Many Are the Ways

Gomm Valley, where I went walking. Photo © Andrew Smith. Click for more information.

It’s been a busy few weeks, and a kind of milestone. K’s retirement after 42 years’ continuous employment has been finalized; and we’ve had a new kitchen installed. These two events seem to have balanced the scales of Destiny. For on the one hand, we’re no longer tethered to this unique spot on the globe’s surface. Theoretically, we could go anywhere. On the other hand, we’ve committed ourselves to staying put. Putting in a new kitchen, especially when you live in a small cottage, is a bit like moving home. It lingers in the mind as a warning, a kind of vaccination against the full-blown infection. We actually did move out for the first week of the work—rented a holiday cottage six miles away. When we got back, it was a pas de trois, a dance-for-three, instead of our accustomed pas de deux routines, where our physical steps have always needed to be choreographed to avoid collision at the various bottlenecks—the kitchen being the principal one (it being also the passage to the washing-machine, bathroom and backyard). Our fitter had his own key, and even when not there had to leave boxes of tools, plus a redundant piece of worktop so long that we couldn’t close any of the ground-floor doors. Consequently, the dust from sawing down a piece of wall got everywhere. But then, Andrew is such a pleasant fellow that we endured it without trauma, even when the agreed plans for space, time, dimensions, intelligent design vs. evolution were knocked sideways by life. “It’s all good,” as he remarked from time to time, and we didn't disagree. (Note to self: consider It’s All Good as title of a memoir.)

So I woke early the other morning, when we were back to the ballet of pas de deux, with the new stage scenery in situ, wanting little more than tidying and a lick of paint, which can be done at my pace and indefinitely-extending time. I knew I must write. It’s the only way to find out what’s happening within me. It’s a ritual that has established itself over the last ten years, not to be lightly waived. Writing has been a tool towards clarity of thought. I scribbled my ideas, but they stayed earthbound. I felt the call to wayfaring.

I went to Wickes and bought a tin of paint. It was a sunny morning, the kind that summons me to exercise on Nature’s own treadmill. So I left the paint in the car and wandered where the fancy led, to Gomm Valley, talking to my voice recorder as I followed the route marked up in white below. Little Gomm Wood, in the photo above, is at the northernmost point of my walk, where I turned west.



Here is the edited transcript.

-------

It seems clear that if one is on a path to seek wholeness, to know oneself, and bring forth that in oneself which desires to be born, thinking plays a vital part. The thing-that-happens-within-me, which lies beyond thought, says wordlessly that thinking doesn’t define me. Thinking is an attribute, a capability which I develop; and I improve that skill through use of language. Thinking is a component within a wholeness I call me. And what is “me”?—the only member of my species that I can know from the inside. This knowing-from-the-inside keeps me separate from the others, for my knowing is different from theirs. And yet I can feel one with them. Personal can merge with universal. This species can recognize its oneness with all species, and all creation.

I know the world through feelings, sensations and thoughts. How did I come to possess these wonderful faculties? Only because they have evolved as useful, that is to say vital to the development and survival of my species. Slugs, it is safe to say, have developed and survived on a simpler set of faculties—but are equally dependent upon them. I can use my faculties not just to interact with the world and survive, but also to know myself: both as that-which-I know-from-inside and as just another part of the world. When I observe myself in the world, as one of its moving parts and a component in its whole, I like to think of myself as free. But in truth I am a sophisticated slug. My feelings, sensations and thoughts are like its eyes and feelers, waving about on their stalks, or retracting in expectation of danger. I spend my time pursuing an agenda, or reacting. Sometimes I walk under the sky without an agenda. I simply act. I simply am, as a moving part of the landscape, observing, running on primal instinct. And yet I can speak, I can still use language.

At this time in my life I—this mysterious I—am able to feel myself as I am, inhabiting this body and no other; for I remain bound to it, no matter what thoughts abstract me from it momentarily or for hours at a time. As an “I”, that is to say a conscious human being, I cannot escape being possessed by emotions when they arise in my body, summoned by self-generated chemicals, given colour and shape by imagination. But when these are stilled, and I’m not reacting like a hunted beast, I perceive within me something that feels like an extra dimension, you could call it depth, that seems to resist description in language.

In these writings over the last ten years I’ve demurred at using the word “spiritual”; refused to talk of a “spiritual path” for its implication that there could be any other kind of path through life. “Spiritual” stood in opposition to material, material, physical, sensual, intellectual, bodily and mundane. Spiritual claimed an existence beyond science’s reach. It supported itself on a cloud of belief, whether traditional or New Age. I could not use this word, for I had discovered a wholeness which refused these distinctions. And in this wholeness there was, and is, an ecstasy.

Thus my language was unable to keep pace with experience. Nor was I able to borrow the language of others wherever it relied upon beliefs and practices contrary to my developing sense of wholeness—in which nothing need be rejected, nothing was my enemy. And so I have felt, and feel, that what I am trying to say is everywhere and in everyone. But since it is hard to express, people borrow the expressions, beliefs and practices of established traditions. I conclude that many are the ways to find what I find by certain means peculiar to my own trajectory in life. Indeed, for much of my life these particular means were closed to me, and I sought this dimension of depth by going in entirely the opposite direction to the one I go now.

-------

It’s Friday as I write, and on this little street streams of worshippers come from every direction for communal prayers. Some come five times a day, even long before daybreak, to our mosque, a stone’s throw from where I am sitting now. I sense that for some of them, this is the means whereby they find that depth or that dimension, that I find in my way. I looked up Moslem Prayer, but it merely lays out a set of rules for the visible parts of the ritual. Not a word about anything else. One would have to look further, to a poet, Kabir perhaps, in this or another ninety-nine of his poems (click here to view them):

[XC]
To whom shall I go to learn about my Beloved?
Kabir says : “As you may never find the forest if you ignore the tree, so He may never be found in abstractions.”

Many indeed are the ways, and we may join others in our pilgrimage, but in the end, each has his own path to find.