Pondering Pilgrimage

Now that the pilgrimage is a few days behind me and I've caught up on my sleep (mornings come early in northern Wales . . . even earlier when there's a tree full of wood doves nesting outside your bedroom window) I'm finally having some time to reflect on my experience.   

Like many of the pilgrims, I embarked on this journey with some specific intentions, hopes and dreams.  I don't know if I found any answers along the way.  I think I gave up any need to find them fairly early on as I let myself just be fully present in each moment, not holding onto the perceived need to be still and silent.  Instead, I let myself wander and let the landscape speak to me.  What I did find, in looking back on the pictures I took, was that the images I captured seemed to focus mainly on doors and paths leading to who knows where.  Perhaps the perfect metaphor for the journey . . .

Off to Wales. . .

LINKS by Ruth Bidgood from Symbols of Plenty (Canterbury Press)
Some have said that by the pillar
where Becket was struck down,
they felt not pain but a derangement
of nerve-ends, a distant echo of blows,
enervation like blood-loss.

                             And I

in a windbitten valley have laid my hand
on stone of old walls, and felt a held life,
all the remembering there is
of what was made in that starved place,
a barely accessible material memory
woken with a touch.

In twenty-four hours I'm off to Wales-- first for a few days in Betws-y-Coed with a dear friend and then at the end of the week to Hawarden to meet up with the rest of the pilgrimage group.  I'm hoping to touch a lot of stones along the way-- in abbey ruins and ancient churches, in Norman cathedrals and underfoot on rocky beaches.   And along the way I will be inviting the 25 other pilgrims from Washington National Cathedral to do the same, being open to what memories wake for them.

If you'd like to follow us on our journey, check out our official pilgrimage blog for Lives, Legends and Landscapes:  A Pilgrimage to Northern Wales. Throughout the trip, members of the community will be sharing their reflections and recollections of our journey.

I am hoping to post on this blog as well if my mobile devices cooperate.  Post-pilgrimage I'm heading to London for a few days to visit friends.  Then it's back to the lovely Gladstone's Library for a self-imposed writing retreat, unless of course the weather is sunny and warm in which case you'll find me here, although I think I'll opt for the best strawberry ice cream in the world on the pier in lieu of the fish and chips. 

Llandudno Pier