Quest
Leaves: Nikon D3s
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
(Anaïs Nin)
Finding ourselves can mean that we need to get lost.
Yet we often mistake the cognitive task for a physical one and will travel a thousand miles to get away from it all.
I’ve always made quite a thing of travel. I’m fascinated by the shifting vistas and glimpsed potentials of transit and, even when I arrive, I find myself ambling, wandering and gently exploring as I relocate myself into new geographies, structures and arrangements.
These days, my wanderings have become more limited. We are constrained in ways that we might never have imagined and ‘globe trotting’ feels oddly dated as our individual worlds have contracted. Anyway, most of my previous travel was in service of ‘getting somewhere’, so the opportunity to dwell in disorientation and wonder was lost as I anxiously looked to the satnav, reached for my phone or simply accepted that most of the places I visit are much the same anyway. Globalism steals our surprises and getting lost has become an anachronism.
Over the last few months, though, I’m aware that my urge for quest has returned.
But I’ve intentionally exchanged 1000 miles for 1000 paces.
Walking, wandering and photographing close to home, within an arbitrary, self-imposed limit of 1000 steps from my back door, has brought me strangely closer to the reality of my experience. As I have switched my attention from macro to micro, the anxiety-laden ‘big picture’ of our political, ecological and social difficulties has faded into abstraction. I have become more concerned with the aesthetic possibility of a fallen bough than the daily disturbances on my TV screen. Even time has reconfigured itself as the natural rhythm of the day has emerged; I’ve witnessed early mornings, late evenings and sunsets, and the gradual shift of season as my landscape has become brighter and warmer. Each day, sunlight has fallen differently through the trees as leaves and grasses have grown, obscuring paths, inviting bafflement and confusion. And, as I have allowed myself to become obscured, I have renewed my sense of dignity and personhood on familiar trails and byways, finding a deeper participation in my local world.
Perhaps this is what every attentional ‘discipline’ seeks to provide; a devotional, repetitive action that connects us carefully into our psychic and physical experience?
I’ve come to learn that if we look closely enough, the urge to get away from it all diminishes and we can lose ourselves in the familiar places that we have never seen before.
So, as we look for renewal and transformation, perhaps we should quest for reconnection?
To ourselves, to each other and to our (nearby) world?
Notes:
In The Great Work, Thomas Berry speaks to our present sense of dislocation and alienation from the natural world; “This psychic world of no attachment, no intimacy, is also the world of no fulfillment. There is effectively no feeling of intimacy with place. We expect our place to give itself to us, we have no sense of giving our selves to our place.”
Robert MacFarlane does a fabulous job of noticing how our experience of landscape was melded into our language and dialects. In Landmarks, he proposes a ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook to let us hear how nature might ‘converse with us.’
By either coincidence of synchronicity, it’s been interesting to note how many of my doctoral supervisees on the EDOC programme at Ashridge are inquiring into how our experience of walking can provide a foundational, embodied discipline for coaching, strategy, sustainability, artful work etc…
Finally, I’ve been enchanted by @Astrid_Tontson and her images of London’s parks and green spaces that drop into my Twitter feed each morning.
See Also:
