Flint Hand-Me-Down

I’ve always preferred other peoples’ clothes worn to the shape of their lives.  For the last four weeks, I’ve been visiting older adults at the Lockwood Senior Living facility in Burton, and today was my last day—well, for the time being.  A few days ago, I emailed Candace the activities director questions for the participants to think over:  how did your parents or grandparents wind up in Flint?  What would be on your map of the world when you were seven years old?  Can you remember a favorite walk you took in Flint?  The talk was so warm, punctuated with laughter and groans.  At the end, most said, “Oh, I have really enjoyed this.”  Fran didn’t even get up to go to church this time.  “We don’t get to talk like this very often.”  “It helps to learn more about the people you live with.”  Reluctantly, or so it seemed to me, they pulled chairs back from the table around which we’d sat, released the brakes on their walkers, and headed off, either down to lunch or back to their private apartments.  Kurt, whose grandfather had come from the Ukraine with an invention that was “stolen,” got depressed and eventually killed himself, said, “You know, when all the people I knew are now gone, I have to ask myself why I am still here.  It occurred to me that maybe I am here for this,” and he gestured to the table around which we’d been sitting and sharing the memories of lives lived in a very different Flint—“when Flint was THE place to be.”

And here I am—a professor and aging woman who may one day live in such a place, whose mother died in a version of this place, and who continues to wander the east side, climbing through weeds to peer into the foundations of burned-down houses, listening intently for what the ruins have to say.  Since coming to Flint, I have found and loved people who help me to fill in the holes and cover the ruins with lives past and present.  First there was Fran, whose family—up from Tennessee—ran a boarding house for factory workers.  “When I’d go to cities without factories, I’d think ‘these are not REAL cities’,” she told me.  I married Paul, in part, because he’d walk down railroad tracks with me through Chevy-in-the-Hole and give me a walking tour of all the mills and buildings that once were and now were no more.  When I met this group of seniors, my joy was genuine (a partial satisfaction of a longstanding desire).  They clearly wanted to share with me memories more sparkling than heirlooms, more vivid than the black and white photo of Dolly kissing Joe in front of a shiny new Chevrolet.  Finally, here I am gazing into the faces of Flint people rather than char-burned holes, and as I listen, my images of the city shift and so do the sounds: instead of crickets and natural sounds that signal neighborhoods returning to nature, I hear the happy sounds of kids playing, the whirr of roller-skates on concrete, the noise of factories working, and voices of people who have lived through a lot and are still joking and laughing.  

The things they have touched are held out to me

Like the sleeve of an old coat

To try on.  I pull one arm in,

Listening to the story of its making:

There was a boarding house with a Victrola playing

European men—crushes—working at Chevrolet.

Baskets half woven in an upstairs bedroom:

“I learned basket-weaving in the hospital

After the electric shock.”  When Fran got cancer

She gave my husband her father’s violin

And told me how her own mother

never wanted him to play.

Norma tells of her father electrocuted at work,

but “GM gave my mother a job in cut and sew. 

I was five years old.  She married again,

and he was real nice.” 

Mercury balls the Papas brought home for toys

We didn’t know then what we know now

They really pinged.

Sidewalks so smooth you could roller skate down ‘em

And we walked everywhere … EVERYWHERE.

On Saturdays we’d go to the theatre

For five cents you could see a show

And if you had a dime you could get a bag

Of popcorn.  A boy threw an apple core at the screen

And the matron yelled, “That’s it,” and the ticket price went

Up to 25 cents.  That was too much.  We nearly died.

In the winter, they’d flood the field by the armory

And we’d ice skate.  There was a warming shed

Where we waited for rides

We didn’t have cell phones to call our parents and say

We’re freezing. 

Missouri, Wisconsin, Iron Mountain, Chippewa lands

Norway, Sweden, Scotland, Ukraine

Languages spoken at home

Beverly still remembers numbers 1-10 in Norwegian

But that’s all.  Rose left home at 12 on the firing end

Of a shotgun pointed at her stepfather:  “he beat me,”

Was all she could say.  Things were hard

The strike, the work, the noise, the neglect,

But when put into a new role, Rose

“didn’t think about it much, I’d just do

What needed to be done.

