St. Cuthbert's Way Day 6: Immersion

            I arrived at dinner with a backpack full of gear for swimming.  I grabbed a hotel towel, a tank top and leggings, hoping to swim after supper.  Having walked seventy miles in Cuthbert’s footsteps, I wanted to follow him further, by mimicking his devotional bathing practice.  I’d imagined it as a kind of baptism into a new life, transformed by walking the Way.  I whispered my desire to one of the Swedes, who said matter-of-factly, “not now.”  People were a deterrent to a full and complete understanding.  And why not take the full-body plunge.  The whole pilgrimage was an embodied form of faith, moving forward into the natural world and into the supernatural world in a physical way.  Swimming at night or just standing still and singing with the seals would have completed that experience, but it was not to be.  Not for me.  Not then.

            I followed Robin back to the hotel while the women went further into the night.  I’m not sure why I did that except that he intrigued me and I felt the pull of kindly nature.  Saying goodnight, I turned the key into my room and drew a bath.  I plunged into the water and lolled,  plump with dinner but not judging my own body seal-shaped.  I lay in the pristine white bed linens while the curtains breathed in and sighed out.  My sleep was light.  So much to think about and listen to as the wind stirred and a storm brewed.  Had I known that the keening sounds across the water were seals, I would have listened for them, but I wonder if unconsciously I hadn’t recognized the siren voices calling me back to the elements and even my element.  A lover in the past thought that I was a selkie—a woman who had been a seal but who, because her skin was stolen, was trapped in a life on the surface when she longed for the depths.  I knew but blocked the knowledge that this particular man was the one who stole my seal skin and used me for his own pleasure while my naked skin dried out and I nearly died.  Here on Lindisfarne, there are pelts for the taking.  Even scholars, who study the evangelists’ pages in the Lindisfarne gospels—pages that pair each gospel writer with his signature animal—notice that Saint Mark’s lion is a credible beast with a stylized but hairy pelt.  My walk had been a journey home, and so it was fitting that here (finally) I heard the cry of my own soul, externalized as seal—come out, come out, go deep, dive with us, play.

            Up at 6:00 the winds were so strong that using an umbrella was impossible.  Bundled up in my rain poncho (my only worry being my iPhone), I headed for the sand dunes and the empty coastline on the north side of the island.  There were no houses, no fishing boats, no people.  There was nothing but rolling hills of sand, stormy skies, and gray surf in the rain that was coming down so hard that I could barely raise my eyes to look around.  But very small rabbits hopped about dunes that were pock-marked with coney-caves.  I didn’t realize that rabbits dug holes and made dens in sand banks.  When I got out to the beach, I watched sandpipers (or birds like sandpipers) scurry along in the tracks of receding waves.  The paths through the dunes were also full of plant-life, but the one flower I remember were yellow asters, but there were others that hid themselves—purple loosestrife, heal-all, and flowers with white starlike blossoms (white gentians?).  Rabbits, sea-birds, and yellow-asters.  Dune grass waving.  

One line of Shakespeare played repetitively in my mind, “there’s not any bush or shrub to bear off any weather at all and another storm brewing.  I hear it sing in the wind.”  “I hear it sing in the wind.”  These lines are spoken by the fool, Trinculo, who believes he is the sole survivor of shipwreck and is stranded on the magical island of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  Lindisfarne was supposed to be a magical place, but I was experiencing it in one of its rougher, elemental moods.  Cuthbert, in my reading of his life, heard and responded to the call of wild places and withdrew further and further out to sea.  Lindisfarne, in his time, was a bustling island with an industrious community of monks.  What’s more, it was on the ocean trade routes.  Cuthbert moved his cell to a little island off-shore where I’d left a plastic rosary yesterday evening.  Years later, he felt the need to go further away from people to battle demons and talk to God, retreating to Farne—an island he shared with eider ducks and probably seals.  Today, they bask on the rocks of Cuthbert’s private island.  At the end of his life when he was sick, he had no qualms about taking a boat alone in a storm and heading out to his island.  (Nick Mayhew-Smith argues that Cuthbert and other northern saints need to confront, exorcize, and redeem the elemental forces of Nature, 143.)  Knowing these stories, it is no wonder I felt the need to leave my soft bed and cups of warm coffee.  My need to swim had to be satisfied and was by total immersion in an early morning storm.  Hallelujah!  I was neither the sole survivor of a shipwreck and was far from being a saint.  But the rabbits were enjoying the morning, unfazed by the rain.  Cuthbert feared no storms but seemed to relish them.  All I had to do was follow their examples to get back on my Way.

            Dripping wet from my walk, I headed to St. Mary’s Church just next to the Abbey.  Through the old stones in the churchyard, I could see the castle which was almost obscured by the mist and rain.  There was a white rose bush by the entrance to the church.  I thought of Gabrielle Mary’s gift of the white, thornless rose, pressed in a book in my suitcase.  I looked for Maria and Christina.  We agreed to meet for Holy Eucharist.  Better this bread than the toast we’d eat later.  I left my wet things in the back of the dark church and, looking like a drowned rat (or a sleek otter), was ushered toward the choir stalls.  My travel “friends” came in and slid in next to me, and together (bonded by shared experience) we watched middle-aged and old local people and visitors arrive.  In her brief homily, the elderly minister spoke about prayer as the way to continue our pilgrimages once we left the island, and the service ended with a blessing of all those who had walked Cuthbert’s Way.

Minister:

To the prayers of our Island Saints we commend you.

May God’s angels watch around you to protect you.

May the Holy Spirit guide and strengthen you for all that lies ahead.

May Christ Jesus befriend you with his compassion and peace.

Pilgrims:

Lord, be a bright flame before us.

Be a guiding star above us.

Be a smooth path beneath us.

Be a kindly shepherd behind us.

Minister:

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord

Pilgrims:

Thanks be to God

            Wrapping ourselves up in ponchos that looked like trash bags, we made our way through the weather back to the Hotel where the host gave me “loaner shoes” since mine were soaked and covered with pirri pirri burs and offered to dry my wet clothes.  The male walkers were in the dining hall.  I hurried to my room to put on dry clothes, and when I came back downstairs, Robin greeted me and said, “I heard someone go out early this morning and wondered who that wild woman was.” 

“That would be me,” I said, glowing with warmth of having come in from the cold. 

St. Cuthbert's Way Day Five: Crossing Over

            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. 

St. Cuthbert's Way Day Four: Second Chances

            Walking takes you out of your well-ordered, cozy comfort zone and throws random events at you like confetti or like a sun shower.  Sometimes those events take on a kind of pattern that can suggest destiny or some sort of moral about the way life is.  Two quick examples.  On my first day of walking, the way wound along the River Tweed for a few miles.  The water moved rapidly and my pace quickened, too, despite having to push my way through dense clusters of fireweed.  I slowed only for pleasant exchanges with trout fisherman and local dog walkers.  I stopped for several minutes though when I ran into two middle-aged ladies standing still in the middle of the path admiring a very beautiful butterfly.  Its wings were orange with accents of violet, but the stand-out feature were the four circles that looked like open eyes with blue and purple irises around black centers.  The women were marveling at how close the creature allowed them to get, and they were taking pictures with their phones.  I joined the group, but when I tried to bend down and position my phone to get the best possible shot, the water bottle I’d been carrying in one hand slipped, fell, and frightened the butterfly away.  I was annoyed at myself for being such a klutz.  Weirdly, by the end of that first long day, another of the same kind of butterfly was basking on a leaf just waiting for me to eye him.  I felt like the recipient of two blessings:  a second chance to see the same kind of butterfly and a message from the world at large.  Nothing is final or over.  Life circles around.  Flit from beauty to beauty and you will have chances to correct, to see better, to understand.  There was that.  Then, this.  I woke up in Wooler and before beginning my walk, I ducked into St. Mary’s Church to see a photo exhibit on spirituality and landscape which I enjoyed very much.  Someone had done what I was doing—collecting stones, leaves, and grasses and writing love letters to woods, hills, water, dark skies.  The nice things distinguished men said about landscape and walking, men like John Muir, Albert Einstein, Henry David Thoreau, and Robert Louis Stevenson were printed on cards around the church.  When I’d had my fill of looking, I lifted my eyes to hills visible through the lead-paned glass, and in a petal-shaped panel, there was Robin!  What is the world telling me?  Will he be in my future?  Whether or not, I knew I’d be bumping into him and his companions on the trail, and I would have to balance solitude with sociability.  Even trickier, I’d have the chance to feel things and maybe even express my feelings.

            The mix of clouds and sun, of moorlands and farmlands, of fern, heather, and gorse, of naked hills and darker pine plantations sliding down them was a feast for the eyes.  I felt happy and free and walked Weetwood Moor alone, seeing no one, save for a couple of Russian girls wearing flimsy rain ponchos that the wind whipped around their heads.  They were looking for the ancient stones said to be hiding in the heather, cup and ring-marked rocks, and they had a lap top out that they were using to navigate.  They didn’t seem to be on any Way but were out only to find these particular stones.  We spoke briefly and I climbed over a stile and went on.   All was peace.  The rain in the air made the distances misty, and I gave little thought to my worries about the men or anyone else.  My mind was on Cuthbert and answering the question posed by the exhibit, “how does it feel to walk in the footsteps of the Northern Saints.”  How does it feel?  What can we learn about Cuthbert’s life by walking the hills he walked, leaning on the good shepherd and even the sheep, having visions, feeling the tension between the bliss of solitude and the need to serve.

            Eventually, I saw the group of men in the yellow distance, and slowly I began to rely on them for direction.  My attention slackened and my thoughts turned to Robin.  Then they paused by a gate, considering the way, and I caught up with them.  We chatted about the Russians and began to move forward.  Once I’d joined them, I stopped trying to find my own way, and, funnily enough we all got lost.  A missed turn took us out onto paved roads and we wound up walking an extra mile or two.  Some of the time, I walked with Robin, chatting about teaching and writing and walking.  He grew bored or felt he needed to stay with his group, and I found myself talking to and walking with a 70-some retired Danish vet, Ed.  This was not the way I wanted to walk.  I missed my own ruminations.  I missed the company of the plants and animals.  I told the guys that I’d stay with them until we found the way.  Once we did, I said goodbye and bolted ahead.  My attempt to talk to Robin had failed.  I felt my spirits flag, and, worse, I felt my mind turn onto the familiar road of self-criticism:  not attractive, not clever, not  not not.  Negativity.  But the physical act of walking and looking brought me back to my own natural buoyancy.  I quickly forgot about Robin and the rest, and I took the incident as a lesson about not giving up on oneself and not becoming a follower.  Followers get lost literally, and, worse, they lose the joy of the Way.

            The destination of the day was Cuthbert’s cave.  This is the one stop on the route associated with Cuthbert’s life.  Legends are contradictory:  one suggests that Cuthbert used the cave during his young life as a shepherd and another one claims that the monks, who carried his body away from the coast when Vikings invaded, stopped in the cave to rest.  The cave is eroded from a cliff of yellow sandstone, and it is set uphill in an ancient pine forest.  A line of pines across the top of the cave look like sentries or angels.  There was an English couple around the cave taking pictures and a picnicking family with kids bicycled up to it, but since I had no acquaintance with these people, they did not trouble me.  I explored around the cave and then remembered my host in the Wooler B & B said to be sure to scramble up the rock outcrop behind the cave for the view of where you’ve come from and where you are going.  I did.  Ferns and heather beyond the woods.  A wire fence.  Stiles.  Finally, bare rock.  On top, there was a view of the sea!!!  And I could actually see the tiny little “sand-castle” looking thing on a tongue of land.  Lindisfarne!  I was surprised at how close I was to the ocean.  From here, it looked like just a couple of fields away.  Charcoal smudges in the distance suggested rain.  But nothing could dampen my spirits up there on the high rocks looking at the blue water melting into the blue air—and Lindisfarne!  I felt free and joyful. 

Heading back to the cave, descending along the wood path, there were the guys, leaning against the boulder in front of the gaping mouth.  They were eating and drinking.  I guess this was their lunch stop.  I waved and approached.  One of the Danes offered me a capful of liqueur, and I slugged it back and asked for more.  Robin offered me a granola bar and, when I complained about being almost out of battery power, he pulled out a solar cell and offered to “give me power.”  It was a light and sociable meeting.  “Mary Jo …,” began Robin, “I’ve been wondering why the monks would carry around a Cuthbert’s dead body.”  His other question involved a misunderstanding of the place of the monastery in the community, “how could the monks think it was okay for the local population to support their life on contemplation?”  did they?  That was not my understanding.  I thought that monasteries were highly entrepreneurial and good for the community.  Maybe I was wrong.  But I was still chewing over Robin’s question of yesterday, “Wasn’t Cuthbert a very extreme person?”  Disagreement stimulated thought.  Conversation pushed me to think harder and opened up byways of thought that I needed to explore.  Mostly though, it stimulated me to want to present my own views intelligibly and beautifully to others.  The meeting was warm and filling.  Photos were taken.  They wanted to photograph me.  One of the Danes noted with satisfaction that having reached the cave, they had accomplished the purpose of the day; and his remark forced me to pause and to assent.  I, too, had had a glimpse of the under glimmer of things:  the inside of the rock, yes, but also the joy that is possible in sharing, even simple food and drink and ideas, with complete strangers.  They took the high road and I went back to the Way, reluctant to become just a follower.  But I still got momentarily lost—confused by my interest in them and their direction, and I had to make my way through a field of animals and climb a fence that wasn’t in the book.  But when I found the path and read that I was to turn left at a fork “signed Holburn,” I knew that the men ahead of me, who’d turned right, were once again, off course. 

            Walking alone toward the village, I felt that I had taken a big step forward in personal growth.  I had joined a human group (accepted an invitation) and also remained on my own Way.  Did Cuthbert experience the same tensions that I experienced?  I wondered. He was a gregarious jokester of a youth who was told by a child that he had to straighten up.  He went into a monastic community but sought places of solitude by walking to far-flung communities to preach.  Eventually, he retreated to Lindisfarne (Aidan’s island), and from there, he went further and further out to sea:  to Cuthbert’s island (a sand bar off Lindisfarne) and, finally, to Farne where angels helped him build a high-walled cell.  He was called off Farne, out of isolation, to become a Bishop.  Very reluctantly, he agreed.  His stint as Bishop lasted only two years.  This was definitely not a man who was “extreme.”  His was a human life of paradoxes, pulls in contradictory directions, and accommodations.  What about love?  I wonder what Cuthbert did with his human desires.

            He had friendships with several noblewomen who were also Abbesses of local convents.  The princess, Ebbe, was one such.  She invited Cuthbert to Coldingham, located on the coast just norther of what today is the Scottish border.  The monastery at Coldingham housed both men and women and, due to the noble backgrounds of the members, it was a place for eating, drinking, and entertainment.  I’ve read that the monks and nuns in this place were very lax and worldly.  This place was the setting for one of Cuthbert’s most iconic miracles.  At night, he walked down to the sea (perhaps to get away from the partying), immersed himself up to his neck and began to pray and sing psalms in the sea as waves rose up but didn’t swallow him up.  When he came up on shore in the morning, otters bounded out of the sea and rubbed themselves all over Cuthbert’s feet to dry them.  Miracle?

            After the day I’d had, I felt I understood Cuthbert’s desire for immersion in nature as an antidote to the aches and pains human life causes, and I wondered if he, too, felt compromised by his own experience of desire.  Perhaps he was attracted to Ebbe.  Perhaps he was tempted by the luxuries of her monastery.  From the hilltop, the sea looked so close, but the walk along hedgerows and through patches of forest in rain and mud to Fenwick (Fennick) was joyful.  Before the rain came, down in the grass before me, was the orange butterfly with eyes.  Second chances.  I bent down to marvel and looked right into those eyes.  Back home in America I find a “Butterflies of Scotland” website and learn the name for it: “Peacock butterfly.”  The site includes legends about butterflies and notes that some people believe eyes on butterflies means they are “God’s spies.”  I understand that, but what I jotted down in the tiny notebook tucked into my money belt was this:  “if we open all the eyes of our senses, we can fly.”

St. Cuthbert's Way Day Three: Tale-telling

                         “We have at least as complicated a relationship with ourselves

                                   as we do with the rest of the environment.”

            Pilgrimages in literature involve storytelling—The Canterbury Tales and Pilgrim’s Progress.  I woke on the third day of my pilgrimage wondering whether I could discern a story without imposing one on my walk.  There were knots in my life that I was hoping walking would untie—the loss of Mom, the lacks in my marriage; and, although I didn’t place these problems in the front of my mind—I just walked—I wondered if I would wend my way to a solution. 

            I walked through the tiny village of Kirk Yetholm on the lane, heading east, past the cottage where the last gypsy king was “crowned” in 1898.  It was an unassuming white house with black shutters.  (There’s a story here.)  The road went along up and down for a couple of miles next to farms.  As I passed a field, I greeted a black and white horse, who responded by walking to the fence to meet me.  

I stroked his white nose and picked bunches of wet green grass and clover.  He moved his flesh-colored lips, nuzzling my cupped palms, and the grasses disappeared quickly.  Contact of such a sensuous kind—movement of mouth tickling palms—was rare in my life.  I was aware of liking it and of needing it.  When I prepared to go, the horse followed me along the fence.  It was as if he was offering to go along with me.  For a moment, I wondered what it would be like to mount him and take the hills by storm, up and down, letting his animal knowledge of the land shapes guide me.  And sheep were everywhere on the third day of the pilgrimage.  Lambs in August are nearly the size of ewes, yet they still want to suckle, and pull hard on the teats.  The ewes looked annoyed or tired, yet I saw one that rested her head on the back of her “baby” while she eyed me suspiciously.  They retained their places if I kept moving but leapt away if I stopped to look at them.  Shy or wild.  Perhaps shyness, even in humans, is an effort to preserve wildness.  I shared that quality with the sheep I “met” just as I was sharing with them the narrow paths made through upland hills and moors by hooves and boots.  “On foot everything stays connected” and “one lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.” When the going got rough or lonely, I would pick up a piece of wool and smell it, fondle it, and pray a few lines of the 23^rd psalm which seemed to come to life here more than it ever had when I heard it inside a church.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures

He leads me beside still waters,

He restores my soul

He leads me in the right paths

Today of all days, I needed leading and I needed to be able to lean on the Lord.  The guidebook noted that Day 3 was the toughest day with boggy and “indistinct” sections and tiny paths nearly overgrown by the blooming heather—bell heather (pink/orange blossoms) and the “regular” heather with the purple flowers.  Losing the way (when the description in the book no longer made sense), I would feel afraid and pray, look for footprints, clutch my sheep’s wool, and hope against hope that I would see the circular waymark with the Cuthbert cross on the next gate or stile.  Usually, I did.

            “Take the lane uphill, signed Halterburn Penial Revival Centre.  It climbs steeply, then descends to Halter Burn glen.  At the valley floor, bear left along the fence to cross a footbridge with a tall signpost.”  What was a burn?  What was gorse?  What does it mean to “sign” and to “bear”?  The lay of the land and its features told me what such words meant.  But an expression as simple as valley “floor” set my mind working.  If the valley has a floor, then this place is a house or a temple, and as I worked my way up the hill, scattering sheep and flushing red grouse whose wings drummed and voices trebled with “laughter,” I saw the pile of stones on a distant hill that the book called Eccles cairn.  The stones mark either the site of a very old church (Eccles for ecclesia) or the burial site of a prehistoric chieftain.  Sources, like paths, are indistinct.  I left the way despite gathering dark clouds and climbed the naked hill for the view and for the ecstatic feeling I’d had on Wide Open Hill the day before.  When I arrived at the stone pile, I was thinking about Jacob and the dream he had after sleeping on a stone.  He saw a ladder with angels going up and down, and God hovered over him, reassuring him that he would be with him and guide him on the way out and back.  When Jacob wakes up, he is in awe and afraid

How fearsome is this place!

