Touched – by the weather

The clouds are moving so fast across the sky that it feels quite surreal. At times it looks like the sort of special effect that film makers use when they have someone rooted to a place while everyone moves quickly passed them on a speeded up film, or like the dramatic cloudscapes rushing across the sky to denote the passage of time. As my house is framed in the window of my study (a room at the bottom of the garden) the effect when I first started work this morning was as if my house and garden were speeding through space towards some new destination (in another galaxy?). Then the direction of the wind changed and the clouds are now moving a little more sedately from right to left (north to south). However, they are still moving faster than I have seen them for a long while.

I have just watched a bird as it tried to fly towards me high in the sky. It has been pushed from my right to my left and each time it tries to make headway it seems to get only so far and the sideways forces make it so unstable it reverts back to gliding and tacking against the wind and begins drifting further to my left. It has gone out of sight now and yet it had barely made any headway before disappearing.

Today, I am reflecting on the nature of pilgrimage for something I am writing (an article) and at the moment I am thinking about walking. Of course, people tend to say that walking gives you time to connect with the world around you as you pass through it. They often compare this with cycling and driving cars or moving along on public transport. Usually, they talk about it this way in relation to the relative speed of each mode of transport. Of course, the effect of being separated from your environment is also a factor.

I have talked about the effect of walking with others but if we just stop and think about the process of simply walking from A to B we can see that other things may also be factors.

I like the idea that everything we encounter changes us in some way – we leave something of ourselves behind and take up something from the encounter. So, the more closely we interact with a thing the more we exchange. Diving a car through a landscape may affect us emotionally and there is still some physical exchange – as a member of a family of hay fever sufferers I know that driving through areas with a high pollen count can affect all who take part in the journey, for example. But I fear that driving through a landscape results in us leaving more than we pick up!

Modes of transport such as bicycles, horses and walking certainly bring you closer to the world you are passing through. As someone who has enjoyed all three of these alternatives I can certainly see advantages in each one.

However, as I am going to be walking all the way to Santiago (I hope) it is the act of footslogging that concerns my thoughts most.

Some of my thoughts have that enthusiastic thrust of the optimist where I know that each step will be a privilege and a pleasure and other, darker thoughts lead me to worry that I might not be up to the task in some way. But all of me knows that the time spent walking through towns and country roads or paths will be time well spent. I know about the struggle to do the last few miles and of the pains that can dog you as you go. I worry about blisters and strains and I know that sometimes the environment you pass through is neither welcoming nor kind. And I know that focussing on each footstep as you trudge up a hill in the rain, dodging the heavy backwash spray of lorries as they roar past too close for comfort is far from the idyllic image of savouring the beautiful countryside as we stroll comfortably through it.

But it all adds up to one thing in the end – it is the pilgrimage we choose to take and along with the good and the easy comes the less good and the more difficult and even the down right unpleasant bits.

Which brings me back to the clouds scuddering by my window as the weather tries to pretend it is springtime in between each fresh flurry of snow. At the moment I am sitting as everything weather-wise passes me by. On the road we will be on the move each day and, depending on the direction of the winds, etc., we will either have the weather as our companion or as our passing friend. And because we will be walking, we will have the time to appreciate each of its aspects in considerable detail. So, I wonder, will we miss this intimate relationship when we return home? Will we think of ourselves as being “weather beaten” at the end or what? I know the phrase “sun kissed” but is there another expression around or should we invent one on our return?