we can still see the imprint of the human mind and body, in the green we are reminded of the larger half of the breathing web of which we are a part. This walk encourages us to greet trees and flowers as fellows, to notice the shapes of leaves, to seek shade in summer under the canopy or trace the winter silhouette of a lone huge sweet chestnut on the main road, still giving the Machine the finger.

Regaining the green cannot be accomplished by an act of will. Every continent yields sheafs of tales of the doom that stalks those who cut down trees and trample the wild. We live inside those stories now, scorched at the edges, drowning in the low places, losing our topsoil from hearts and fields. Our loam is often thin and infertile. Fittingly, our walks are sober affairs. Delight is glimpsed in the iridescent beetle on the path or the brown trout leaping in the Dart, but is not the reason we will go the Green Way. We go to the woods because we must. No cathedrals without towering trunks, no books without trees, no crops without clouds, which are the outbreath of forests. We go to the green to remember what community really is, how interdependence underpins all life, to see through the myth of the lone protagonist once and for all.

Green is a cold, bitter-herb draught which wakes us up from the spell cast by devices. Suddenly we look down and see mushrooms speckled and glistening where seemingly none had been before. Elf cup blue mycelium tints the punk wood turquoise. Oracles available in the green are always saying this: the wild world is more than we could ever say it is, greater than we could ever know. It is an intricate expression of the Great Mystery, the dripping pool at the source of the spring of awe.

Black Way

Here in the top left, the north west, is the culmination, fire, the night sky, prayer, the root (and the rot), awe and meditation. This way is walked, paradoxically, in stillness. The route of Black Way is to find oneself where the night sky can be seen, as far away from light pollution as possible, just once, or for as long as is possible, perhaps until you quit the city for good and go where lights can still be switched off. Somewhere you are not forced to watch diodes eat electrons and emit pallor. We go somewhere the true beacons of mind, the constellations, can be seen.

Then this path is walked, degree by degree, by the neck and the spirit, in looking up. This short journey is the method to travel back in time to meet our ancestors, who are standing right behind us at all times, cheering us on, willing us to notice their proximity and regard. Such a short route, so rarely taken! The Milky Way, the Great Bear, or the Southern Cross, however named, are up there just where your grandmother left them for you, like fresh bread rolls on the table under a cloth, for after your late shift.

The dark night sky is the promise of renewal, the counterpoint to an inflammation of ego, the cure for an addiction to personal success. Such scale offers us true proportion. Out of the void, the compost of the universe, tumbles stars and wormholes, churning, silence, grandeur. The oracles here are told in stories (and hundreds have already been written down) by every single culture that has ever lived.

Our ancestors threw their oracles at the sky and they stuck. Orion’s belt still squeezes, Cygnus still flies. Blink and the International Space Station goes overhead again. Our fellows, incredibly, are up there using Earth as an oracle, measuring sea level, temperature and windspeed. We read their cosmic data in New Scientist with a politely veiled distaste once conserved for the haruspex.

Black Way is all that is composting, void, fecund, regenerative, terrifying, excellent and infinite. This is a walk that never ends, if you start. The fastest way to walk it is to lie on your back next to a trusted other, and to fall face-first into the ancient light of whatever stars shine above you. Greet these photons, formed just as we were by the Great Mystery, as tiny pilgrims, emissaries from a mind beyond our ken. How then will we hail them?

With open eyes, open hearts, and words of welcome.

This is how we arrive home from pilgrimage and become as hosts to the universe.

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