Table of
CONTENTS 6. 2 Minute Travel Review: De Leon and Blue Springs State Parks in Florida By Hannah Skipper 7. The Journey of my Life in Books By Mike Flynn 10. 2 Minute Travel Review: Montana By Samantha Watson 11. Eagle Wisdom By Nicholas O'Connor 12. 2 Minute Travel Review: Dales Gorge, Karijini National Park, Pilbara, Western Australia By Beth Amos 13. A Fragment of a Life By Ananda Barton 14. Traveling Through EverChanging Ireland By Kristin Wilson O.C.D.S. 18. 2 Minute Travel Review: I Fed the Chipmunks at Creede, Colorado By Amanda Pizzolatto 19. Ships of Theseus By Lawrence Hall 20. New Adventures By Mike Flynn 21. 2 Minute Travel Review: Madonna di Fiesole By Jamison Noenickx 22. The Abbot of Langhorntown goes on a Pilgrimage By Yakira Goldsberry 26. Jack in the Green on a Beltane Morning By Kenneth R McIntosh 29. Limping Pilgrims By Sarah Bingham
30. 2 Minute Travel Review: Key West and Dry Tortugas By Hannah Skipper 31. This Homely Land By Amanda Pizzolatto 32. Under the Brooklyn Bridge By Ray E. Lipinski 37. