The Solitary Walker

Historic Southwell

2012-01-29T02:58:00.000Z

A cold but sunny winter Saturday found us in Southwell, Notts. — one of the hidden treasures of the English Midlands. The jewel in Southwell's crown is the Minster (see top and bottom pics), one of the finest yet least visited cathedrals in Britain. The style is Norman and early English, and in the fourteenth century the famous chapter house was added — ornamented with exquisite stone carvings of foliage, and the heads of 'green men' and other mythical creatures. The lead, pyramidal spires (Rhenish caps or 'pepperpot' spires) are the only examples of their kind in the UK. We didn't go in as there was a service going on, but instead wandered through the narrow streets of the town (though really it's little more than a large village; the Minster is known as the 'village cathedral'). We ended up in a little Saturday market, passing this quaint sweet shop on the way:

At lunchtime we took a break in the Saracen's Head, an old coaching inn dating from the fifteenth century. Both Charles Dickens and Lord Byron stayed here. And it was also here that King Charles I spent his last night of freedom before being captured by the Scots in nearby Kelham during the English Civil War. (The Scots handed him over to Cromwell's men — the Parliamentarians — and he was subsequently executed on 30 January 1649.) We drank our coffee in the long bar at the back of the hotel, watching the Liverpool v. Newcastle football match, but thinking back to much earlier and bloodier conflicts. The half-timbered walls, huge fireplaces and grandiose mirrors just oozed history.

Don't Look Back

2012-01-26T11:45:00.000Z

Orpheus And Eurydice

Uphill he climbed, his girl behind.
He turned around, for love is blind,
Nor was he the obedient kind.
Fate held him in a double bind.
He turned around, only to find
His girl in Pluto's arms entwined.

Back at the top, he could not think
Or act or speak. He turned to drink.
Apollo raised one awful stink,
But Bacchus gave a tipsy wink
And Pan the Goat was tickled pink.
Distraught, he hovered on the brink

Of life and death. His choice was plain.
He'd leave the world with all its pain
Of loss, and seek his love again
Before his grief sent him insane.
Little to lose, so much to gain.
His lyre lay rusting in the rain.

So he died of a broken heart
(A sozzled liver played its part),
Descended to the Underworld,
Searched high and low to get his girl,
And now they wander, hand in hand,
Forever, through a happy land.

Bollingen Tower: Kindling A Light

2012-01-25T10:00:00.000Z

At Bollingen, I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself. CARL GUSTAV JUNG

Bollingen Tower, Lake Zürich

I'll end my series on literary and spiritual 'towers' with the tower built by the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung. In 1922 Jung began work on a spiritual retreat near the village of Bollingen on the northern shore of Lake Zürich — which became known as Bollingen Tower. He kept enlarging the house over a period of many years. His intention was to create an architectural symbol for the structure of the human psyche: the whole conscious and unconscious mind. After the death of his wife in 1955 Jung added a second storey, which for him represented an extension of consciousness achieved in old age. As a child, Jung had often imagined a castle on an island in a lake — a symbol of the unconscious inner stronghold of the self. Now his dream had become a physical reality.

Jung spent several months a year at Bollingen, where he was able to fulfil his great need for solitude. His life there was of utter simplicity: he cooked, chopped wood, fetched water from the well, sailed boats on the lake. He painted murals and carved in stone. Most of all he went deep within himself, into the dark recesses of his mind. He encountered universal archetypal figures such as the 'anima' figure of Salome, and the 'animus' figure of Philomen, whom he identified as his personal, spiritual guide. And he described these psychic discoveries in the manuscript that was published much later (in 2009) as the Liber Novus or The Red Book.

I've been fascinated by Jung ever since I read his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in my early twenties; and I'm constantly amazed how contemporary his ideas still feel. He did much research into the field of symbols and dream interpretation. He explored alchemy, astrology, the occult, literature, sociology and Eastern philosophy. He originated the terms 'extrovert', 'introvert', 'synchronicity' and 'collective unconscious'. Jungian thought still permeates our current concerns with personality, the self, the causes and cures of neurosis and psychosis, and the spiritual life.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. CARL GUSTAV JUNG

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people. CARL GUSTAV JUNG

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. CARL GUSTAV JUNG

Thanks go to Ruth for inspiring this post.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Stones In The Sky

2012-01-23T16:41:00.000Z

I built her a tower when I was young — / Sometime she will die — / I built it with my hands, I hung / Stones in the sky. ROBINSON JEFFERS For Una

Hawk Tower, Carmel Point, California. Jeffers built this entirely by himself.

In 1914 the great American poet Robinson Jeffers and his wife Una visited the Carmel-Big Sur coast south of California's Monterey Peninsula and were overwhelmed by its wild and pristine beauty. They decided to build a house there — Tor House — on a craggy finger of land called Carmel Point. They used granite stones and rocks gathered locally from the shoreline of Carmel Bay. After the house was finished, Jeffers continued to build, constructing his rugged Hawk Tower: a poetic retreat which inevitably brings to mind other literary towers — the towers of Hölderlin, Rilke and Yeats, for instance.

It's evident that Jeffers was a practical man, and a scientific one too. He'd studied medicine and forestry and astronomy and evolutionary science. But he was also well-versed in literature, languages, religion and the Classics. Truly Renaissance in his education. Ah, where have those times gone?

Sign-Post

Civilized, crying: how to be human again; this will tell you how.
Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity,
Let that doll lie. Consider if you like how the lilies grow,
Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity
Make your veins cold; look at the silent stars, let your eyes
Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man.
Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes;
Things are the God; you will love God and not in vain,
For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature. At length
You will look back along the star's rays and see that even
The poor doll humanity has a place under heaven.
Its qualities repair their mosaic around you, the chips of strength
And sickness; but now you are free, even to be human,
But born of the rock and the air, not of a woman.

As a poet, Jeffers evoked the divine in nature, and was one of our very first poet-ecologists. He realised that, if we pollute our environment, we pollute ourselves — our own minds and spirits. He denounced the arrogant, destructive tendency of human beings, and lamented the self-created split between mankind and the natural world.

Natural Music

The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,
(Winter has given them gold for silver
To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)
From different throats intone one language.
So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without
Divisions of desire and terror
To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger smitten cities,
Those voices also would be found
Clean as a child's; or like some girl's breathing who dances alone
By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.

Jeffers recognised the humbling truth that we are just part of the universe, not the centre of it; and that our high-minded ideas amount to very little in the face of raw nature and its extraordinary power and beauty.

The Beauty of Things

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things — earth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars —
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality —
For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant — to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

Robinson Jeffers

Thanks go to am for inspiring this post.

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)

The Hermit Of Muzot

2012-01-22T14:58:00.000Z

Castle Muzot, Switzerland

During his feverishly creative, final years, Rilke lived at Castle Muzot, idyllically positioned above the town of Sierre in the upper Rhône valley. Here he lived in silence and solitude, with no telephone, electricity or running water. His housekeeper, whom he called a 'ghost', kept out of his way as much as possible. Living on the second floor of his 'tower', Rilke worked at a heavy oak table with glorious views over the valley. He ate meagre vegetarian meals and saw almost no one except, occasionally, Baladine Klossowska (whom he called 'Merline'), his last lover and confidante. Muzot, and its surrounding countryside of mountains, forests, rivers and streams, became dearer to him than any place he had ever lived.

Here, in a letter to Marie von Thurn und Taxis dated 25 July 1921, Rilke has just found Muzot, and is considering living in this enchanting place:

So, if everything works out, I could live at Muzot for a while, with a housekeeper. The castle is situated at the top of quite a steep hill, twenty minutes from Sierre. It's a rural area, charming, and not too dry, with abundant springs — from it your gaze extends down the valley towards mountain slopes and the most wonderful depths of sky. A small, rustic chapel lies a little higher on the left among vineyards...

Rilke in the garden of Castle Muzot

In the same letter Rilke continues to praise his new home in the Swiss canton of Le Valais:

In these last weeks I have often come very near to announcing my visit, and a peculiar current came into my rather sluggish spirit whenever I wanted to do so; but what keeps me here is this wonderful Valais. I was imprudent enough to travel down here, to Sierre and Sion; and I have told you what a singular magic these regions worked on me when I first saw them last year at the time of the grape harvest. The fact that Spain and Provence are blended together so strangely within the features of the landscape struck me immediately even then, for, in the final pre-war years, both these lands spoke to me more strongly and decisively than anywhere else. And now to find their voices united in a broad, Swiss mountain valley! This echo, this family likeness is not fanciful. Just recently I read, in a brief treatise on the plant life of the Wallis, that certain flowers appear here which are otherwise found only in Provence and Spain; it is the same with the butterflies: thus does the soul of a great river (and to me the Rhone has always been one of the most wonderful) bear endowments and kinships through the countries. Its valley here is so wide, and so grandly filled out with little heights within the frame of the big border mountains, that the eye is continually provided with a play of the most delightful changes, a chessgame with hills, as it were...

Hölderlin's Tower

2012-01-19T13:12:00.000Z

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), now considered one of the greatest German Romantic lyric poets, was little read and largely misunderstood in his lifetime. Even after his death it took at least another fifty years before his importance was recognised. One of the first people to acknowledge the genius of Hölderlin, and, indeed, to be influenced by him, was the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

A cataclysmic event in Hölderlin's life was his love affair with Susette Gontard, the wife of Frankfurt banker Jakob Gontard, who employed the poet as a private tutor. Hölderlin was dismissed when the affair was discovered, but the couple continued to meet each other in secret, until Susette fatally contracted influenza in 1802. Already showing signs of mental illness, Hölderlin never really recovered from Susette's death (she became the 'Diotima' of his poems), and his mental condition worsened.

After a fruitless stay in a clinic in Tübingen — where he was given three years to live — a local carpenter, Ernst Zimmer, took pity on Hölderlin, giving him a room in his house, a tower in the old city walls overlooking the river Neckar (see pic). Zimmer and his family were to look after him for the next thirty-six years until his death in 1843. During this time Hölderlin's own family and friends (who included the philosophers Hegel and Schelling) completely deserted him. The only mourners at his funeral were the Zimmer family themselves.

Another day

Another day. I follow another path,
Enter the leafing woodland, visit the spring
Or the rocks where the roses bloom
Or search from a look-out, but nowhere
Love are you to be seen in the light of day
And down the wind go the words of our once so
Beneficent conversation...

Your beloved face has gone beyond my sight,
The music of your life is dying away
Beyond my hearing and all the songs
That worked a miracle of peace once on

My heart, where are they now? It was long ago,
So long and the youth I was has aged nor is
Even the earth that smiled at me then
The same. Farewell. Live with that word always.

For the soul goes from me to return to you
Day after day and my eyes shed tears that they
Cannot look over to where you are
And see you clearly ever again.

FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN (Translated by DAVID CONSTANTINE)

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Yeats's Tower

2012-01-18T13:25:00.000Z

In 1917 WB Yeats bought for 35 pounds an old castle with attached cottage on the banks of the river Cloon near Coole Park, County Galway, home to his dear friend Lady Gregory, and set about restoring it for his new bride Georgina Hyde-Lees, known as 'George'. He named his home 'Thoor Ballylee' ('Thoor' is Irish for 'Tower'); it became an idyllic summer retreat for Yeats and his family for twelve years. Here are some extracts from various letters he wrote enthusing about this new and inspiring environment:

... everything is so beautiful here that to go elsewhere is to leave beauty behind.

We are in our Tower and I am writing poetry as I always do here, and, as always happens, no matter how I begin, it becomes love poetry before I am finished with it.

... as you see I have no news, for nothing happens in this blessed place but a stray beggar or a heron.

It was here that Yeats wrote many of the rich and mature poems of his later years — including the 1928 volume he called, simply, The Tower. In Meditations In Time Of Civil War, one of the poems from this collection, he describes his home with these lines:

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,

A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,

An acre of stony ground,

Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,

Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,

The sound of the rain or sound

Of every wind that blows;

The stilted water-hen

Crossing stream again

Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;

A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,

A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,

A candle and written page.

