Whether we are world travellers or home bound stick-in-the-muds, we are creatures just traveling through: our essence and our attention caught, even as we sit in our arm chairs, gazing at our screens, by mythological images that mirror our traveling nature
Why am I writing another book of essays when I almost always feel as if I am abandoning my first love - poetry: when there is so much more poetry to be written? Why am I writing Consolations II?
Apart from the pleasure, the surprise and the satisfaction I find in writing them, I think it is simply the overwhelming response Consolations has invited from a world needing different definitions and different understandings than our everyday language provides us. These brief essays, written in all kinds of strange situations and over a great deal of time and travel, seem to have been of such help to others going through all the familiar difficulties and heartbreaks we experience so intimately in our extraordinary, ordinary lives. So many readers and listeners around the world have sent messages and letters saying how much the previous volume of essays helped them and gave them a different place to stand in each of the qualities addressed. The essays on Friendship, Honesty, Regret, and Anger have helped people through some very dark times, such that the pressure to follow up with further help, seems natural and in some ways inevitable. I suppose I am going where I am needed.
Many years ago I introduced the new essays as they appeared through a subscription called ‘The Reader’s Circle’ and then through Facebook. If you wish to catch them this time, almost as they are done, they will be available right here on Substack behind the paywall.
I have just finished the thirty-second essay ‘Unordinary’ in the lobby of my hotel here in Rome, a morning which brought back all the previous hotel lobbies, mountain sides, train carriages and assorted desks around the world in which I wrote the first essays a dozen years ago. Please join me for a very intense and personally rewarding literary venture and which I hope, will be just as an intense and rewarding read.
-videography by Bodi Hallett
SOJOURN
is what we all do, every day of our restless lives: arrive, stay a while and then move on. Sojourn captures that simultaneous sense of recent arrival, intriguing stay, and adventurous departure necessary to the underlying joy and happiness of our human essence. Sojourn is a word that melds the three tenses of past, present and future together. We are creatures of the sudden hello, the getting to know and the long or the short goodbye, but sojourn is also a word that understands that even in our briefest stays we are changing and being changed by what we stay with. Staying with something is to change and deepen whatever we are staying with; staying itself is a journey that always leads to altering our further departures. Sojourn takes its definition by being a stay between journeys that is also a journey in itself.
Human beings love the idea and the ideal of the eternal and the unchanging, but seem to meet that eternal only in the never ending invitation to see and experience the underlying unstoppable and changing nature of existence. We intuitively understand that we conspire in this state of affairs, we are both helpless witnesses and unconscious engines of change every moment of our day, witnessing and causing trouble even in our simple passing through. Indeed, there is no trouble-making change agent to match our very own bodies, which moves on without our asking or without a bye or leave, through the thresholds of maturation without a stop or a halt. By the agency of some hidden, unstoppable driver of change, the body makes its pilgrim way through childhood, into adolescence, into adulthood, into eldership, into the sudden realisation that our next journey is into our own disappearance all accompanied, we hope, by our own noble attempt at a brave goodbye. The body we realise, seeing in that one single glance in the mirror, the youth we were, the person we are now and the elder we are about to become, is the ultimate sojourner.
Whether we are world travellers or home bound stick-in-the-muds, we are creatures just traveling through: our essence and our attention caught, even as we sit in our arm chairs gazing at our screens, by mythological images that mirror our traveling nature: that stranger at the door asking for alms and hospitality, that handsome traveller at a bar asking not so innocently for a good time, that good Samaritan on the road offering to help, that ultimate pilgrim of the restless, Clint Eastwood, turning his horse toward the sunset, having freed the town from awful predators, all of us, believers or not, vicarious travellers in great and timeless religious images inherited from our past: Christ entering Jerusalem, St Paul struck down on the road to Damascus, Basho’s narrow road to the far north; all of us, caught imaginatively whether we go or not, by the pilgrim roads of the world: the road to Varanasi, the road to Santiago the road to Graceland, the trackless roads across the oceans our ancestors explored: all beckoning us on to some place where something wonderful already happened and where something wonderful, something beyond my present, might well happen to me.
The underlying undertow of existence, even in our most rested state is restless, tidal change, and our agency and context for this restless travel is longing in all its forms: physiological and psychological: even Zen students, refusing to move, sitting stock still in their black robes on their black cushions travel invisibly on the road of longing: the longing, strangely, to be free of the restless mind, in order to be at rest with the true, underlying restless movement of the world. Each of us, sojourners all, even when we seem to be as quiet and as still as a mouse, journeying on into some other, longed for spaciousness, every step of our restless way.
-this essay will be published in the forthcoming Consolations II. The first 52 essays are included in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
videography by Bodi Hallet
I’m home bound due to illness and disability.
Once I scrambled up trees, rocky coastlines, mountains…currently I’m what Coleridge called a “library cormorant” and what Robert Macfarlane describes as a word hoarder.
Never a stick in the mud.
I love the word “sojourner.”
I am so delighted to hear about the new Consolations II. Your essays in Consolations helped me so much. And, as a yoga teacher, I have shared snippets from them as the seed for meditation classes and centering. What I especially love is that you take a different perspective from what we often hear in life AND in yoga teachings - that certain natural, normal human feelings are undesirable and not to be engaged in. Like procrastination. Like nostalgia. You always speak to why these are important internal conversations and invitations to growth. I felt particularly guilty about nostalgia until I read your freeing words that bolstered me and showed me how understanding my nostalgia - learning to love again what I did not love and appreciate the first time around, has been important for me to find my way back to what I love. The idea, of course, is never to get stuck in any of it. But you allow these things to be important parts of the journey. I SO look forward to this next book of essays. They are poems in their own right.