How?  Well, I liked people.”

No thoughts of suicide then.  Almost none.

“There was a pump in the front yard

And neighbors would bring their jugs--

The water from that artesian well

Was so cold—oh, it made the best iced tea.”

“Pa’s work partner in the factory was a black man.

It was hot in the summer so Pa bought a fan to blow

On both of them.  The man was so happy

He wanted to pay for half the fan.”

Early marriages, no furniture, tales of managing

Cooking, canning, sewing

Learned at the knee of a grandmother. 

Some came from parents who were adopted

Others were shunted from foster home to foster home

“No folk?” Well, my ma and pa made their own

Seven kids. 

The problem today is there is

No communication

Silence except for the click of keys

No talking

No sharing

No mixing of young and old.

We have to work on that, work to find one another again.  I made an effort.  I didn’t know if they would like me.  I didn’t know if they would share.  But I wrote the questions.  I threw myself in.  I ate the fried dough with brown sugar that Betty made every week.  I told them about losing Mom.  I ached when it ended today.  Not over.  Never over.  We have so much to preserve … before the growing season ends, before the snows of winter come.

St. Cuthbert's Way Day 7: Sabbath Rest

Landscape is always made.  It is a work.  As I transfer hundreds of photographs from my Smartphone to my computer, although I am relieved that they are safely stored, I am also very glad that I took the time to describe the feelings I had in relation to these places.  The pilgrim’s feelings and her interactions when she is out in a place are really all that matter.  In a poem where she torturously questions the purpose of travel, Elizabeth Bishop concludes quite humbly:

But surely it would have been a pity

Not to have seen the trees along this road

Really exaggerated in their beauty

Not to have seen them gesturing

Like noble pantomimists robed in pink.

The pilgrim witnesses the expressiveness of the world around her.  It is a matter of obligation and devotion to translate the language of trees, brooks, and stones into her own idiom.

I shared a taxi to Berwick with the men.  Despite Palle’s tiny bottle of mead and Robin’s insistence that I buy a tin of haggis to take home, there was no warm hug, no promise to stay in touch, no exchange of emails.  I thought of how often my mother had to part with traveling companions and wondered whether it was hard for her, too.  I sat with my sadness on the bench waiting for the Durham train.  Forward movement is the cure for all loss I suppose.  The train arrived, I stumbled on with my heavy duffel bag, and we were off.  I thought of the way the monks carried Cuthbert’s coffin for seven years all around the kingdom of Northumbria to escape the Vikings.  Before crossing to Lindisfarne, I had asked for my feelings of loss to be healed.  On the walk, every flower and thistle, every bee and cloud salved my scars and scabs.  But crossing over, I had let my feelings out of the bag a bit, and the result was disappointment.  Maybe like the monks I have to carry my dead:  dead father, dead mother, dead lovers, and dead hopes further along down lonesome lanes before I lay them to rest.  I was sitting by a cute old lady from Aran.  Wait.  What?  Isn’t Aran off Ireland?  How long have you been on the train?  She took out a Smartphone and showed me a picture of an electric bike.  “I decided to treat myself.”  She must have been 80 years old.  She, too, evidently thrived on movement.  My purpose in going to Durham was to visit Cuthbert at his shrine.  Healing.  But I had also decided that I would hole up and wool-gather, put together some of my thoughts about the walk, organize my observations before they drifted too far away from me.  I needed the solitude that I’d missed on Lindisfarne.  Wool-gathering.  Idleness.  Solitude.  Prayer.  Return to the Way.  Be with me, Island Saints.