            This can be but the house of God,

                        And this is the gate of heaven

Jacob set up the stone he’d slept on as a pillar and poured oil over its top, and he called the place Bethel.  Jacob had many knots in his life and was going into exile because his brother was murderously angry that he’d stolen his paternal blessing.  Jacob is a cunning strategist, but his exilic pilgrimage is about learning a new way, about relying on the Lord:  “And Jacob made a vow, saying, “If the Lord God be with me and guard me on this way that I am going and give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and I return safely to my father’s house, then the Lord will be my God.”  He cuts a deal.  He requires God to insure his trip before he is willing to commit fully.  What chutzpah!

            The dream, the cairn, the conversation with the divine—all of these things raised Jacob’s spirits and he sets off—“lifted his feet and went on to the land of the Easterners” where he promptly falls passionately in love with the first lovely shepherdess he sees.  Jacob’s covenant led directly into a love story—the first love story in the Bible:  “And Jacob kissed Rachel and lifted his voice and wept.”  “And Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed in his eyes but a few days in his love for her.”  Sitting at Eccles Cairn, taking in the views of the Cheviots and the rolling hills of the Scottish borders misty in the distance, I didn’t remember that, for Jacob, love of God seemed to express itself laterally in human love almost immediately.  To say that I was falling in love with Cuthbert and God makes me sound a bit too much like a monk.  But when at home, I live like one studying and sleeping in a tiny cell and inhabiting an absolutely chaste marriage.  Still, I have desires I don’t know what to do with and, therefore, can say with the Japanese traveler and poet, Basho, that I have one foot in the dust of the human world.

            It was somewhere after Hethpool, after the rain came and went, when I followed two English super walkers that had blown by me on the road alongside a red castle.  While I was stumbling up a bank, trying not to get cut with barbed wire for a view of the ruin, they were utterly disinterested.  Far ahead of me, I saw that they were holding hands as they walked.  It was after that that the unexpected happened: I began to meet people.  “Shepherd me, Oh God, beyond my wants, beyond my fears from death into life.”  I thought I wanted to be completely solitary.  I thought that was my way, but, as a priest back in Michigan says, “dear people, we often don’t know what we are praying for, but God sees the whole picture.”  I was climbing again, and the sun was lighting up one hill after another.  I felt very happy and light.  

An enormous black slug appeared.  I remembered seeing a medieval stone basin at Dryburgh Abbey that was carved with lizards.  The blurb, written by some scholar, speculated that lizards, in the serpent-dragon category of creatures, were “evil,” and perhaps the mason sought the symbolic contrast between evil of the lizard and the purity of the water.  

Seeing the black slug, I thought how wrong that was.  My slug wasn’t a lizard, but I found it beautiful anyway.  It comes out after rain when the world is wet.  The mason was probably just making art of things from his own experiences.  Higher yet, the breeze kicked up and began drying things out.  The bunched clouds were broken by paths of blue to match the green ways I was following.  I spotted an old stone sheep enclosure.  It was the perfect place to stop for a rest.  But by this time, there were two women in purple and pink windbreakers walking behind me.  Should I walk faster or slow down and let them pass.  At this point, I did not want human company.  Soon enough though there was another group of men.  Where did they come from?  I felt nothing but annoyance, wishing to be alone.  The women were Swedes, friends who walk pilgrimage routes together every summer.  “Have you done the Camino?” they asked.  As for the men:  there were four of them.  Three were three bright eyed and gray-haired but there was a younger man who seemed to be leading them—tall, lanky, dark-haired, with an almost oriental cast to his eyes.  In the few minutes we walked together, I learned that he was trying to read Middle English and finding it difficult, that he quit dentistry to write fiction, that his tutor told him he needed more of a “story” in the historical fantasies he crafted in the vein of the Hobbit, and that he was teaching an online class for Oxford in creative writing.  When he shook my hand—his hands were large and soft—I laughed, and I heard my laugh like the voice of grouse scattering in flight.  After a bit of talk, I bounded away, footsteps thudding like a frightened calf, but the soft hands and the adorable admissions of his struggle with Chaucer’s English took me by surprise.

