Journey

Thanks to youoregon once again for hosting Abstract Thursday which has got me thinking again.

A day of journeys, starting with a busy morning/early afternoon at Kirkby Stephen followed by going up to Carlisle and back to the office at Penrith.

I took this on a late walk round the village when I realised I'd spent all day sitting down pretty much. It made me think of journeys, both internal and external, physical and emotional, parallel existences and processes, the many dimensions in the moment ... and of how far we are prepared to travel for what we need. It reminded me of a story G told me of seeing two old Grasmere chaps meeting up after many years outside the Co-op. One had travelled and lived all over the world and made his money so that he could retire in comfort back in Grasmere. The other had stayed there all his life. The first was apparently rather boastful of his success and said how good it was to come back to Grasmere and enjoy his retirement. The second said how good it was to have stayed in Grasmere and to have had the chance to appreciate it all his life. And that reminded me of Paolo Coehlo's 'The Pilgrimage'.


from Little Gidding, The Four Quartets - T.S.Eliot

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.
                                      If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.