The monks opened the casket and realized that Cuthbert’s body was incorrupt before they began their pilgrimage from Lindisfarne to an unknown place.  The flesh was soft, ruddy and flexible; Cuthbert looked like he was asleep.  This sleeping saint acted as guide on the post-mortem journey.  He saved the Lindisfarne gospels from the Irish Sea when a storm wrecked the ship they were on.  He also selected Durham as the site for his church and his cult.  The site has much in common with Old Melrose (where Cuthbert had first entered the monastery) and Dryburgh, which he must have visited many times.  All three sites are located on peninsulas surrounded on three sides by a curving river.  In Durham, it is the River Wear.  Cuthbert was buried in the first church as Chester Le Street until the Normans invaded and thirty years later decided to invest in the Cuthbert cult and build a massive cathedral to house and to honor him. 

O ancient stones

Quarried and carried

And piled to house

The remains of dear

Saint Cuthbert

Not just to protect

But to teach us his Way

Your towers are the color of earth

An ancient human forest

The lines, the chevrons, the patchwork

All designs he saw or felt

On his journeys through borderlands

Here written out in a building

We can cling to or walk through

A building that stayed strong

Through changing creeds, regimes,

Wars and the wearing down of faith

Because his way was and is

THE WAY

            As I walked down the nave and toward Cuthbert’s shrine, emotions came to the surface.  I felt as if I were going to cry.  

His tomb is in a raised place behind the altar called the ferestory.  Check etymology.  Feral.  I climbed up the stairs and was in the shrine, an island of quiet.  Though the cathedral was crawling with tourists, there was no one inside.  The slab said simply, Cuthbertus, and there was a light burning above it.  

At times during my two-day visit, there was also a tiny tea-light on the stone slab.  Behind the shrine, next to the lamp, was a headless statue of Cuthbert (Cromwellian violence) holding the head of King Oswald.  The real head was, at one point, buried with him.  I prayed for my mother, the women from my support group in Flint, for my daughter; but mostly I prayed for my pilgrim soul that had been awakened and wanted to stay awake and not fall back into a sleep upon ending the pilgrimage.  I prayed for healing:  the cancer in my ear, the diseases of my spirit, and my awful indecision.  I listened for a long time.  Music.  Beautiful choral singing filtered into the shrine.  What were these voices?  Leaving Cuthbert for a while, I followed to peek into a door which was promptly closed.  Around to the cloister, the chapter house door was open and a woman (my age) listening outside.  The chapter house was packed with middle-aged women absorbed in a rehearsal.  “These are four local rock choirs.  They are practicing for a concert next Friday night.”  I’M ONLY HUMAN AFTER ALL, I’M ONLY HUMAN AFTER ALL, DON’T PUTCHER BLAME ON ME.  DON’T PUTCHER BLAME ON ME.  OH, OH!  Saints are real.  Cuthbert’s body is fresh and flexible under that stone.  Mama, too, has gone to the mountain.  And I’m only human after all, human after all.  Somehow in all of this was the key.  Desire.  Vocalization.  Normal.  Human.  Accept your body and your humanity.  Move.  Sing.  How do I do it?  I began to speak to this other listener, and a conversation unfolded.  A-levels.  School in Newcastle.  Shakespeare.  “I love the way characters escape to green worlds where they are made new.”  She’d seen a student production of As You Like It in her hometown of Newcastle where the forest was the ruins of an industrial city and the students played with the idea of recycling, of remaking and rebuilding through reuse of refuse.  Wow.  Hymen, the god, was made of plastic bottles.  Before I met Fiona, sitting in the shrine with Cuthbert, I’d envisioned the cathedral itself as a big rambling wood.  The builders made a forest of stone to recreate the paths.  The stone ribs of the vaulted ceiling were the criss-crossed trunks of a leafy canopy.  The decorated columns and pilasters were beeches and oak deeply grooved, part of the patchwork of greens and golds.  Lines, squares, chevrons.  Landscape is made.  The builders knew this.  They, too, were walkers.  They, too, experienced their world in the way that I had just done.  They created with their art a get-away, a place to relocate and recharge, a forest for God but also for Cuthbert.  The living song, the fresh and lively conversation, that’s what was supposed to happen here.  We’re only human after all, but when we come together, we must sound to the angels like the wood doves sounded to me in the on the first day of my walk.  Women so fresh, so fat, so lovely.  Not like those dried up, grimed-up city-birds.