            That evening in the town of Wooler, I’d had dinner in the Black Bull pub—the same one I’d sheltered in after coming down from the high places in the rain to have a relaxing lager while Mom (invisible but by my side) had her relaxing cigarette.  When I first came in from the rain hill, people looked scared of me, and I remembered that Moses had to veil his face after being on the mountain.  Dinnertime rolled around, and I returned to the pub with hair combed and settled at a table in the corner to make notes and wrap myself in solitude.  The Swedes came in but chose not to sit with me. 

Afterward I took a short walk around the town, feeling lonelier than I’d felt all day.  I talked to myself:  Why can’t I face the fact that I, too, want a human story?  All the heroines of novels I love and who walk long distances have love stories even when, like Dinah in Adam Bede, they also have vocations.  And for Shakespeare’s Rosalind (the heroine of As You Like It) falling in love is the sport that is the emotional equivalent to going to the forest of Arden.  I thought of the handshake and blushed inwardly at how quickly I could spin a fantasy around this strange man if I wanted to.  Just as I was thinking these things, he appeared, down the street, standing outside of a hotel.  What was his name?  Robin!  Good.  I walked right up to him, and he said, “Didn’t I meet you today on the hill?”  I learned more of his story.  Dentist.  Revolutionized implants.  Colleagues.  Palle, Kai, Edward.  “I hate coming down from the high places to the town,” I confided, testing the waters.  “It breaks the spell, doesn’t it?”  Yes.  Exactly.  I will not write a romance, I told my heart.  Yet there was something irresistibly appealing about having had an experience together and sharing feelings about it.  Simple and profound.  I instantly understood Rosalind’s nervousness when she discovers that Orlando is in the forest, but she’s dressed as a man, “Oh, what shall I do with my doublet and hose?”  But, at the same time, I held onto the sprouting thought that a human connection made while walking might lead somewhere other than a romantic entanglement.

           

St. Cuthbert's Way Day Two: Mountain Message

                                    “A landscape can sing about God, a body about Spirit.”

Animals and man work on the land through the paths they take, the farms they make, their flights on, above, or below the surface.  From any hill, the landscape appears as a patchwork quilt with squares of greens and squares of gold—plantations of trees and fields of wheat and barley.  I look at the land like a painting when I am standing still, but when I am walking, I am less aware of any composition than I am of making another line to add to the vast system of moving, squiggling, dancing lines:  a fish leaps, a buzzard lifts off in flight, diagonal shafts of rain sweep the hills in the blue-gray distance, I walk field-edges, hedgerows, and ridge lines.  I push through the tall stems and curling stems, and am touched by the wet silks of spiders.  On the hills, I walk the same paths used by sheep and wild goats.  As creatures in motion, we add to this calligraphy and, sometimes if we’re given the grace, illuminate the manuscript. 

            An Englishwoman walker warned me at breakfast that I would need to get to Morebattle and “gather my strength” because the hill (“Wide Open Hill”) was a “proper climb.”  It is the highest point on the Way, and it consists of at least three “cols” or summits.  But the morning walk was too wonderful to worry.  The steady wind at my back was a constant reminder that wind in the Bible is often compared to the Spirit that blows where it will or, as Genesis 1 has it, “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”  My thoughts of other worlds, too, kept me company.  I was very aware of being in proximate relationship (just next to) an entirely different reality.  While in the forest—pine with fern understory or beech with clusters of bluebells around mossy roots—if you look left or right or if you pull your eyes away from the fascinating particulars to peer over the stone wall, you will see a bright world of golden grain rippling like water.  It’s no wonder legends sprang up here about fairies in the woods (“out of this wood do not desire to go”) or of the people that live under the Eildon Hills.  Sunshine percolates the tightly bound bales of hay, turning it to energy for animals, and this is the image I sit with as I drink my golden lager (“free for walkers”) at the pub in Morebattle.  The pub is perched just on the edge of a small hill before the road dips down into a very low valley that runs along at the base of the huge green slope that I am going to climb.