The Tower contains twenty-one poems (I have my own Penguin paperback copy on the desk beside me as I write) including the well-known Sailing To Byzantium, A Prayer For My Son and Leda And The Swan. I'm particularly fond of the sequence A Man Young And Old, which begins like this:

First Love

Though nurtured like the sailing moon

In beauty's murderous brood,

She walked awhile and blushed awhile

And on my pathway stood

Until I thought her body bore

A heart of flesh and blood.

But since I laid a hand thereon

And found a heart of stone

I have attempted many things

And not a thing is done,

For every hand is lunatic

That travels on the moon.

She smiled and that transfigured me

And left me but a lout,

Maundering here, and maundering there,

Emptier of thought

Than the heavenly circuit of its stars

When the moon sails out.

After the Yeats family moved out in 1929, Ballylee fell into disuse once more; but it was restored again in 1965 as a Yeats museum. The adjoining cottage became a shop and tea room.

Below is the slate slab Yeats had carved when he carried out the initial restoration:

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green slates,

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George;

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)

Tower Of Song

2012-01-15T16:31:00.000Z

But you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I've gone / I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the tower of song LEONARD COHEN Tower Of Song

It's a strange but interesting fact that Rilke, Hölderlin and Yeats — three of our most brilliantly creative European poets, and three of my favourite writers — all spent part of their lives in hermit-like seclusion ensconced in 'towers', from where they produced some of their most intense and inspired work.

Here's a quatrain I wrote the other day about the ambivalent private/public life of the artist. You may also interpret it from a blogger's perspective, if you wish. I suppose 'This public refuge' could be any soul-baring, personal yet published work (or work available to others apart from the writer) — and that includes a blog. I wrote it in French because I'm drenched in French at the moment (having spoken it a lot, albeit imperfectly, during my recent week in Switzerland). Also Rilke wrote most of his Castle Muzot poems in French.

Tour de Chanson

Ce refuge public

Demi-ouvert, demi-secret

S'offre au monde

Comme un Muzot de mots

(This public refuge

Half-open, half-secret

Offers itself to the world

Like a Muzot of words)

Rilke At Muzot

2012-01-14T15:16:00.001Z

For the last five years of his life the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) lived at Castle Muzot — barely a castle, more a castellated house — which impressively overlooks the broad, high-sided valley of the upper Rhône. Rilke had been looking for a permanent place to stay in Switzerland since the summer of 1919. After two years of unsettled and fruitless searching he finally chanced upon a photo of Castle Muzot in a shop window in Sierre, and immediately fell in love with the place. It was available for rent. Thanks to the patronage of Werner Reinhart, who subsequently bought and renovated Muzot, Rilke was able to live there rent-free and relatively untroubled till the end of his life. It was here that he spent his most intensively productive years — completing The Duino Elegies which he'd begun in a gifted trance at Castle Duino near Trieste; writing The Sonnets To Orpheus in rapid bursts of frenzied inspiration; composing nearly four hundred lyric poems in French (many of them evoking the beauty of his beloved Valais, the Swiss canton where he now lived); and translating the works of Paul Valéry, his favourite French poet.

On Thursday 5 January I stepped from the railway station at Sierre in a quest for Castle Muzot. According to the girl in the tourist office it was easy to find — though she seemed rather surprised I was going on foot. Armed with maps, I set off uphill in the direction of Veyras. The rain poured down. Remnants of hard-packed snow made some sections of the pavement tricky to negotiate. After three-quarters of an hour I'd reached the village of Veyras, on the north-western slope above Sierre. I headed up the Route du Moulin. There, suddenly, on my right-hand side, behind a small vineyard, was Muzot! Smaller than I'd envisaged, more compact, more hemmed in now by the houses and chalets which had sprung up over the last fifty years. But it was Muzot nonetheless — despite the 'Private' sign at the gate, despite the cold and the rain, despite the mist partially obscuring the superb view down the Rhône valley. And there still, in the garden, stood the poplar tree about which Rilke went into such ecstasies!

Here's Rilke at Castle Muzot with the lover of his final years, the painter Baladine Klossowska (1886-1969) — or 'Merline', as he affectionately called her. She was married to the art historian Erich Klossowska, but they separated in 1917. Baladine was the mother of the artist Balthus and the writer Pierre Klossowska.

This is the fine eighteenth-century building of the Maison de Courten, Rue du Bourg 30, Sierre. It's home to the Rainer Maria Rilke Foundation, which was established in 1986 to promote knowledge of Rilke's work through exhibitions, lectures, conferences and publications. The museum is open to the public between April and October each year. And every third year the Foundation stages a Rilke festival.

Rilke is buried in the churchyard at Raron/Rarogne, a little further up the Rhône valley. The self-composed epitaph on his gravestone reads, enigmatically:

Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,

Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel

Lidern.

(Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight

of being no one's sleep under so

many lids.)

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)

Fribourg

2012-01-12T23:09:00.000Z

Fribourg has one of the best maintained Old Towns in Switzerland — or so I've read. And I would not disagree, for on Tuesday 3 January I walked through Fribourg's charming and historic old quarter, and found it beautifully preserved. It had a distinctly Catholic and medieval feel. I wandered through small, atmospheric squares with fountains. I climbed steep streets which led up to the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas with its Gothic bell tower. I chanced upon all kinds of architectural nooks and crannies, and picked out tiny effigies of saints in walls and alcoves. Then, after admiring the fine sixteenth-century Town Hall, I crossed the ancient Pont de Berne, a roofed, wooden bridge spanning the river Sarine.

Soon the river entered a deep gorge. I passed a trout farm and followed the river for several kilometres. The Sarine had eroded a twisting course through the soft molasse — a friable mixture of sandstone, shale, conglomerate and marine deposits. Over the millennia the river had smoothed this rock into sinuous shapes, scooping out depressions and carving pinnacles, and undercutting it to form exciting overhangs. My circular route then doubled back to Fribourg along field paths which tracked the topmost edge of the ravine. The weather was hardly cold, considering the time of year, and long, low scarves of cloud indicated that a mild Föhn wind was about to blow. A spectacular sunset lit up the city as I climbed back down.

Fribourg (Freiburg in German) was famous for its weavers, tanners and dyers in medieval times. It's now a popular university town, with a population of 40,000. Lying on the border of French and German speaking Switzerland, it is, as such, bilingual. It's an arty place, an academic place and a gastronomic place. I ate in two restaurants there — one Lebanese, one Italian — and both were very good.

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)

Winter Escape

2012-01-10T05:41:00.000Z

Postcard: view over Montreux and Lac Léman towards the seven summits of the Dents du Midi. Out of sight to the west (the right) an intimidating chain of mountains — the northern limit of the French Alps — plunges precipitously down to the lake in a jumble of snowfields, cirques, bare grey slopes and glaciated valleys.

In a bid to escape the madness of Christmas and the mayhem of New Year, Sunday 1st January found me on a Eurostar train to Paris then a TGV-Lyria train to Geneva. I'd half intended to walk a few sections of the Swiss Chemin de Saint-Jacques/Jakobsweg, but in the end I did shorter, circular walks, and visited some of the historic towns and villages of Switzerland's south-west corner: Lausanne, Montreux, Sonzier, Glion, Fribourg, Sierre and Veyras.

Lake Geneva, or Lac Léman, formed the centrepiece of my stay. I was at once seduced by its ever-changing moods and colours. I saw it in rain and sunshine, mist and snow. From the hills above Montreux the Alpine panorama on the far side of the lake was magnificent, particularly the jagged peaks of the Dents du Midi, which loomed menacingly over the flat, broad valley of the river Rhône's upper reaches. This mountain chain, in the Swiss canton of Valais, has seven summits, or 'teeth'; and in October 2006, after several years of boiling hot summers and subsequent thawing, a huge mass of rock detached itself from La Haute Cime, the most easterly peak, causing a massive landslide.

One outstanding walk took me from the heights of Sonzier up the Route du Pont de Pierre, past skeleton trees and crashing waterfalls, over an old stone bridge which spans the Gorges du Chaudron, through Glion (the view of the Dents du Midi from the Buffet de la Gare's restaurant window is quite breathtaking) and back down to Montreux with its charming old quarter.

On fine days I watched a low sun progress over the French Alps, bathing the snowy peaks in a rosy light. On milder, mistier, rainier days the mountains, which dropped sheer onto the lake's southern shore, all but disappeared. Sometimes the orange glow of a streaky sunset lit up the western horizon. And by night a waxing moon trailed the sun across the sky, but following a higher orbit — silvering the lake, which, along its northern edge, already twinkled and shone with headlamp beams from the snaking autoroute and the lights of all the shoreside settlements between Montreux and Lausanne.

Occasionally a Föhn wind warmed the valleys, producing briefly an exceptionally soft microclimate. Buzzards yelped, and herons beat a slow, direct and airy course above the streams and rivers. Little railways twisted impossibly up steep, wooded slopes and around rock faces, connecting remote hamlets and farmsteads. Even when hidden in a gorge or cutting, you could still hear the screech of their metallic glide. And among new buildings and modern chalets were scattered older, eighteenth-century houses, painted green and gold, with slate roofs and wooden balconies, and tumbledown wooden barns, little changed for centuries.

Postcard: view looking east from Lac Léman across Montreux. You can clearly make out the shadowed ravine of the Gorges du Chaudron.

Invincible Summer

2011-12-31T14:50:00.000Z

A thousand thanks for the many wise words and quotations you left in my comments' box. Here they all are, collected together:

Prompt me, God;
but not yet...
the meaning is in the waiting. RS THOMAS

... all will be well and all will be well and all manner of things shall be well... ST JULIAN OF NORWICH

Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best. HENRY VAN DYKE

Mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it. SRI NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ

Try it, what's the worst that could happen? UNATTRIBUTED

Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind. RALPH WALDO EMERSON

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive. JOSEPH CAMPBELL

This moment is eternal. UNATTRIBUTED

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA

Now you will feel no rain,
For each of you will be shelter to the other.

Now you will feel no cold,
For each of you will be warmth to the other.

Now there is no more loneliness,
For each of you will be companion to the other.

Now you are two bodies,
But there is only one life before you.

Go now to your dwelling place,
To enter into the days of your togetherness.

And may your days be good and long upon the earth. APACHE WEDDING BLESSING

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. HENRY DAVID THOREAU

You don't stop playing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop playing. UNATTRIBUTED

Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention. JOHN O'DONOHUE

I will add just one more of my own:

In the midst of winter, I found there was within me an invincible summer. ALBERT CAMUS

I wish everyone a Happy New Year, and may we always feel the warmth of that invincible summer in our hearts.

1000th Post

2011-12-25T09:27:00.001Z

This blog is about many things, and one of those things is poetry. So first of all I'll celebrate my thousandth post with a new poem. Naturally it's about Christmas.

Supposing Christmas Never Came

Supposing Christmas never came —
Santa on strike, the reindeer sick,
the presents barely wrapped,
the wise men lost, their camels lame,
shepherds without their flocks
(due to an outbreak of ovine flu),
the Virgin Mary, virginal no longer,
painting the town red,
Joseph distraught, the Holy Child
sans swaddling clothes, sans stable,
mangerless, and the bright star
of Bethlehem now a black hole,
turkeys extinct and Christmas trees
dead as Dutch elms — then I’d ascend
some nearby mountain such as Scafell Pike
or one afar like Ober Gabelhorn,
Aiguille d'Argentière or Monte Rosa,
and meditate within a little hut
like Thoreau at the edge of Walden Pond
or Kerouac on Desolation Peak.
I’d view the frosted ridges, snowy crests
(real mountain chains not paper chains,
real snow not the stuff out of a can),
thinking of nothing very much but Zen,
and letting pure agape flood right in.

At this point I'd like to thank most warmly blog poets Ruth, Lorenzo, Rachel, Pat and Dominic, whose own poetry constantly inspires and encourages me to keep on writing poems myself.

