The Next Pilgrimage

The long straight track.

Much of the time, we are willing to do almost anything rather than face the unknown, the wilderness. When we drive in our cars, we'll go on for endless miles, rather than admit we're lost. We drive our lives that same way until a crisis stops us. But that fear blunts our experience of the world, doesn't it?

. . . if you're lost enough, then the experience of now is your guide to what comes next. None of us knows what comes the next second.

WILLIAM STAFFORD

Oh, a storm is threatening / My very life today / If I don't get some shelter / Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away THE ROLLING STONES Gimme Shelter

The pilgrimage I'm undertaking soon may well be a challenging one: many days, if not weeks, of solitude — with cheap accommodation, or indeed any accommodation, thin on the ground. I'm taking a tent. And this time I'm making sure my pack weight is nearer a manageable 20lb than a punishing 30lb. I came up with the following 'ideal' guidelines, which I'm carrying with me in my head (zero weight!). Wish me luck.

     

Twelve Zen Guidelines for the Long Distance Pilgrim and Walker

1. To walk — and live — fully in the present.

2. To neither regret wrong turnings (the past) nor yearn for destinations (the future).

3. To walk — and live — mindfully, aware of and focused on what’s going on around, through the five senses, and what’s happening inside, through thoughts and feelings.

4. To try to get beyond desire, craving, negativity and division.

5. To let go.

6. To welcome intuition and the imagination, and to use them creatively.

7. To walk — and live — simply, thriftily and economically, consciously making each coin, each morsel of food and each mouthful of drink, count.

8. To be grateful for the luxurious, comparative freedom of a long-distance walk: going where I want, quickly or slowly, directly or obliquely.

9. To be grateful that, for a period of time, I am not subject to the usual routine dictates and compromises of family and society.

10. To consider walking a kind of art form.

11. To consider each step, breath, mile, thought, feeling, action, encounter, sight and insight a kind of prayer.

12. To try to love unconditionally.

Footpath through poppy fields.

For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know myself?

ROBERT MACFARLANE The Old Ways

Traveling Through The Dark

While I was editing my poetry magazine The Passionate Transitory, would-be contributors occasionally asked me what kind of poem I was looking for. Some asked me to suggest a 'model' poem as example and guide. Some asked how you wrote a good poem.

It's hard to say what makes a good poem, but you know one when you see one. I've been thinking what poem I would choose if I had to choose just one as perfect paradigm, one that seems to embody everything I like in a good poem. Naturally this is a very personal choice (I would love to know your own choices). This is the poem I came up with:

Traveling Through The Dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deer

dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.

It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:

that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car

and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;

she had stiffened already, almost cold.

I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason —

her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,

alive, still, never to be born.

Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;

under the hood purred the steady engine.

I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;

around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all — my only swerving —,

then pushed her over the edge into the river.

WILLIAM STAFFORD

It's probably Stafford's best-known poem, and deservedly famous, I think. I clearly remember when I first heard this poem read on the radio years ago. Its impact on me was enormous, and it haunts me still. For me, it's got everything: apparent simplicity, great technical skill disguised by an almost conversational tone, a concision in which every word counts and resonates, a moral/life dilemma, an ambiguity, a confrontation between the modern human world and the natural world.

Your One Wild And Precious Life

Two poems about awareness and mindfulness, and the amazing possibilities of the present moment in our sensory world...

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life -

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

WILLIAM STAFFORD

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean - the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

MARY OLIVER

I like the way Mary Oliver considers 'awareness', or close attention, as a kind of secular 'prayer'.

Both poems end with a question, which is a wake-up call to all of us.

Can we awaken our minds and senses to what the 'now' has to offer?

How do we really want to spend our lives - our precious lives, our only lives?