            To modern ears, the name “Morebattle,” conjures up images of archaic fighting or some kind of heroic effort.  The Englishwoman, Katie, certainly spoke about the hill as if it were a test that she had not passed.  “It flattened me.  I was very weak.”  But this place had once been an outpost of Lindisfarne, and there had also once been a lake or loch nearby (now the trough before the hill that is rich, green pastureland).  “Mere” and “botl” combined is “Morebattle,” and it means building by a lake.  The ancient landscape of blue waters between the breasts of hills, flowing into crevices and filling valleys, is female and familiar from the Adirondack Mountains of my home in New York state.  Indian Lake, where I grew up, is surrounded by very high mountains, much higher than Wide Open Hill.  Thus, I felt no need to prepare for battle.  If anything, I felt like I was heading home.

            I approached the hill by crossing through a field of black cows and sheep with black faces, and I skirted a hedge of prickly bushes on which sheep wool was caught and drying in the wind.  I pulled some wool off the briars and held onto it throughout the climb to remind myself that I would be led, would be given the strength I lacked, that I didn’t need to try too hard.  The path (pressed-down green grass) sailed above the pastures and followed a serpentine stone wall.  I moved forward and up … and up, trying to discern whether the wind had its own voice.  I would tell myself that I couldn’t stop and look back until I’d reached a particular rise.  Keep moving into the sky past the cows, past the sheep, into the wind.  I always cheated though, unable to resist the view, unable not to pause (“shelah”) to take in all the beauty.  Each time I reached what I thought was a summit, another green mountain would appear with a path beckoning me on.  I breathed and the wind whispered, “sh, sh, she,” like a calming voice.  The moving shadows of clouds and the wind at my back kept me going.  “Crackin day isn’t it,” quipped a delighted Dad with his two boys and wife who were heading down.  By the time I got to the top, the few walkers were gone.  I was alone and sunk down to rest with my back against my walking buddy, the stone wall that had been by my side all the way up.  Support.

            I had left the quilt made by man’s hands below and left the herds.  I let the velvet hills, the heathery moorland swatches and the wind flow over me without trying to analyze its moods.  Sitting there, I knew that my mother’s soul was happy in some such place.  This is Heaven.  Mom is here (or there) in cool air, warm sun, feeling connected to everything without effort.  I listened to the wind speak, and then, suddenly, just before my eyes, a hawk hovered, facing into the wind (like me) and held himself or herself almost perfectly still in the air, halted in the presence of a commanding majesty.  An occasional beat of wings was all she needed to steady herself.  My own heartbeat slowed.  Together, we gave ourselves to the air and hung there in blissful stillness transfixed by the green mountain.

            As I descend, the wind is less noisy and not as cold.  The happy sounds of the herds return and the human scene takes shape—farmyard, clumps of trees, tractors, men.  I understand that here below there is so much we can choose to focus on.  Not so above where phenomena choose us (or so it seems).  Take the hawk.  It didn’t have to perform its trick of floating on the air just for me.  But it did.  Twice or thrice even.  Cuthbert understood birds as special helpers.  If an eagle left a piece of dolphin meat on shore, it was God who had directed the bird to do so to feed a hungry monk.  Perhaps the hawk was my mountaintop message not to try so hard but to let the spirit lift me up.  If you surrender to the air, you can ride it.

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            Almost a full week later, plodding along the pavement in London, hoping I am still marked by my experience on Wide Open Hill, I enter the open door of a church in South Kensington.  I can’t stop walking and am headed from Hammersmith to the British Museum—at least a seven-mile mini-pilgrimage across the whole of metropolitan London—to see the Lindisfarne gospels.  The gospel from Matthew read at the mass is about Jesus’ walking theology.  Call it that.  He is teaching the disciples that he will have to die but will rise again.  Then they come into Capernaum and are harassed about paying the temple tax.  From theology to taxes.  That is the declension all walkers must make when their journeys bring them back from hills to the petty paces of town and city, from crosses in the landscape to crosses nailed to the interior walls of church buildings.  So as not to cause offense, Jesus tells Peter to go down to the lake, throw out a line.  In the mouth of the fish he will catch, there will be a coin twice the value of the temple tax.  Don’t try so hard.  Don’t worry.  And, most of all, do not let the petty ways of man divert you from the Way you have walked.  Your face is still glowing from what you saw in the high place.  Write hawk with quill pen or clicking computer keys, imagine a face and feathers on the letter "H," and make a new and very real path on the desert of the page.