            “The cathedral is big, but Durham isn’t.  You should hop on the train and go up to Newcastle,” and Fiona listed in my notebook several literary sites that I should not miss.  But I stayed up late writing and reading.  I woke up to rain showers, and I was tired.  More importantly, I felt like I needed to get back to the cathedral … to the woods (even if it was manmade) and make more discoveries.  Interestingly (and I would learn this much later after returning to Michigan), in Britain’s conversion period after the Romans had withdrawn and missionaries were attempting to spread Christianity, trees and sacred places in nature were used as peaceful gathering places.  In fact, as Nick Mayhew-Smith notes, the first description of a church in Britain comes from the Life of St. Germanus, a text written around the year 480.  To prepare a number of native Britains for an Easter baptism, a church was built, “of leafy branches.”  Early Christians in Britain did not destroy pagan sacred sites but respected their power and used the peoples’ devotion to the spirits within the natural world.

            I wanted to see the cathedral perched on its cliff, to get a sense of its site, and so I found the way to the Riverwalk.  It was like being on the Tweed all over again.  Same plants—peas and giant Queen Anne’s lace everywhere.  I studied one for a long while and felt like I was back in the borderlands.  Meanwhile, a duck swam over the rapids and grabbed a slippery serpentine fish.  Snap, Snap.  In the corner of my eye, I saw it swallow the fish.  On I walked and started to cross over a bridge when an inscription stayed my steps:

Grey Towers of Durham

Yet well I love thy mixed and massive piles

Half Church of God and Half Castle gainst the Scot

And Long to roam these venerable aisles

With records stored of deeds long since forgot.

I could sympathize with the writer’s desire to roam the aisles, but this writer’s cathedral was more archive while mine was Cuthbert’s woods, recreated by the faithful builders (men who probably revered the saint) as a teaching tool.  I walked uphill to the Cathedral, and I made my way to the shrine once more.  No tears today.  Instead, I felt like I was entering a holy place that was also very familiar and comfortable.  There were many people there.  “He talks to people,” was what a guide had told me yesterday, and I perked up my ears to hear his voice.  Sitting quietly along the back wall, I ran my hands along the curved wood of the pew side rails, and wondered about the carvings.  At the very moment I recognized a squirrel on the end of the pew, I saw a woman photographing a rabbit.  The rounded ends of each side rail were carved into the shapes of different animals.  No repetition.  Each one unique.  Otter.  Boar.  Lion.  Rabbit.  Squirrel.  Sheep.  Tiger with cub.  Whoever made these pews loved Cuthbert.  He understood that Cuthbert had a special closeness with the natural world and he wanted the creatures to gather in his shrine.  It was lovely and intimate.  It also made me feel my humanity as creaturely.  I had a sudden impulse to kneel down and touch the stone.  “Please heal my ear, Cuthbert.  I believe you can do it.”

            The Tower had been closed the previous day and was still closed in the morning of my second day, but by early afternoon, they had opened it.  I bought a ticket and began the climb up a winding, narrow, stone staircase.  It was impossible to pass two abreast, so I listened for oncoming footsteps and flattened myself against the wall when descending others needed to pass.  At the top—oo, how dizzy tizz to cast one’s eye’s so low.  The Wear foamed, and the farms and fields and distant low hills beyond the city limit invited.  But I stood transfixed by the sight of two perfectly white pigeons swimming in the air around the right tower and land together in the arcade.  Natives of the place.  Spirits?  Cuthbert and Bede?  I thought of Gabrielle’s rose.  I thought of the wood pigeons.  Again, I felt at home in the woods. 

