The Loneliness of the Long Distance Walker (2)
You keep telling yourself: a pack-rat intellect won’t make a good pilgrim of you. Isn’t it what we do? Don’t we try to sort out our thoughts so that the final meeting with the absolute could be more fruitful? Yes, we do, but we also could get lost in the act of preparation as we look for some kind of scaffolding to climb on and believe that all those medieval relics will help us keep walking: the scrap of St David’s cloak, the cheek bone of St Margaret’s face, St George’s liver, the fragment of St Thomas’ skull… A weir collection, isn’t it? Even if they are real, no one will let you put them in your own pocket. If they are meagre fakes, you’ve been fooled. What you sometimes need is your empty hands and pockets as well. Keep your eyes wide open because you never know when you can stumble upon something valuable. If it doesn’t belong to anybody… finders keepers…
Sylwia, your thoughts are clearly somewhere around the cathedral. Or, are you trying to say the reality on the course from 9 am to 9pm is all relics? To me, life on that hill always seemed much simpler and more straightforward, as long as I avoided therapists in the seminar rooms.
I just get the impression that the whole Pilgrims thing is a bunch of tricks. They approach the topic of creative methodology in a very superficial way and Simon himself doesn’t have a clear plan of what to do with us. He seems to be extremely tired.