I watched the lateral rays of early
morning sun slant through the open window of my bathroom in the Fenwick B&B
as I hurriedly packed and reviewed directions for the final leg of my
pilgrimage. I sat in a wicker chair and
drank instant coffee while I watched house martins play, swoop and spiral
around the stone house across the street.
I longed to be outside in the sunlight moving with them rather than
inside amongst the artificial flowers and coverlets and cakes covered in
plastic wrap. But after I’d finished
breakfast, laced up my still-wet boots, fastened my backpack around my waist,
and headed out the main road of town, I found that I was crying. Tears streamed down my face. What was going on? Hadn’t I prepared the night before by asking
myself to focus on what needed healing?
And what answer came? I needed to
be released from “this deep-seated feeling of loss … loss of Mom, loss of Pop,
disappointment about my marriage and my rigidity in staying with it for so
long.” Maybe it is time to BE, to
LIVE. Maybe now I know what Sister
Eileen meant all those years ago, “If it’s not life-giving, God doesn’t want
you in it.” What was I crying about on
this final walk to the causeway, where I would wait for low tide, and walk
across the mud flats to Holy Island, the Island of Lindisfarne? In my momentary self-examination, I turned up
these answers: I was sad to leave the
high places where I’d lost all sense of my own weight. I was said that I would never see my mother
smile again or look worried. And I was
sad that human love seemed to be so elusive for me. Looking back on that morning, I think that
having things end, especially when the ending involved a crossing over into
another reality was bound up for me with Mom’s death and the transformation of
our relationship into something entirely new that even I did not yet
understand. The walk required great
concentration. I poured myself into it
and lost my sadness for a time. Being
done with it (or nearly done), my grief returned.
Even though I was so close to the
end—the ocean couldn’t have been more than two or three miles away as the crow
flies—I got lost. Was getting lost a
conscious choice? I must not have been
paying close attention to the narrative description and realized I had missed a
turn when I crossed railroad tracks on a stone bridge that didn’t match the
photo in the book and there was no phone that I was supposed to use to call the
switchman. Uh, oh. Where did I go wrong? I backed up, climbed a fence, crossed a field
with cattle and sunflowers, and tried to climb a wire fence when my legs were
utterly ensnared by the weeds and brambles.
It took all my strength to yank one free and I practically fell on the
stones that edged the railroad tracks.
The faces of the sunflowers witnessed my humiliation. I picked myself up and carefully walked along
the tracks, hoping that a high-speed liner didn’t come along before I’d found
the proper bridge. I was in luck. There was the bridge. As soon as I crossed it, a train sped past me
like a bullet. Is getting lost, on some
level, a conscious choice? Did I ignore
the directions because I wanted to lose myself in geography? Avoid the aches and pains of locating myself
without a mother, in a sexless marriage, friendless in the world? To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender,
lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so
that its surroundings fade away. To be
lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being
in uncertainty and mystery. To be lost
is to encounter Mom on the mountain. To
be lost is to be found and almost courted by a strange Scotsman. To be lost is to lose the ordinary Mary Jo
and find the wild child who stripped naked and hid in the woods to avoid having
to get on the bus and go to school, sit at a desk, and do worksheets for grades. By the time I reached the causeway where cars
were already lined up to cross to the island, any sadnesses I’d felt had grown
over with greenness and blown away in the light breezes of a summer
morning. Change, accept, go, walk. Don’t hold on, join, participate, Live. Perhaps I am learning something about how to
live … I wrote this sentence while perched on one of the huge square masonry
blocks—“anti-tank barriers” left over from the war, still relevant in an age of
growing nationalism, and an age (what age isn’t) of self-defense.
I walked up to examine the line
where the water covered the road and left behind brown bubble chains of
seaweed. Car doors were open. And the scents of expensive cologne and after-shave
on well-cared for bodies drifted out.
Money. The kids had snacks and
ran between the cars. Signs warned to
wait on the tide or risk losing your car.
But these human snails, in their moving living rooms, were over-eager
and began to plow through the receding water well before it was safe. A middle-aged Scotsman and his “partner” on a
bike trip rehearsed the dangers of over-eagerness: water in the engine, salt in the brakes. I thought of the Egyptian chariots stuck in
the mud and drifting like flotsam when God closed the pathway through the
sea. I was happy to wait on Nature. Let the cars go. Pilgrims were told that to take the Way
across the tidal flats you should wait a whole hour after it was safe to cross
on the road. As a girl, I had been
fascinated by geese and the mystery of their migratory movement. How do they know when it’s time to go? How do they navigate? The movement of tides contained something of
the same mystery—the waters come and go, come and go. Our lives come and go, and we are left
yearning for the power we sense but cannot see or name. (The early Christian community at Iona took
the symbol of the wild goose).