Then I discovered the “Sacred Treasures Museum and Exhibit” that begun with displays of stone masonry and book art to the artifacts found in Cuthbert’s tomb, displayed in the Great Kitchen.  These were his personal things that had rested in the casket with him; the intimacy of it all was stunning.  But his casket had been opened so many times.  He’d been checked and double-checked to see if he was corrupt or incorrupt.  I think the body finally did begin to decay.  An ivory comb, a pocket-sized altar, the embroidered bands he wore with his vestments figured with Old Testament prophets, his pectoral cross (gold with garnet and bits of shell and glass, showing signs of wear), and finally his wooden coffin pieced together like a puzzle and covered with human figures.  Not an animal in sight.  “Stand back against the wall,” instructed a guide.  “You are standing in what was one of the monastery ovens.  You have to imagine this place full of monks preparing food and animals.  It would have been very busy.”  Right.  I began to smell the food and the smoke.  But mostly I was sensing the alive presence of Cuthbert.  There was his cross and his comb, and his altar.  He was somehow out of the box and present in this place with his things, offering himself for us to follow.  He was a man who walked and taught.  Who read and combed his hair.  He offered mass to crowds that pitched tents to hear him.  Because he didn’t worry about food, it’s ironic that he must minister to us in the Great Kitchen.  Maybe that’s as it should be since he is our food.  His word.  His way.  His reassurance that we needn’t worry.  Look to the eagle.  Trust your horse.  God works in mysterious ways.  When I left the kitchen, I walked right into the café and bought a cup of tea and a scone. 

            My final hours in Durham Cathedral were spent at Holy Eucharist the following morning at 8:00.  It was Sunday.  There were no tourists at that hour.  The market square was empty and the noisy bars finally quiet.  No photography was permitted.  The shrine locked.  The priests are serious about wanting this to be a place of worship, and we worshipped.  But more than anything I heard from the priest, I was touched by the warmth of an old man who opened the locked shrine one more time for me.  George Hetherington, an octogenarian, remembered that he’d been nine years old when he became a cathedral chorister.  The war was on, and we had to board at the cathedral.  We sung two services and had two rehearsals daily, and that was a lot of singing and discipline for a child.  We missed our parents especially at Easter and Christmas.  They kept you until your voice cracked, and I guess I sung here until I was 15.  They let German prisoners of war stand in the back.  You could tell by their faces that all they wanted to do was go home.  Like us.  I suppose we felt an affinity for them.”  “Affinity.”  That is Mom’s special word.  The feeling of connectedness.  Nature is fine in love and were tis fine, it sends a precious instance of itself after the thing it loves.  Affinities are tenuous and strong.  It’s up to the creature to decide what to make of them.  Everything or nothing.  When we were in the shrine, I knelt and prayed one last time.  Then, Mr. Hetherington told me to look up at the ceiling.  He was pointing to a roundel carving around a bell-pull.  “That carving is as detailed as embroidery,” said the elderly man.  He had looked at it with binoculars and explained the figures on it to me.  “What amazes me is that the workman who carved it must have known that the detail would not be seen by any people below.  But he did the work carefully and well and intricately anyway.  That is devotion.”  He took my hand, kissed it, and we parted.

            Just as I didn’t want the walk to end, I hated to leave this forest of stone.  But I had wended through it, noting the waymarks.  Architects and masons loved Cuthbert and were teaching his Way with every detail.  Like Cuthbert’s pocket altar, his comb, and his cross, the contents of my pilgrim’s pocket—cross, stones, compass, sheep’s wool—must be shared because only when we take out what’s inside can we really truly touch others.  Nothing was in the box, in the tomb, and the spirit of Cuthbert “talks to people.”  I’d asked Fiona if the assembled rock choir had a cd.  Oh, no!  They sing for themselves and for one another!”  George Hetherington, speaking of the ceiling carving said, “today whenever people do anything, they have to put it on Facebook or on television.”  The point is to do small things with great love, and, more importantly, to them for their own sake.  That is contemplation.  That is the Way.  That attitude is what (perhaps) enabled Cuthbert, who loved his solitude to preach and teach and even to be bishop, for a time, duties that carried him away from Lindisfarne and his hermitage on the even smaller Farne.  But he must have also known that he’d found home because he kept returning to those islands.  Places of wind, birds’ cries, and seals’ song.  Why do the seals sing?

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.