I would never have believed, after starting this modest blog four and a half years ago, that I'd ever reach post number one thousand. Yet here it is. And I must honestly tell you that each and every post has been a joy. But without your readership, your loyalty and your comments, I'm sure I would have stopped long ago. For it's this reciprocality that lies at the heart of all our blogging enterprises — of this I have no doubt. I'd also like to acknowledge a few blog friends who have stuck with me for the long haul — Grizz and am come at once to mind. Readers come and go — that's only to be expected — but others stay religiously loyal, such as our wonderful friend and fellow traveller George, for instance. Apologies for missing out so many names here — there are dozens more. You know who you are, and I thank you all for reading my humble offerings from the bottom of my heart.

Our blogs are forever quoting words of comfort and wisdom from different saints and sages, poets and philosophers. I wondered if, to indulge me on my thousandth post, you might quote me one of your own very favourite sayings, aphorisms, adages, bons mots, proverbs, koans, stories, prayers or truths? Something that brings you hope and inspiration, and gives you the motivation to carry on journeying down life's rocky road. We could create a rich storehouse of enlightenment here! My own contribution would have to be the Prayer of Saint Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Greetings to everyone in this strange time between Christmas and New Year.

Joyeux Noel

2011-12-23T07:23:00.000Z

The Solitary Walker caught photographing the Christmas hearth.

J - urançon

O - rwell

Y - evtushenko

E - unate

U - ltreia!

X - mas

N - egative Capability

O - pium

E - nna

L - and's End

It's been a wonderful walking year, in which I've walked most of the Hadrian's Wall Path (with George of Transit Notes), part of the Viking Way and all of the Via Gebennensis, the pilgrim route from Geneva in Switzerland to Le Puy in France. I wonder what next year has in store?

This blog is now four and a half years old, and every post has been a joy. The next post I write will be my thousandth. I've no idea what to do yet, but hope you will all contribute!

I wish all my blog friends and blog readers out there a very happy Christmas. Without you this blog would be as Santa without his reindeer, Fred Astaire without Ginger Rogers, a day on the Camino without a glass or two of wine at the end of it. Or something like that!

Paulo Coelho: The Pilgrimage

2011-12-21T07:37:00.004Z

I was a book rep for twenty-five years, and for part of that time I carried the list of a publisher of self-help books, New Age books, books that were loosely 'spiritual'. Many of these titles were frankly unreadable. Some were written by those in pursuit of a quick buck, some by well-meaning people with woolly ideas, others by out-and-out charlatans and snake-oil salesmen. It was a question of separating the wheat from the chaff, and there was a lot of chaff. Often, unfortunately, the chaff dispersed widely, and the wheat was scarce — though precious.

As I've said before, I'm not a big fan of Paulo Coelho, and find his novels, parables, fantasies and so-called autobiographical books about 'the spiritual journey' too simplistic, too trite and too eager to please. Needless to say, he's an internationally bestselling author with a huge base of readers and admirers. I wouldn't go so far as to call him a charlatan — no, not at all, I'm sure he's totally sincere — but I find his sparsely told, derivative fables annoyingly childish. The message of The Alchemist (the book which propelled him to fame in 1988) seems to be that the treasure is not to be found at your journey's end (in this case the Pyramids of Egypt) but at home when you return. OK, but there's nothing earth-shatteringly new in this. In fact, many have remarked that the whole novel is simply a retelling of one of the stories in A Thousand And One Nights.

Having been disappointed with The Alchemist when I read it a while ago, I recently picked up a second-hand copy of The Pilgrimage, a book he wrote in 1987 after completing the pilgrim route to Santiago the previous year — and, again, I felt let down. There are real spiritual insights in the book, to be sure, but they're put across in far too simple and populist a way. Also the story is marred by all sorts of fantastic nonsense about the Knights Templar and their rituals. (It seems that writers can't get enough of the Knights Templar nowadays — from Umberto Eco and Dan Brown to Kate Mosse and Steve Berry.) In addition, Coelho uses far too much vocabulary and far too many concepts to do with 'winning', 'losing', 'conquering' and 'fighting the good fight' for my own personal spiritual taste. So I fear you're unlikely to find profound answers to profound questions in Paulo Coelho. You may think he's more sham than shaman. I leave it for you to judge. However, I did like this passage from early on in the book:

When you travel, you experience, in a very practical way, the act of rebirth. You confront completely new situations, the day passes more slowly, and on most journeys you don't even understand the language the people speak. So you are like a child just out of the womb. You begin to be more accessible to others because they may be able to help you in difficult situations. And you accept any small favour from the gods with great delight, as if it were an episode you would remember for the rest of your life.

At the same time, since all things are new, you see only the beauty in them, and you feel happy to be alive. That's why a religious pilgrimage has always been one of the most objective ways of achieving insight. The word peccadillo, which means a 'small sin', comes from pecus, which means 'defective foot', a foot that is incapable of walking a road. The way to correct the peccadillo is always to walk forward, adapting oneself to new situations and receiving in return all of the thousands of blessings life generously offers to those who seek them.

Banzan In The Butcher's Shop

2011-12-18T17:02:00.000Z

Do you know the story of Banzan? Before he became a great Zen master, he spent many years in pursuit of enlightenment, but it eluded him. Then, one day, as he was walking in the marketplace, he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer. 'Give me the best piece of meat you have,' said the customer. And the butcher replied, 'Every piece of meat I have is the best. There is no piece of meat here that is not the best.' Upon hearing this, Banzan became enlightened.

I can see you are waiting for some explanation. When you accept what is, every piece of meat — every moment — is the best. That is enlightenment.

ECKHART TOLLE The Power Of Now

I love this story. What I like most about it is the setting: an ordinary, humble butcher's shop. It's not about enlightenment dawning after many months of rigorous meditation under a banyan tree, or after years of wandering and soul searching in the mountains and deserts, or as a result of disciplined study and ascetic practice under a yogi or other spiritual teacher. No, it's about enlightenment dawning suddenly, and when least expected, in a prosaic, everyday setting. To me this has the ring of authenticity. Perhaps we are mistaken in walking so endlessly and so earnestly the caminos of this world in pursuit of spiritual illumination, when we are more likely to find it — if we remain aware, open and receptive — in the moment NOW, in our own ordinary home, in our wilderness back garden, in the local streets and shops of our town or village.

So, when you're at the butcher's this week picking up your Christmas turkey, sausage meat, gammon joint and pork pies, be sure to eavesdrop on the conversations going on around you. You never know, it might be the start of a whole new life.

Garden Wilderness

2011-12-17T16:07:00.004Z

Acacia

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show. ANDREW WYETH

Crab apple

I trust your Garden was willing to die ... I do not think that mine was — it perished with beautiful reluctance, like an evening star — EMILY DICKINSON (From a letter to her Aunt Katie Sweetser, 1880)

Neglected herb patch

Piper To The End

2011-12-16T20:16:00.000Z

Mark Knopfler at Nottingham's Capital FM Arena on 11 October this year.

When I leave this world behind me / To another I will go / And if there are no pipes in heaven / I'll be going down below / If friends in time be severed / Someday we will meet again / I'll return to leave you never / Be a piper to the end

Cats And Ducks Are Our Teachers

2011-12-15T19:49:00.000Z

It's about realising that there are no problems. Only situations.

So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action - just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord.

Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now. As you become more deeply aware of this one step, you realize that it already contains within itself all the other steps as well as the destination.

True love has no opposite. If your love has an 'opposite', then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets. It is the ego's substitute for salvation, and for a short time it almost does feel like salvation.

A Buddhist monk once told me: 'All I have learned in the twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: All that arises passes away. This I know.' What he meant, of course, was this: I have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow the present moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.

I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them cats. Even ducks have taught me important spiritual lessons. Just watching them is a meditation.

ECKHART TOLLE The Power Of Now

My Children, Not My Children

2011-12-14T13:32:00.001Z

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

KAHLIL GIBRAN The Prophet

Two Lives Of Dickens

2011-12-12T22:23:00.011Z

Charles Dickens

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. EL DOCTOROW

Two biographies have been published recently anticipating the bicentenary of Charles Dickens's birth next February: Becoming Dickens: The Invention Of A Novelist by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life.

Both books mention the meeting Dickens reputedly had with Dostoyevsky in 1862. In a subsequent letter mentioning this momentous encounter, the great Russian novelist recalls his great British counterpart telling him that All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him ... one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Whereupon Dostoyevsky was supposed to have asked: Only two people?

Whether or not the meeting actually occurred, and whether or not the letter is authentic (it has never been traced, and there is no extant copy), no matter. What's interesting is the Jekyll and Hyde (though Stevenson's novel The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde did not come out until sixteen years after Dickens's death!) 'split personality' Dickens admits to here. Of course, Dostoyevsky himself was fascinated by multifaceted personalities (one of his stories is called The Double) and the dilemmas caused by opposing moralities struggling for ascendance in the same human soul (just look at Raskolnikov in Crime And Punishment).

Dickens, after twenty one years of faithful (so far as we know) marriage to his wife Catherine, began a liaison with the actress Ellen Ternan in 1857 - which continued until his death in 1870. Divorce was barely thinkable for a man in his position at the time, so he separated from Catherine in 1858 but remained married to her. Perhaps guilt about this was at the back of his mind when he made his startling revelation to Dostoyevsky, perhaps not. Who knows?

However, from a personal point of view, the longer I live, and the more I experience life, the more convinced I am that we all have, to a greater or lesser extent, split or multiple personalities. We all have some of the saint and the sinner, the hero and the villain, the good and the bad within us - in varying proportions. And it's only when we get beyond such manifest polarities of our fragile and fearful ego that we can start to experience the unquenchable joy, peace and love which characterises our true Being and Consciousness - as Eckhart Tolle* might say.

* I'll have more to say at a later date about Eckhart Tolle's book The Power Of Now.

The Books In My Life (5)

2011-12-06T11:15:00.001Z

We have books in nearly every room of the house. These are some shelves in our bedroom. I often read in bed before falling asleep. It's one of life's greatest pleasures, isn't it? There are lots of novels on these shelves. At one time I used to read novels almost to the exclusion of everything else. Now I still read fiction, but less so, and mixed in with biography, travel, history, natural history, religion, spirituality, philosophy and popular science. And of course poetry I've always read a great deal of.

Here you will find books by some of my favourite novelists: Balzac, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Scott Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Hardy, DH Lawrence, Thomas Mann, John Cowper Powys, Steinbeck, Stendhal, Tolstoy and Patrick White. There's a novel about Welsh hill farmers called On The Black Hill by the exquisitely gifted travel writer Bruce Chatwin. There are two books, Vertigo and Austerlitz, by the joyously uncategorisable WG Sebald, genre-busting works which are part fiction, part memoir, part history, part autobiography, part travelogue. There's a collection of short stories called Under The Dam by David Constantine, who is also a wonderful poet and was one of my old German lecturers at university. There's a selection of short stories by that master of the form, Guy de Maupassant. There's Philip Pullman's terrific children's trilogy His Dark Materials - these are definitely books for adults too! And there's Thomas Mann's classic novella Death In Venice, a book I reread time and again.

This is the final post in my series The Books In My Life.

Concerning The Spiritual In Art

2011-12-04T20:04:00.012Z

The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life. It exists and has power to create spiritual atmosphere; and from this inner standpoint one judges whether it is a good work of art or a bad one. If its 'form' is bad it means that the form is too feeble in meaning to call forth corresponding vibrations of the soul. Therefore a picture is not necessarily 'well painted' if it possesses the 'values' of which the French so constantly speak. It is only well painted if its spiritual value is complete and satisfying. 'Good drawing' is drawing that cannot be altered without destruction of this inner value, quite irrespective of its correctness as anatomy, botany, or any other science. There is no question of a violation of natural form, but only of the need of the artist for such form. Similarly colours are used not because they are true to nature, but because they are necessary to the particular picture. In fact, the artist is not only justified in using, but it is his duty to use only those forms which fulfil his own need. Absolute freedom, whether from anatomy or anything of the kind, must be given the artist in his choice of material. Such spiritual freedom is as necessary in art as it is in life.

WASSILY KANDINSKY Concerning The Spiritual In Art

I suppose Kandinsky's manifesto does not sound quite so revolutionary today, and the argument for the spiritual and technical freedom of the artist has long since been won, but it's always good to be reminded of this influential treatise on modernism published early last century. It had a huge effect in its day, impacting decisively on the development of modern art.

Of course there are countries in the world (I'm thinking of China and its treatment of Ai Weiwei) where certain artistic freedoms are frowned on, even severely curtailed by the state - though no country or state will ever be able to restrict an artist's inner, spiritual freedom.

Nouvelle 55: Landschaft Mit Roten Flecken, Nr. 2

2011-12-03T11:30:00.014Z

Wassily Kandinsky: Landschaft mit roten Flecken, Nr. 2

That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul. KANDINSKY

I am one among multitudes yet my soul

Raps out a unique rhythm through the woods

And forests, hills and mountains of my desires,

Singing a soft and sinuous path

On cliffs as tall as longing and in chasms

Deep as dreaming, dancing its course

Under rainbow bridges, tree-trunk chimneys,

Coal-black peaks and death-black doorways.

Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibration in the soul. KANDINSKY

(For Kandinsky's ideas on the spiritual significance of colour, and colour's relation to music, see this Wikipedia article. On the colour red: Red is a warm colour, lively and agitated; it is forceful, a movement in itself. On the colours blue and yellow: Yellow is a typically terrestrial colour, whose violence can be painful and aggressive. Blue is a celestial colour, evoking a deep calm. The combination of blue and yellow yields total immobility and calm, which is green. On the colour black: Black is nothingness without possibility, an eternal silence without hope, and corresponds with death.)

The Books In My Life (4)

2011-12-01T19:23:00.006Z

Just to prove not all of our books are rigorously classified, here are a couple of shelves of disparate titles from the living room. At the top, running left to right, are various illustrated books on Venice, Spain, Scotland and Ireland; a meditation on islands by John Fowles containing evocatively melancholy black and white photographs by the late Fay Godwin; Tolstoy's War And Peace (still haven't finished it!); an excellent biography of Tolstoy by Rosamund Bartlett; Sartre's Existentialism And Humanism; Chi Running by Danny Dreyer (I took up some gentle, early morning running in the spring of this year, neglected it over the summer, but have now started again - what a buzz it gives you); Paulo Coelho's The Pilgrimage (bought this just yesterday in an Oxfam shop. I'm not a big fan of Coelho, but felt I should read it as it describes his own Camino to Santiago); biographies of Maria Callas and Thomas Hardy (this by Claire Tomalin, whose book Charles Dickens: A Life is being serialised on Radio 4 this week to mark the bicentenary of Dickens's birth); The Oxford Dictionary Of Phrase, Saying And Quotation; and a book about photographing landscape by Charlie Waite.

On the bottom shelf are various gardening books, pride of place going to Geoffrey Grigson's The Englishman's Flora. There's also a title by Dave Hamilton we bought the other day called Grow Your Own Food For Free (Well, Almost) and one called Organic Gardening by Lawrence D Hills which Dominic from the blog ...made out of words was kind enough to send me. In between these gardening books and some practical photography manuals there's an illustrated version of Treasure Island, a book called The Ancient World Of The Celts and Anton Gill's Il Gigante, a detailed analysis of Michelangelo's supreme work of figurative sculpture, David. Mmm... I wonder how they got in there? You could say these shelves are an eclectic mix.

Plastic

2011-11-28T10:31:00.026Z

Disillusioned words like bullets bark / As human gods aim for their mark / Make everything from toy guns that spark / To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark / It’s easy to see without looking too far / That not much is really sacred BOB DYLAN It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

Broken lines, broken strings / Broken threads, broken springs / Broken idols, broken heads / People sleeping in broken beds / Ain’t no use jiving Ain’t no use joking / Everything is broken BOB DYLAN Everything Is Broken

Despite our present-day, heightened eco-awarness and our current investment in recyclables and renewables, it's a sobering fact that there are still millions of tonnes of plastic floating in our seas and oceans, that the earth beneath our feet is stuffed full of plastic rubbish, and that the stomachs of many of our seabirds and cetaceans resemble plastic junkyards. Our messy and destructive human footprint is everywhere.

Though, in this poem, 'plastic' takes on a wider, metaphorical meaning: the plasticity of the artificial, the superficial, the inauthentic, the enervated, the meretricious, the unholy. Yes, the commercialisation of Christmas seems to have got to me as usual, folks. I tried to call on Milton, Eliot, even Simon Armitage for constructive guidance, but I've ended up being influenced by Dylan and Dr. Seuss yet again. Not to mention Ray Davies. Oh well, some of us may be destined to remain at the bucket shop end of poetry (and that's a plastic bucket, of course).

plastic world

plastic dog and plastic cat
plastic mouse and plastic rat
plastic flower plastic tree
plastic far as we can see
plastic ice and plastic snow
plastic everywhere we go
plastic death and plastic birth
plastic all around the earth

plastic smile and plastic frown

plastic king with plastic crown
plastic Adam plastic rib
plastic Jesus plastic crib
plastic bird and plastic beast
plastic wise men from the east
plastic shepherds and their flock
plastic chicken plastic cock
plastic sex and plastic love
plastic in the sky above
plastic in the ground beneath
plastic tits and plastic teeth
plastic parents plastic kids
plastic eyes with plastic lids
plastic boy and plastic girl
get me out
of this plastic world

The Books In My Life (3)

2011-11-27T17:30:00.007Z

Here are some of my books on walking, climbing, travel and the countryside. I've lots more books on these subjects - but the ones I love the most are displayed on these three shelves. The categorisation is loose, but they are arranged alphabetically by author. Once a librarian, always a librarian! I'll highlight a few authors and titles which are indispensable to me...

In this pic you can see on the left a few general 'outdoor' books - books on hiking, backpacking, navigation and mountains, including a book with one of the most memorable titles ever: How To Shit In The Woods by Kathleen Meyer. An A-F sequence follows, with books by Edward Abbey, Tom Brown Jr. and Colin Fletcher, three of my favourite American backcountry, wilderness writers. There are two absolute travel writing classics: Robert Byron's The Road To Oxiana and Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia. There's a collection of travel essays called Hills And The Sea by the Anglo-French Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc, whose eccentric but captivating memoir The Path To Rome was one of the first books to inspire me to go on long-distance treks. There are several volumes by the wonderfully opinionated George Borrow, who wandered extensively throughout Europe, often in the company of gypsies and other nomads. And there's Gerald Brenan's South From Granada - one of the best books about Spain I have ever read.

On the second shelf (G - M!) you may be able to spot Goethe's Italian Journey; four books by Patrick Leigh Fermor, probably my favourite travel writer of all; a couple by Richard Mabey, one of the UK's finest writers on natural history; two books by the exciting, genre-busting, contemporary writer Robert Macfarlane, a master of deep, resonant, poetic prose; several by Jan/James Morris, queen of our present-day travel authors; Peter Matthiessen's classic The Snow Leopard; Arctic Dreams, that richly conceived, ground-breaking book about the Arctic by Barry Lopez; a few books from the mystically inclined English nature writer Richard Jefferies (read his spiritual autobiography The Story Of My Heart for an extraordinary description of mystical illumination on the Wiltshire downs).

On the bottom shelf (M - Z! You would have expected this) there's John Muir's Nature Writings; Eric Newby's Love And War In The Apennines; a couple of Jonathan Raban's; WG Sebald's incomparable The Rings Of Saturn; two books by Rebecca Solnit (including her brilliant Wanderlust); and two by Edward Thomas, the troubled English poet, essayist, journalist and walker (and friend of Robert Frost), who died in the first world war.

My Heart Is Like A Singing Bird

2011-11-26T18:38:00.004Z

Thanks, Rachel, for reminding me about this great song of the head and the heart by Mumford & Sons...

Apart from this song probably being at the back of my mind - I featured it on the blog in February - my poem head or heart may also have been influenced by a beautiful sonnet by Christina Rossetti...

A Birthday

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

Although we tend, poetically and romantically, to associate feelings with the heart, such emotions - like all human sentiments, thoughts, desires and actions - have their seat in the head, or, more specifically, the brain. And, whereas we tend to correlate the left hemisphere of the brain with logic, linear reasoning and numerical calculation, and the right hemisphere with more creative, intuitive and lateral thinking, our feelings and emotions are in fact bilaterally controlled. In other words, perhaps we are naturally predisposed to achieve that difficult balance between head and heart. Having said this, it doesn't seem to prevent most of us falling off the tightrope with unerring frequency.

Head And Heart

2011-11-24T19:05:00.001Z

Which do you follow, the head or the heart? I've a tendency to follow the heart - though this can often lead to deep difficulty and suffering. Do I follow the heart's wild camino or the head's safe, straight and narrow, everyday path? What if the latter is the correct and moral thing to do? Sometimes I think that life's greatest challenge is to find a symbiotic balance between the head and the heart, between reason and feeling, between logic and instinct.

head or heart

the heart says yes
the head says no
the head says stop
the heart says go

the heart acts
while the head reflects
the heart dreams
what the head rejects

the head speaks out
a warning word
the heart sings
like a soaring bird

the heart is fire
the head is ice
give me the heart
at any price?

The Books In My Life (2)

2011-11-21T15:24:00.002Z

I've seen Bob Dylan in concert around thirty times - which must make me rather more than the average fan. Fanatic may be a fairer description. The first time was at Earls Court in June 1978. We queued all night and half the next day for tickets. This was Dylan's first UK appearance in ages and London (where we were living then) rocked with excitement and expectation. The last time was at Nottingham's Capital FM Arena on 11 October this year. Although Dylan was, for him, energetic, communicative even - he stage-walked quite a bit instead of hiding away behind a keyboard - I found the gig disappointing and alienating. The music was hammeringly loud and unsubtle, almost devilish. And his guitar, keyboard and harmonica playing teetered on the edge of embarrassment. I may not go and see him again. But, as Am reminded me in a recent comment she left on my blog, he's been fading into his own parade for a while now.

All this by way of explanation why I own so many goddam Bob Dylan books. They've been begged, stolen, borrowed, gifted - occasionally even bought. You might spot the odd Neil Young, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash and Picasso (uh, how did he get there?) on these shelves - but essentially it's just Dylan, Dylan, Dylan.

The Books In My Life (1)

2011-11-17T19:35:00.006Z

Inspired by recent posts from blogfriends George and Ruth, I'm revealing today my own personal workspace. This is my study/music room/dream factory.

You can see my new iMac, my steel string guitar and my Roland keyboard and amp. On the right is the desk my son Nick often uses. Can you spot the Camino 'magnets' on his PC tower? On the window sill to the left is a wood-turned stupa (there's another one out of sight) and in the middle of the sill two halves of a coquille shell - though you can barely make them out. One of my two buddhas sits on the second bookshelf down.

Next to my desk there's a shelf full of wildlife identification guides. I refer to these constantly. My most treasured possession here is Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey's Birds Britannica - the big, orange hardback on the right.

And below is a collection of books on myth and mythology, religion and pilgrimage. Here you'll find On Pilgrimage by Jennifer Lash, A History Of God and Through The Narrow Gate by Karen Armstrong, The Imitation Of Christ by Thomas À Kempis, George Steiner's Real Presences, Dark Night Of The Soul by St John Of The Cross, The Tibetan Book Of Living And Dying, Bulfinch's Mythology, Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and those classics by Robert Graves, The Greek Myths and The White Goddess.

I Muvrini And Ana Moura

2011-11-14T21:16:00.001Z

I recently came across the music of Corsican folk group I Muvrini and Portuguese fado singer Ana Moura. Hope you enjoy!

2011-11-14T20:59:00.002Z

Celtic Twilight

2011-11-14T11:26:00.012Z

It's clear that in this poem by Yeats, one of my favourite poets, he's been influenced by old, romantic Celtic poems such as the one I highlighted here in my last post. (Yeats played a leading role in the Irish Literary Revival, also known as the 'Celtic Twilight', in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.) The 'golden apples' of the last line also recalls my recent post about the quinces/golden apples of the Garden of the Hesperides, the mythical Greek paradise.

The Song Of The Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

WB YEATS

Woodland Lovers

2011-11-10T13:02:00.002Z

While leaves were green, I gave
Veneration to my sweetheart's leafy bower.
Sweet it was awhile, my love,
To live under the birch grove,
Sweeter still to clasp fondly
Hidden together in our woodland hide,
Strolling together by the seashore,
Lingering together by the wood-shore,
Planting birches together, goodly task!
Weaving the branches together,
Love-talking with my slender girl.

An innocent occupation for a girl -

To stroll the forest with her lover,

To mirror expressions, to smile together,

To laugh together and, mouth to mouth,

To lie together in the grove,

To shun others, to complain together,

To live together kindly, drinking mead,

To repose together, to celebrate love,

To keep love's secret cordon, covertly:

Truly, I have no need to tell you more.

ANON (c. 14th century)

This poem was included in a book I brought back from Ireland with me earlier this year: The Book Of Celtic Verse: A Treasury Of Poetry, Dreams & Visions, edited by John Matthews. It's a handsome volume, hardback, and with a green and gold cover.

Quince

2011-11-05T10:15:00.010Z

When a baby is born in Slavonia and Croatia, a quince tree is planted as a symbol of fertility, love and life. WIKIPEDIA

Quince

In my poem raining quinces, the quince is meant to stand for something luscious and exotic. However, I've been vaguely concerned that the celebrated tartness of the raw fruit ran counter to my symbolic intention. So I've been doing a little research - and, thankfully, I needn't have worried. The quince is as romantically exotic as a fruit can ever be. And, although most varieties are astringent, some sweeter varieties have now been developed which can be eaten in their raw, uncooked state.

The quince, or Cydonia oblonga, is the only member of the genus Cydonia, though there are four other species belonging to separate genera - one from China and three from eastern Asia - which are closely related. It's a small, deciduous tree, growing from 5 to 8 metres tall. The flowers are pink or white, with five petals, and the fruit changes from green to a lemony yellow as it ripens. The flesh of the ripened fruit is known for its strong perfume. It's a native of the Caucasus region of south-west Asia - home to the Caucasus Mountains and Mount Elbrus, Europe's highest peak.

The Caucasus

Aphrodite

Quince cultivation is very old, and probably predated the cultivation of apples and pears - to which the quince is related. In fact, the word 'apple' in many ancient texts, including the Bible's Song Of Solomon, may often have been wrongly translated - and should be 'quince'.

References to the quince abound in Greek and Roman mythology as a symbol of love and desire or a symbol of paradise. It's the sacred fruit of Aphrodite, goddess of sex, love and beauty. It was the 'golden apple' in the Garden of the Hesperides, the mythical Greek paradise - giving its name to the Italian word for tomato, pomodoro. It was a ritual offering at weddings in Ancient Greece. And, on her wedding night, a Greek bride would eat a quince to perfume her breath before kissing her new husband - rather like we might suck on a mint today (sorry to be so unromantic!)

On the French and Spanish Caminos you're never far from a quince jelly or jam (quince is coing in French and membrillo in Spanish). Quinces are also used to make cordials, teas, wines, brandies and liqueurs. In Spain I often enjoyed dulce de membrillo, a delicious quince jelly traditionally eaten with manchego cheese.

The Golden Apple

They dined on mince, and slices of quince, / Which they ate with a runcible spoon; / And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, / They danced by the light of the moon. EDWARD LEAR

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)

As I Walked Out

2011-11-04T12:40:00.001Z

Rereading Esther Morgan's poem As I Walked Out in last Saturday's Guardian Review, I was struck by a similarity of theme with the poem I wrote yesterday, a vagabond life. Although the means of expression are quite different, both poems are about the dream of escaping from a mundane present.

As I Walked Out

Don't tell me you've never dreamed of this -
of waking in a room with a wide open window,

the air clear and ringing after night rain;
of needing no other reason than a sky

the unbelievable blue of which
sends you flitting deftly through the house

past the year-old jar of nails and flies,
the pile of dishes in the sink, and out the back door

where you're caught for an instant in the brightness
because the future's so much easier than you'd thought -

slipping your heart under the rosebush like a key,
everything you need in the canvas bag

resting lightly at your hip
and life as simple as turning left or right.

ESTHER MORGAN (From her collection Grace published by Bloodaxe)

a vagabond life

2011-11-03T13:46:00.001Z

i'd be off again
at the drop of a hat
at the swing of a stick
at the slink of a cat

at the lick of a dog
at the clang of a bell
at the wink of a star
over compostelle

at the bark of a deer
at the lilt of a lark
at the arc of a moon
in the chill of the dark

at the glow of a sun
in the bowl of the sky
at the moan of a sea
where the wild geese fly

at the scent of a rose
at the prick of a thorn
at the sigh of a breeze
at the rage of a storm

at the rush of a stream
at a kingfisher's call
at a salmon's jump
up a waterfall

at the tang of a peach
at the suck of a fig
at the leap of a frog
at the squeal of a pig

at the rim of a rock
at the roll of a stone
at the flick of a wrist
at the click of a bone

at the smile of a girl
in a flowery dress
at the press of a hand
at a lip's caress

at the flare of a match
at the gleam of a knife
i'd be off again
to a vagabond life

The influence of that Dr. Seuss gets everywhere...

Pilgrims On This Earth

2011-11-01T18:19:00.005Z

All of us are pilgrims on this earth. I have even heard it said that the earth itself is a pilgrim in the heavens. MAXIM GORKY

My Camino is done. On the way I befriended strangers, and strangers befriended me. Each night I slept in a different place, sometimes with other pilgrims in the same room. Families welcomed me into their homes and entrusted me with their children. Motorists wound down their car windows and wished me 'Bonne route!' and 'Bon courage!' Market stallholders gave me food for free, and villagers filled up my water bottles. Each day I became fitter and fitter, until mountains became mere hills, and 30 km seemed like a short but very beautiful walk in the park.

I passed churches and chapels, crosses and calvaries, shrines and sepulchres - the sacred places. I followed shell signs and stone markers. I had a mini-spiritual crisis at a hunting lodge in the middle of an ancient forest and wrote this poem about it. I did not pray much - I find it difficult to do so - but I had many prayerful silences and secular meditations. I remembered, and honoured in thought, my sister and my parents.

I met with the kindness of strangers and, hopefully, gave back some small thing in return, perhaps some reflected Camino glow, some bohemian rhapsody. I witnessed natural wonders which made my spirit soar and my heart sing. I encountered great beauty, and some of that beauty rubbed off on me, and touched my soul.

So, my Camino is done. And a new Camino begins. It is always thus. One door closes, another door opens. Or, as Eliot put it in Four Quartets, The end is where we start from. Already I feel a change happening in my life. On the practical, workaday level there's the glimmer of a possibility of a whole new career. And, on the more important spiritual level, I hope I've learnt a little about about giving, about friendship, about beauty, about love; and I keep faith that at least some of this fragile sense of love and beauty may leak out into everything I do in the usual and everyday world, the world outside the special 'bubble' that is the Camino.

The thirst that from the soul doth rise / Doth ask a drink divine... BEN JONSON Song To Celia

Le Puy-En-Velay (2)

2011-10-31T14:08:00.006Z

A pretty corner of Le Puy.

Trust the civilised French to have civilised dogs! I thought this was rather sweet, and would have entered out of curiosity, but I felt embarrassed without a canine companion.

A fountain in the centre of the square next to the Préfecture.

The cathedral and the Virgin on the rock.

The cathedral just before the sun came out from behind a dark cloud.

Le Puy from the Virgin on the rock.

Le Puy's new town.

I climbed a spiral staircase, then a ladder, inside the hollow, bronze figure of the Virgin, and stared out through her eyes. Bizarre!

A cross overlooking Le Puy's new town.

As I stood next to the Virgin, the sun suddenly emerged from behind a black cloud, and the unmistakeable shape of a coquille Saint-Jacques fanned out towards me across the heavens.

Le Puy-En-Velay (1)

2011-10-31T08:27:00.011Z

Entering Le Puy.

The bell tower of the cathedral is on the left; the bronze statue of Our Lady, Notre Dame de France, is on the right.

A warren of backstreets and alleyways takes you steeply up to the cathedral.

Inside the cathedral you come across a wooden statue of Saint James near the altar. It was in this exact spot four years ago that the Bishop of Le Puy invited me to take from a basket some folded notes containing supplications from parishioners and visitors who were suffering or in distress. I was asked to pray for these people on my way to Santiago.

Leaving the cathedral via the west porch.

Looking out over Le Puy from the west porch.

The western facade of the cathedral is magnificent. Note the Arabic influence on the architecture. The arches, pilasters and geometrical patterning of the stonework reminded me strongly of Córdoba cathedral in Spain. The white stone is sandstone; the brown stone is volcanic breccia.

I stood in this place four years ago at the start of my two month pilgrimage from Le Puy to Santiago. This is the photo I took then.

Cows And Crosses

2011-10-30T17:56:00.001Z

Here's another impressive outcrop of extruded igneous basalt - rock formed by rapidly cooling volcanic lava. You can see why certain configurations of this rock have been likened to organ pipes...

I entered the church at Saint-Germain-Laprade. It's one of the oldest in the region, some of the interior stonework dating from the 10th century...

This is one of my favourite photos, featuring two of the consistent themes of the Chemin: cows and crosses...

It was the last day of my journey. I was in no hurry, for I didn't...

... want it...

... to end...

I caught up with Michel and Brigitte, two pilgrim friends, at a bar in Brives-Charensac...

... then crossed the river...

... and followed the riverside path for the remaining few kilometres to Le Puy...

My Feet Are Singing

2011-10-30T01:31:00.005+01:00

Anyone fancy a volcano tour?

I stand the risk of being guilty of hyperbole, but I can honestly say that this, the penultimate day of my journey, was scenically the most magnificent. After the watershed of Raffy, my eyes fell upon a truly ravishing landscape of wooded hills and extinct volcanoes. After several hours of climbing through dense forest, this view was a revelation, almost an epiphany. Wave upon wave of flat-topped peaks and ridges receded to a hazy horizon...

What an idyllic place for a midday picnic! In fact I did have my lunch here, and a little siesta...

Who wouldn't want to live in this stone cottage...

... overlooking such a spectacular landscape?

I'm now approaching the village of Queyrières...

Look closely and you will see that it lies at the foot of a huge and impressive lump of volcanic basalt rock...

I was once again blessed with warm and sunny weather. This, plus the captivating scenery, combined to turn the day into a kind of sensual ecstasy. I was not tired, I was quite fit now, there was no strain on my body. As they say in pilgrim circles, my feet were 'singing'. I'll let the pictures do the talking, for there is no way I can adequately describe this sublime landscape or the happy mood I was in...

Nearing Saint-Julien-Chapteuil, I was almost reluctant to admit that the day was coming to a close. My feelings of joy and gratitude were starting to be tinged with a bittersweet nostalgia, and a pricking sadness that my pilgrimage would soon be at an end...

Here's the church at Saint-Julien and its wonderful facade, in the evening sunlight's glow...

On Top Of The World

2011-10-29T05:37:00.000+01:00

Red berries of autumn.

Sign opposite the tourist office in Tence. Le Puy lies only 42 km away.

Beautiful autumnal trees.

A perfect country scene.

A colourful corner of the garden.

This cairn near Raffy marks the highest point of the whole Chemin: 1276 metres above sea level.

Looking back from Raffy over the day's route. Note the tall seed heads of rosebay willowherb in the foreground (called fireweed in the US).

il pleut des coings

2011-10-28T17:54:00.003+01:00

raining quinces

farewell to the land of luscious fruit

where apples hang like rosy pink lanterns

and pumpkins swell like pregnant farmgirls

and bunches of grapes are purple chandeliers

and succulent figs so wickedly feminine

they seem barely legal

i’m back in the land of bitter sloes

where crab apples lie wasted in the orchards

hips and haws food only for the fieldfares

and blackberries are shrivelled up and tart

but it’s always raining quinces

in my heart

La Forêt De Taillard And Beyond

2011-10-28T03:32:00.010+01:00

Early next morning I left the town of Bourg-Argental, followed the course of an old railway track along a river valley, then climbed for many hours through extensive woodland...

Every now and then you had a brief glimpse of a view, but mostly you were hemmed in by the trees...

I took a well-earned rest at this shelter and information hut...

In fact I was traversing the huge forest of Taillard...

I came upon this oddly shaped cairn built on a tree stump. I was getting very hot and tired by now, and, try as I might, I couldn't prevent my fevered, scatalogical imagination from telling me this was a lump of petrified dinosaur poo. Well, it could be, couldn't it..?

Exhausted, I almost collapsed into the auberge, La Riboule, in the hamlet of Les Sétoux. I needed a rest. I needed to eat. Most of all I needed a drink. It was only an ordinary place, but to me it was extraordinary that day, and the food and the wine were very good, as they are virtually everywhere in France. After an entrée of Puy lentils with hard-boiled eggs, and a main course of pork escalopes and potatoes cooked in milk and butter, and half a bottle of rosé wine, I felt on top of the world. And, in a sense, I literally was on top of the world, or my woodland micro-world, for, at 1142 metres, this was the highest point on the day's path...

After Les Sétoux the uninterrupted forest fragmented into a mixed landscape of sloping fields and densely packed conifer plantations...

It was then I noticed that, according to the map in my guide book, I'd just passed a little spot called 'Germany', and that a place called 'Moscow' lay only a few kilometres away. First 'Rome', now this! It was a veritable microcosm of toute l'Europe in these hills...

Later I stayed the night with a lovely French family, experiencing another accueil jacquaire. Alain and Corinne were most friendly and welcoming. In the morning their sweet and impeccably well brought up children, Thomas and Adeline, were very keen to don their own rucksacks and accompany me 100 metres to the road. The pilgrim mentality seems to be instilled at an early age round here!

November Comes Early

2011-10-27T07:29:00.018+01:00

Another poem I wrote in my head in bed last night. I feel inspired at the moment. I wonder why? Perhaps it's something to do with this season of 'mellow fruitfulness' - garnering the rich pickings of the heart. Though I'm not sure my heart is yet ripe enough. Are our hearts ever mature? I'm jumping the gun a little on November but, hey, I've always been rather impatient. It's a trait of those born under the Scorpio sign. Yes - my birthday is next month too.

November

Now it's begun: the slow slide towards winter.
Heating pipes cough and splutter into life.
Men recall heydays with a summer wife.
Logs burning in the grate crackle and splinter.
Stores full of Santas, but no queues are forming.
Shoppers fret about the financial crisis.
Shopkeepers worry how loaded the dice is.
Kitsch snow scenes out of synch with global warming.
In the woods, chestnut gatherers, mushroom pickers.
Lovers longing for one final tryst
Before the forest floor is damp with mist
And the earth dank as a harlot's knickers.
Wellingtons. Warm, woolly underclothes.
And on the briar one last, wanton rose.

Chavanay To Bourg-Argental: The Path To Paradise

2011-10-27T00:06:00.003+01:00

Chavanay.

Between Chavanay and Bessey.

The church at Bessey.

This way to Paradise.

View from the woods.

Someone's lovely driveway.

Landscape with horses.

The church at Saint-Julien-Molin-Molette. A friendly bar owner from this village phoned a hotel, Le Relais, in Bourg-Argental to book a room for me.

Paradise in sight: the approach to Bourg-Argental. For the moment, a perfect world.

Chavanay

2011-10-26T08:49:00.001+01:00

A broad and fertile valley beyond Revel-Tourdan.

There's always someone who doesn't follow the crowd, isn't there? Thank God.

Colourful caterpillar.

Following a shorter, variant route through the Bois de Taravas, I soon approached a more mountainous landscape.

After a long day covering more than 30 km, I crossed the Rhône and entered the riverside town of Chavanay. The old part of town lay just up a valley of vine-clad slopes.

I spent the night at a communal gîte next to the church with other French, German and Swiss walkers. It was a Sunday, and most places were shut, but we managed to find a small restaurant - with a proper pizza oven - that was open, so we enjoyed an excellent pizza washed down with rosé wine. Before this we'd eaten delicious sweet chestnuts which some French pilgrims had gathered along the day's route, then simmered in water for an hour in the gîte.

The restored chapelle du Calvaire above Chavanay.

A simple stone alcove and cross behind the chapelle du Calvaire.

Last sight of Chavanay in the early morning mist.

The Way continues. Only 1631 more km to Compostelle!

L'Escapade

2011-10-25T06:06:00.004+01:00

Since Le Grand Lemps I'd been walking along the northern slope of a wide and fertile, flat-bottomed valley...

Characteristic of this area was the unusual and attractive nature of its building materials...

You would find examples of this herringbone-patterned stonework everywhere: on walls and on drinking fountains...

... on lavoirs...

... and on churches...

I left the ridge...

... and crossed a flat plain of cereal crops. Here a farmer is turning hay...

... at the edge of a field of harvested maize...

The lane-sides were full of teasel, scabious, centaury and marjoram. Purple-flowering mint crowded the stream-sides. Hedges were heavy with fat, black sloes and other berries, but the blackberries were shrivelled or had been eaten. I passed a fig tree. I admired the tightened cups of the wild carrot's seed heads (I think wild carrot is known as Queen Anne's lace in the US). Chestnuts and acorns rolled under my feet. A rabbit lolloped into the undergrowth.

I rested for a while on a bench near a pond in the village of Faramans. Then, at Pommier-de-Beaurepair, climbed a wooded ridge which took me to Revel-Tourdan, where I spent the night at an auberge called 'L'Escapade' (faire une escapade - 'to run away on an exciting, perhaps risky, adventure...')

Berlioz And Jongkind

2011-10-24T09:27:00.014+01:00

Bidding goodbye to Roland and Elizabeth, I regained the Way - which headed first through woods then along country roads. Suddenly out of the mist came a procession of grey-clad nuns, their leader carrying a large cross. It was surreal - like a scene from some Bunuel film. I greeted them, and they smiled timidly, but said not a word. Perhaps they were a little shy of talking to a tall, unshaven stranger? In the fog I must have seemed like a startling apparition to them. Later someone told me that they were completely lost! I wonder if they had been trying to get to Rome which, according to this sign, was only 0.2 km away...

By noon the sun was blazing down again, and I had a beer in the attractive, typically French commune of Le Grand Lemps. It was market day and the streets bustled with life. I love French markets, so I spent quite a long time there soaking up the atmosphere and buying some bits and pieces for lunch. At a cheese stall I pointed to a small round of local cheese. 'I'll take that one,' I said. The stall owner - a bohemian-looking girl with nose studs and long, braided hair - asked if I was a pilgrim. When I said yes, she insisted I took the cheese without payment...

This sign on the road out of Le Grand Lemps reminded me that the famous composer Hector Berlioz was born in La Côte-St-André, my day's destination...

This is the approach to La Côte-St-André. You turn left at the castle on the hill and approach the town through a maze of stone staircases and alleyways and these formal gardens until you emerge at an old, timber-framed market hall...

This lovely hotel, the Hôtel de France, was beyond my budget, so I stayed at the cheaper, delightfully eccentric, pilgrim-friendly Hôtel de l'Europe instead...

La Côte-St-André was the home of Dutch painter Johan Jongkind. He died here and lies buried in the cemetery. Jongkind was a forerunner of Impressionism and influenced Claude Monet...

We Need To Talk About Kevin

2011-10-23T10:25:00.022+01:00

Yesterday we went to see the new film by Lynne Ramsay, We Need To Talk About Kevin, at Nottingham's Broadway Cinema. Any film with Tilda Swinton in it is a memorable event for me - I think she's one of our finest screen performers. I'm not crazy about those self-conscious, self-promoting, dumb blonde, Big Hollywood Stars; give me intelligent, offbeat, left-field actresses any day, women like Vanessa Redgrave, Sissy Spacek, Nastassja Kinski or Hanna Schygulla.

Swinton plays Eva, the tortured mother of horror-child Kevin. Kevin starts out bad, and becomes, well, evil is probably not strong enough a word. Is the mother to blame, at least in part, for Kevin turning into a sociopath who kills his father, sister and many of his schoolmates with a bow and arrow? Or was he just born like that, some depraved Robin Hood of our twisted times? The film doesn't really resolve this, and the nature/nurture debate is left hanging - as it must be, for these are hugely difficult, complex and contentious issues.

It's a brilliant movie, and Swinton's performance is breathtakingly good - so taut and nervy you feel your own nerve ends jangling throughout - but it's also extremely shocking and disturbing, so don't go see it if you want a mindless, relaxed evening. The story is propelled largely in images - and many of these images are, significantly, blood-red. (You'll never forget that early scene at the Spanish tomato festival.) The film uses a fragmented, impressionistic technique of flashbacks and flashforwards which perfectly mirrors the state of Eva's mind. And the filmic soundscape of pneumatic drills, lawn sprinklers, water gurgling up from blocked sinks, fingernails scraping on glass and Country and Western music (which ironically counterpoints, and objectifies, the suburban horror) is cleverly conceived.

Saint Genix To Le Pin

2011-10-21T18:54:00.023+01:00

This stage of the route was not as demanding as yesterday's, and I easily managed 30 km. Any traces of early morning mist vanished as the sun climbed, and the day turned fine and warm. I passed a lavoir, or public washing-place, where, in the old days, women of the village would congregate to wash their clothes. One can imagine it must have been a social as well as a laundry event...

Not far from the lavoir I came across this old stone barn...

... and this cross, la Croix du Brocard...

In Les Abrets I drank a cup of coffee, and in Valencogne appreciated this homespun but lovingly tended Camino 'tower'. Who says that something which looks at first glance like a public toilet can't be a temenos? The coquilles were unmistakable...

... and another small statue of Saint James occupied the niche...

The countryside became softer and flatter now, with gently rolling hills and shallow, populated valleys. Cows grazed placidly in green pastures, and I noted crops of maize, sunflowers and the occasional strip of millet. The landscape here reminded me of Burgundy, but with more trees...

This view of cultivated fields and scattered homesteads was particularly pleasing...

I saw a dead snake lying crushed on the road. The road margins were lined with yellow St John's Wort, the well known medicinal plant. Back on the path, grasshoppers bounced out of my way, flashing the blue (sometimes red) undersides of their wings (I thought they were dragonflies for an instant). I peeked down a private track at this old farm...

After Valencogne the Way followed a ridge densely forested with sweet chestnut trees. The path through this arboreal paradise was quite magical. Split chestnut husks crunched beneath my boots. A red squirrel scampered daintily past and shimmied up a tree. (Red squirrels are rare in England, where they are on the run from the ubiquitous and aggressive grey squirrel, an American 'import'.) A vocal, lone raven flew directly overhead, discussing something indecipherable with itself. Buzzards mewed and drifted across the sky. And jays - those avian guardians of the forest - screeched raucously at my approach, sounding for all the world like the noisy parakeets I'd heard a year before in Málaga.

Every now and then a lizard skittered through the fallen leaves. And a dormouse - blue-grey above, white underneath, with huge eyes and ears and a very long tail - careered brokenly across the path, veering now left, now right, then freezing and gulping air uncomprehendingly. It was obviously suffering from some serious injury - perhaps a brain injury, as its body looked unmarked. I hadn't the courage to put it out of its misery, and walked on, vaguely troubled. I had never seen a dormouse before in the wild - they are so rare in Britain - and was grieved to find my first one in such a lamentable state.

Once I was out of the forest, the views opened up again. Here's a shot of distant cliffs taken from a field of harvested maize...

Towards the end of the afternoon I dreamt my way down to the village of Le Pin. It's lovely, don't you think?

Here I stayed the night with Roland and Elizabeth, a most kind and friendly retired couple who open their house to pilgrims at a modest recompense. They were so generous to me, the Solitary Walker, and I will never forget them. I had a shower. I washed my clothes. I dined with them, and we talked long into the evening. (I had to speak in French, for they spoke little English - so it was pretty exhausting!)

For dinner they gave me an aperitif (they'd already pressed on me a couple of refreshing beers on my arrival), a salad entrée, a main course of spiced chicken and rice (with wine, naturellement!), a selection of a dozen local cheeses, an ice-cream, chocolate and cream dessert, and a Chartreuse cocktail digestif. When I asked how they could possibly afford to give all their pilgrim guests such an expensive digestif, they replied with a wink: 'We don't give it to everybody. Just the special ones!' I felt so touched and moved by this...

Leonard Cohen: Five Songs

2011-10-20T19:21:00.003+01:00

2011-10-20T19:21:00.002+01:00

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2011-10-20T19:20:00.000+01:00

A Tiny Statue Of Saint James

2011-10-20T10:46:00.008+01:00

Climbing up into the woods above Yenne, I looked back on the village through the early morning mist. You can see that it has a wonderful situation, nestled beneath ranges of hills and mountains...

I soon reached Notre-Dame-de-la-Montagne (Our Lady of the Mountain). This chapel had won a prize for its renovation work. The sun quickly burnt off the mist and the temperature soared again...

From this belvedere I drank in stunning views of the Rhône valley...

The path that day - from Yenne to Saint Genix - was a strenuous one, traversing huge forests high above the Rhône. No sooner had you descended one slope than you were faced with another steeper one. The path was stony too, which was hard on the feet. At least the trees provided some welcome shade from the sweltering sun. I identified box, birch, oak, walnut, sycamore and sweet chestnut. More stone crosses punctuated the route...

Here's quite a new one, erected in 2008, and inscribed with the totemic Camino watchword: Ultreia! You are all expert shell-seekers by now, so I'm sure you've spotted the coquille on the shaft of the cross...

I stopped for a bite to eat at a wooden hunting lodge in the middle of the Bois de Glaize. Some pilgrims were already there, and others arrived soon afterwards. Where do they all come from? This hunting lodge and the stone cross below were two of the inspirations behind my poem 'A Prayer'...

This wayside cross, these offerings / Of stones and flowers crowding the base, / This niche / Jammed with a tiny statue of Saint James...

This could be a representation of Saint James or Saint Roch - the two are often pretty much interchangeable in these parts. Both saints are guiding lights of the Camino.

After a final hour-long slog - which took me almost to the summit of Mont Tournier - I skirted the peak and made a gradual descent out of the forest and into a gentler landscape of farm and pasture - many fields grazed by the familiar brown and white, or light brown, cattle. Just look at those impressive limestone cliffs at the head of the valley...

I finally arrived at the hamlet of Grésin, which lies just before Saint Genix, my day's destination...

Yenne Interlude

2011-10-19T10:12:00.010+01:00

I climbed up to the chapel of Saint Romanus...

... where I encountered these three pilgrims...

They didn't have much to say, so I bid them 'bon courage' and moved on...

On the other side of the chapel I began a steep, slippery descent down to the river valley. I was glad I had my walking poles. The views were simply breathtaking...

The pathway cut through fields of maize...

... leading me to the delightful small town of Yenne...

... where I spent the night at the Clos des Capucins, an ancient abbey dating from the 17th century. Nowadays it's a residential seminary with meeting rooms, excellent bedrooms and a canteen. I paid just over €40 for demi-pension accommodation which included a large, individual bedroom, en-suite, with a power shower and a peaceful view overlooking a grassy courtyard, a superb four course dinner with wine (it was actually more of a restaurant than a canteen, with waitress service) and breakfast the next morning. Not bad, don't you think? And, ah, the cuisine! It seems the French are genetically incapable of producing a bad meal. I ate at a table with two other pilgrims, and we had a great time. The photo shows the old part of the seminary. There's also another building - modern but sympathetically constructed - out of sight on the left, joined to the abbey by a connecting corridor...

I liked Yenne very much. Here's a collection of roofs which caught my eye...

... and here, at a café table in the centre of Yenne, I'm enjoying a beer with four other pilgrims...

There were lots of pretty corners like this in the backstreets...

... and in the church I found a coquille, carved in wood, under a seat in the choir stalls...

Old Friends

2011-10-18T06:31:00.014+01:00

There's a certain type of old, childhood friend, isn't there, who's so familiar to you that you can predict nearly everything they're going to say and do. But that's kind of all right, as just their presence alone reminds you fondly of your youth, when every day was excitingly unpredictable.

Pink Floyd, I recall, once wrote a piece called 'Comfortably Numb', but this one's called 'Comfortably Bored'. I wrote it in my head in bed last night - two places where I write many of my poems.

Comfortably Bored

You really bored me with your drunken talk
Of God and Kant and Wittgenstein,
Of long weekends in Crete and crap Greek wine,
Of kidney problems and the parlous state
Of heart, lungs, liver, bowels and prostate,
Of lack of sex and too much sodding telly,
Of shrinking brain cells and a widening belly,
Of Natalie on Strictly, of divorce,
Of how you should have backed that bloody horse.

You really bored me, but I heard you out.
Even when you started to rant and shout
I still half-listened (also spent some time
Tinkering with this poem and its rhyme),
For this is how old friends fill up their days:
Boring each other in comfortable ways.

The Vineyards Of Savoie

2011-10-16T10:04:00.002+01:00

The path from Chanaz to Yenne was one of the loveliest stages on the whole Chemin. The warm, sunny weather and spectacular scenery combined to lift the spirits. It was wonderful to walk - indeed just to be alive - in such a place and on such a day.

A shell sign points the way

Vines, hills, mountains

Grape picking (1)

Grape picking (2)

The Rhône valley (1)

The Rhône valley (2)

Two pilgrims and a baguette

Red roofs, green fields

The vineyards of Savoie

The Dust Of Stars

2011-10-14T14:30:00.004+01:00

I've been thinking a lot about the Camino recently, its history and meaning. I've also been playing around with a Camino poem, which has ended up as a song or poem medieval pilgrims might have sung or chanted as they made their way towards Santiago, Rome or Jerusalem. They must have thought a great deal about their difficult yet rewarding journey together as pilgrim brothers and sisters through strange lands of endless plains and unfamiliar mountains - enduring harsh climates, predatory bandits and painful feet. They must have reflected long and hard on their lives - past, present and future - and on God and the universe. In my imagination this poem or song could well have been translated from medieval French or English...

Pilgrim Song

We are a mystery to ourselves
And a mystery to others.
What are we?

We are the sound of church bells ringing.
We are the smell of incense swinging.
We are the sight of kirk and shrine.
We are the taste of bread and wine.

We are the living and the life.
We are the struggle and the strife.
We are the breathing and the breath.
We are the dying and the death.

We are the hunger and the thirst.
We are the best and the very worst.
We are united in one desire.
We are the flame, we are the fire.

We are the dream of the skylark's song.
We are the right, we are the wrong.
We are the peacock's rainbow tail.
We are the ship, we are the sail.

We are the gale that blows so strong.
We are the singer and the song.
We are the tension and release:
The killing hawk and the dove of peace.

We are the mouse, we are the whale.
We are the hare, we are the snail.
We are at rest and then in motion.
We are the raindrop and the ocean.

We are the teller and the tale.
We are the quest, we are the grail.
We are the path and the destination.
We are the loss and the separation.

We are the joy, we are the sorrow.
We are today and the tomorrow.
We are what was and what will be:
The agony and the ecstasy.

We are the evil and the good.
We are the drought, we are the flood.
We are the riddle and the key.
We are the cross, we are the tree.

We are the touch of hand on hand
Joined in prayer in a foreign land
On a pilgrimage through heaven and hell
Stumbling towards Compostelle.

We are the world.
We are the sun, the moon.
The universe.
The dust of stars.

The dust of stars.

Remember This Beauty

2011-10-13T17:20:00.007+01:00

Leaving Chanaz, I climbed up into the foothills overlooking the Rhône valley. In this grassy compound I found, as usual, the barking dogs...

... but also, bizarrely, a mute stuffed one in a tree...

I approached the tiny chapel of Orgeval...

... where I read this touching note, fixed between plastic strands of pink plastic roses ...

The Chemin enticed me onwards along its shady lanes...

Fields of maize gradually gave way to pastureland and vineyards. Here the grapes have been picked. But where are the grape pickers?

This was a lovely spot. Note the curving track, the cows and the sinuous line of the hill...

It was very warm and sunny - just a few clouds in a blue, blue sky. The views opened up - vast yet intimate panoramas like this...

It was a wonderful day. I see that I wrote in my diary: Do not forget such days. And: Remember this beauty.

On The Banks Of The Rhône

2011-10-12T08:32:00.003+01:00

For the next three days I would walk close to the Rhône, sometimes on forest footpaths high above the river, sometimes along its very banks. Here are my backpack and trekking poles - and yet another shell marker. It also looks like a starburst or a sun...

I passed a road bridge, Le Pont de la Loi. The mountain behind is Le Grand Colombier...

This day, Monday 19 September, was to be my last day of rain. For the rest of the trip I enjoyed wall-to-wall sunshine. Sleek, brown slugs commandeered the path. Walnuts rained down from the walnut trees. I scooped some up and broke the shells. Difficult to find a perfect kernel - the freshly fallen ones were too unripe and pulpy, the older ones too bitter (apparently you have to keep them just a day or two - no longer). I walked through what my guide book called the biggest poplar forest in Europe, then finally, late in the afternoon, emerged at the small riverside resort of Chanaz. I was feeling very tired, exhausted in fact...

Chanaz was ravishingly pretty. When I was there it was very quiet, but in the summer it must be teeming with visitors. There's a marina. There are boat trips. There are picturesque backstreets with artisan craft shops and delicatessens. And there are lots of flowers...

I spent the night in a chalet on a camping and caravan site, and slept on-and-off for twelve hours. The next morning I felt so much better. It's amazing what a good night's sleep can do. I breakfasted on a café terrace in the centre of the village...

... and, at 10 o'clock (quite a late start for me), headed back into the hills, appreciating this old water-powered oil mill on the way...

Coquille Saint Jacques

2011-10-11T10:53:00.001+01:00

A word about my blog's new header photo. I took it from the Notre Dame de France (a bronze statue of the Virgin Mary which overlooks Le Puy) just before sunset on the last day of my pilgrimage. The sun stayed hidden for what seemed an eternity, then suddenly began to appear. You can actually see individual sunbeams as they stream out in fan formation from behind the clouds...

And, as someone pointed out to me, if you look closely enough, you can make out the distinct shape of a coquille Saint Jacques...

The 360% view from my standpoint, this rock of the 'Red Virgin', was simply amazing...

... as I gazed out over the rooftops of Le Puy...

... at the landscape through which I'd walked the previous day...

A Photographic Portrait Of Seyssel

2011-10-10T11:20:00.003+01:00

The charming little town of Seysell is a town of two departments.

On one side of the river Rhône lies Seyssel de l'Ain, and on the other lies Seyssel de la Haute-Savoie.

Connecting the two halves is a fine suspension bridge, built in the 19th century.

Its central tower - upon which stands a statue of Our Lady - is made of the light-coloured, locally quarried Seysell stone.