When the time came, I walked down to
the point where pilgrims leave the road and follow the wooden sticks across the
flats to the island. There was also a
“watchtower”—a wooden box on stilts for people to flee to in case they were
caught by a fast, incoming tide. There
was Palle and Robin, taking off shoes and getting ready to embark. I was genuinely happy to see them, reconciled
by the beach-holiday feel of the morning to the idea that this would be no
solitary prayerful crossing. Robin tied
my boots to my backpack, and Palle and I slid around in the mud and water,
getting used to the slick and relaxing feeling of this combination of sea and
earth. There were thousands of tiny mud
“castles,” worm-casts, Robin explained.
There were tidal pools to gaze into for cockles. There were delicately banded scallop shells
in pale pinks and oranges. There were
sink holes of black mud. Robin pulled me
out of one of them, and then suggested I go back into it for a picture. I did.
I was having fun. We’d bump into
strangers and play with them for a while.
A young Dad with kids pointing out the green moss-like plants in the
pools. “That’s samphire. It has a salty taste. You can throw it in a pot with shellfish and
it seasons it.” I’d heard of samphire in
a book, King Lear, but now I was
breaking off a bit and putting it in my mouth.
The Swedish women, behind us, caught up to us; and we made a proper
pilgrim group, moving together toward Holy Island. The played hide and seek in the clouds, and
flocks of birds in the light looked like shimmers on the water. Most of us were in our fifties, but Palle was
over seventy. We were acting like kids,
noticing, pointing, picking up, showing one another the simple and miraculous
things they were finding. Robin jumped,
startled by an eel. The crossing was
joyful. A new way to pray.
On the other side—Eden?—we basked in
the sun like cattle. Resting. Celebrating.
Mint cake (emergency rations for British soldiers) and Palle’s liquor made
the rounds. There were not many places
to stay or eat on the island, and we discovered that we were all staying in the
Lindisfarne Hotel. Eventually, we
followed the tourists into town, listened to the rap of the innkeeper about
where to find “tourist junk” and how to get away from it, and we agreed to meet
at the Crown and Anchor at 6:45 for dinner together.
Is this how Cuthbert felt when his
solitude got hijacked, as it must have done countless times in his life? I had only a couple of hours to see the
island for myself: the ruins of the
monastery, St. Mary’s Church, Cuthbert’s “island” on the little sandbar. I sat in the sun and tried to pray, but it
was crawling with tourists and young men, sleek as seals and dripping wet. “Yes, it is cold.” But I’d walked the flats and felt the water,
and thought it warm. The most
“spiritual” thing I saw was a new window in St. Mary’s Church. It included bits and pieces from Cuthbert’s
life in ascending order: the church, the
castle, the eider ducks, the otters, the cross.
I liked this because it suggested that to get to know the world is to
approach the divine.
Time slipped away,
and I debated whether or not to go to the restaurant. I could skip it. But then I thought of Mom. Mom would go, and she would really enjoy her
travelling companions. I pushed aside my
fears, found the restaurant, and walked into the bar, and there they were all
assembled, and there was an empty seat next to Robin. I sat down, ordered a glass of wine and
listened to him joke about the most ridiculous moment in the entire pilgrimage “when
Mary Jo went back into the black sucking mud just for fun.” Two Swedes, three Danes, a Scotsman, and an
American. We shared bits of our
lives. We shared thoughts about what
we’d accomplished, but what bound us together and made the two hours so
remarkably happy is that we’d shared this experience though it was different
for each one of us. We had gone through
it together. I remembered an Italian
painter’s vision of paradise as pairs of people talking together. This meeting was of the same kind.
After dinner, Robin, the Swedes, and I walked down past the ruined
Abbey, down to the coast. The moon was
waxing in the blue sky. The tide was
rising. We heard this mournful wailing
in the wind. Across the water, we could
make out a slip of sand and “the pillars.”
The sound seemed to be coming from there. In the dark blue water, we spotted black
heads popping up here and there.
“Seals!” “There’s one!” The mournful song continued, and theories
were floated but none seemed right: “the wind,” “pigeons,” “ducks”? “There is so much going on that we don’t know
about,” said Robin. The unidentified
music could have been from our own hearts, the longing yearning hearts of
pilgrims that come with their needs and their hurts and lay them out for the
saint to heal. But the animals (and I
would learn the next day that the sound was made by gray seals singing on the
sand back a mile away) turned grief to song simply by voicing it in
company. The people in my pilgrim group
didn’t share the secrets of hearts, but I do believe that heart song can be
heard if one listens closely. It rained
heavily overnight and into the next morning (my only morning on the
island). In The Ship Inn, the only other
pub on the island, I ordered a ha pint o cider mainly so I could sit and
write. Instead I reached out to my
brother with a text. He responded, “Mom
would be proud of you. She’s smiling on
you right now.” There was no one much in
the pub and I cried real wet tears. I only
thought I lost her. It’s true that I
cannot reach her by phone or hug her awkwardly, but it was her influence
working on me that gave me courage to join a human family and find new brothers
and sisters with whom to play and sing.
No comments:
Post a Comment