This stone was also the stone used to construct much of Geneva, Annecy, Chambéry and Lyon.

I love these gaily painted walls and shutters.

I stayed the night at the Hotel Beau Séjour. As you can see, this riverbank hotel was hard to miss. It offered an excellent room with shower at a special pilgrim rate. At dinner in the restaurant I tried a couple of the regional white wines which excited me a great deal with their fragrance and quality: a Chardonnay (don't think boring, unsubtle, homogeneous New World Chardonnay here - this is quite different) and a local grape variety called Roussette - mineral dry, soft and light as new spring grass in an alpine meadow, flowery and fruity and pear-scented.

In the church of Seyssel de l'Ain I found a Black Virgin.

From Seyssel de l'Ain the welcome evening sunshine lit up Seyssel de la Haute-Savoie across the river.

To take this picture I stood under the central arch of the suspension bridge across the Rhône, halfway between Seyssel de l'Ain and Seyssel de la Haute-Savoie.

Caravans, Croissants And The Museum Of The Cow

2011-10-09T15:34:00.010+01:00

That second night I spent in Frangy in a beat-up old caravan on a run-down campsite/mobile-home park. The tyres had long been punctured, the interior laminate was peeling off the chipboard fittings, and the door didn't shut - but I slept like a baby. An ancient crone of a patronne, her hair in rollers, beckoned me into her lair early next morning for coffee, croissants and a huge slice of flan. I left the unremarkable commune of Frangy in the rain, passing these colourful dwellings and gardens...

Denying myself the dubious pleasure of a visit to the 'Museum of the Cow'...

... I crossed the bridge out of town, as the downpour became even more torrential...

Here's an example of a modern, timber-built Savoyard house. Note the typical feature of the overhanging roof - important for protecting walls, doors and windows from the elements, for depositing snow away from the house, and for keeping dry the stored logs...

Once again the stormy weather gradually cleared throughout the day...

... as I made my way through a succession of small villages and isolated hamlets: Champagne, Tangy, Vannecy, Desingy, Pelly, Moucherin, Curty and Chez-Cudet. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure where this is...

But I do remember that I was pleased the sun had come out at last, illuminating this pretty corner of the village of les Côtes d'en Haut...

I diverted from the main route here, taking a variant path which led steeply down to the attractive Rhône-side town of Seyssel...

Chartreuse De Pomier

2011-10-08T16:24:00.005+01:00

Leaving Beaumont the next day, I found Saint James keeping watch over the Place de l'Église...

Soon I passed the Chartreuse de Pomier, originally a Carthusian monastery, founded in 1170. I love the Chinese lanterns hanging from the trees. This grand and historic building is now used for weddings, conferences and conventions...

The stone portico at the entrance is all that remains from the 12th century...

Rain showers set in during the morning, but by mid-afternoon all was dry and bright again. Low clouds drifted up the valleys...

At one point I had to skip rather abruptly over an electric fence to make way for this herd of cows...

More wayside crosses punctuated the route. Note the stones left by pilgrims to mark their journey...

Here I'm looking across wooded hills and valleys towards the Alps, as the afternoon becomes ever warmer...

I spent a few moments contemplating this beautifully situated and sympathetically constructed Marian shrine. It has the air of a fairy grotto about it...

The views were superb as your gaze opened out from unharvested crops of maize in the foreground, across swathes of dark green forest and a patchwork of lighter green pasturage, to a formidable mountainscape of sheer white cliffs in the distance...

RIP Bert Jansch

2011-10-07T20:55:00.000+01:00

RIP Bert Jansch (3 November 1943 - 5 October 2011)

So many of us loved you and your music.

Cows, Boots And Cheese

2011-10-07T12:25:00.008+01:00

Cows are curious animals, in both senses. I like them very much...

Here a solitary young heifer eyes up a Solitary Walker...

I soon approached this renovated chapel near the small village of Vernières...

... and here's a delightful cottage-corner of the village. Can you spot the Solitary Walker's reflection in the window?

Note the pilgrim boots...

Passing another old, stone cross...

... I gazed back on more stunning views...

The trees looked magnificent in the warm sunshine...

... and the scenery just got better and better...

Eventually I arrived at the gîte in Beaumont, an old artisan cheese-maker's house with a spanking new roof (just as well, for there was a storm in the night, with much rain, thunder and lightning)...

This is the walkway into the gîte. Lovely, don't you think? Note the coquilles. I hung up my washing there later...

This was the end of only my first day on this glorious Chemin, and I'd already seen so much...

Signs And Markers

2011-10-06T12:12:00.015+01:00

I was pleased to see that the Swiss care for the toads crossing their roads...

At Compesières I passed the church of Saint Sylvester and the commandry of the Order of Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem...

And in Charrot I marvelled at this plot of artichokes. I had no idea they wore these purple crowns...

On all the Caminos you'll find cathedrals, churches, chapels, calvaries, sanctuaries, shrines and simple crosses like this...

Here the pilgrim is invited to stamp his or her pilgrim passport (or créanciale or credential)...

I soon arrived at the Swiss-French border. It was a simple matter to side-step the red and white barrier. Not a soul was in sight, neither pilgrim nor customs officer...

... so I didn't have to produce one single document of identification...

This sign at Les Combes proved that, authenticated or not, I was at least on the right track...

Hey, only 1854 more km to Santiago!

These helpful signboards cropped up continually along the route...

Via Gebennensis

2011-10-04T14:24:00.023+01:00

I've just returned from a momentous and stunning Camino. Between 16 September and 30 September I made a pilgrimage from Geneva in Switzerland to Le Puy-en-Velay in France. That's a distance of 360 km at an average of 24 km a day. I walked through five different French départements: Haute-Savoie, Savoie, Isère, Loire and Haute-Loire. The familiar blue and yellow coquilles Saint Jacques signs marked the way immaculately throughout. The route follows the same path as the French long-distance GR (Grande Randonnée) 65 - so there were plenty of white-on-red blazes, or balises, to point out the direction too. It was hard to get lost - though I did so temporarily once or twice, as is my custom.

After two mornings and one full day of rain, I enjoyed glorious sunshine for the rest of the trip, the temperature hovering somewhere between a very warm 20%C and a very hot 30%C. The shade of vast and numerous forests provided welcome relief from the heat. There were good accommodations, ranging from simple gîtes to nice hotels. Best and most rewarding of all were the accueils jacquaires - here families invite you to become part of their household for the evening. You sleep in their house, you dine and have breakfast with them, you talk with them. They charge a modest sum for this. It's a privilege and an honour for a pilgrim-stranger to partake uniquely in this kind of local family life for a while. The trust and openness you experience is very special indeed.

This route is a treasure, and the Camino's best kept secret. I won't deny it's a strenuous route - there are few days when you're on the flat. But it's a beautiful route - mountainous, sure, though foothills rather than alpine peaks. This is a path for the walker not the climber! One meets very few English or Americans on it, but it's well known to the Germans and the Swiss.

I set out from Geneva on Friday 16 September in a positive and ebullient mood. How could you not enjoy life as you step out on a new Camino on a warm and sunny day, full of hope and expectation? Geneva's neo-classically designed theatre looked very distinguished under an overarching sky of cerulean blue...

Very soon an early coquille marker in Geneva's old quarter confirmed the way...

In Geneva's Protestant Cathedral of Saint Peter I found a stained glass window depicting the Apostle Saint James, guiding light of the Camino. Note the sandals, the staff and the shell on the hat...

John Knox preached and Calvin taught in this 13th century chapel next to the cathedral...

In need of a little reformation myself, I pressed onwards - ever eager to rediscover the transforming power of the Camino - through Geneva's delightful old town with its rather Italianate-looking squares...

... until I arrived at the lovely suburb of Carouge...

... with its fine and subtly painted buildings...

On the very outskirts of the city I was captivated by this crude, hand-crafted sign indicating the direction to Santiago - a mere 1850 km away...

The auguries looked good as I strode along the path to Paradise Pond...

... and these two contented donkeys proved for the moment that all seemed well, at least in this small corner of Europe, on such a wonderful morning...

A Prayer

2011-09-24T08:32:00.006+01:00

(Written on a pilgrimage from Geneva to Le Puy)

Dear God,
If You care,
Please help me.

If You are there
At the end of this prayer,
Give me a sign.

Though I can hardly speak,
And my signal is weak,
Reply if You can.

Even if You disguise your response
In the wind whispering through the birch trees
On the foothills of the mountains of Haute-Savoie,

Or in the murmur of the turquoise streams
Rushing with purpose down their rocky chutes,

Or in the scamperings of woodland mice
Seeking the knife-parings of pilgrims' cheese
Beneath this rough-hewn bench and table
Before this wooden hunting lodge.

Dear God,
If You care,
If You are there,
Please help me,
For now I need You more than ever,
And I am desperate to find meaning
In something more than landscape.

Dear God, You could say,
In a way, all my vain pilgrimages
Have led up to this time, this place:

This wayside cross, these offerings
Of stones and flowers crowding the base,
This niche
Jammed with a tiny statue of Saint James,
This stumbling prayer,
This weak and human message,
This plea, this faint voice
Appealing to You
Over the vast green forestlands
Of this jag-peaked and beautiful country.

Kim's Camino

2011-09-14T16:59:00.004+01:00

Pilgrim Kim from Key West has made a wonderful film about her Camino and you can find it here on Rebekah Scott's terrific blog Big Fun In A Tiny Pueblo. I find it artistic and atmospheric, spiritual and mystical. It appeals to the romantic in me. And it draws me back magically, magnetically to the Camino. Hope you enjoy. (Be sure to put it on full screen.)

Nearly Heaven

2011-09-12T16:24:00.017+01:00

God is at home; it's we who have gone out for a walk. MEISTER ECKHART

If you do not pause upon the bridge and look over the parapet, you will not see the row of cairns bisecting the river Irthing. Who built this progression of tiny ziggurats, this ley-line of stone stupas? Down the adjacent green lane you wander, seeking an answer, following Ariadne's thread. Then stop, amazed, at an airy threshold. On your right, a heap of stones coalesces into faces, cats' eyes, flowers. A sign says Nearly Heaven. You hesitate, then softly step from the sunken hawthorn track into the sanctuary.

On your left, even more artfully arranged stones suggest a dog, a buddha, a Spanish nobleman - whatever you may imagine. A child's swing, knifed from a rubber tyre, dangles. A comfy chair and sofa are draped in blue plastic against the rain. Semi-circular voodoo heads, roughly hewn from wood, with knapweed seed for hair, swing from a central tree. Behind the tree a dead mouse floats in a rain-filled bucket. A streaked and autographed mural dominates this stage set. It's like a painting by Joan Miró. On it passers-by have scrawled names, dates, messages.

Who lives here, who has lived here, who's passed through? What is this place, this surreal haven just a stone's throw from Hadrian's Wall's rational alignments? A hippie lair or artists' colony? A New Age traveller or gypsy camp? A children's den? A pilgrim resting place? The peat-brown stream rushes round the curve on its stony bed, giving little away. Across the water lies the stub of a ramshackle, do-it-yourself bridge made of wooden packing cases. And beyond this there's a a shelter, a big tarp strung below the boughs of thick-set trees. It seems uninhabited.

Signs and markers. Signs and markers. You construct a simple cairn right at the end of the line, at the spot where the row of cairns hits the stony shore. You choose differently sized stones - large ones at the bottom, smaller ones on top - varying the colours, contrasting this smooth red sandstone with that olive-green rock, this black and white striated pebble with that speckled conglomerate.

What does it all mean? Does it have to mean anything? You sigh, happy to bathe in the mystery. Then walk back from this liminal space into the shadowed lane. Perhaps you'll now tease out a myriad meanings for evermore? That's fine. For within the mystery lies the meaning; and within the meaning lies the mystery.

(Click here and here for the responses of Dominic and George to Nearly [Almost] Heaven.)

Imagine

2011-09-12T05:18:00.000+01:00

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

JOHN LENNON Imagine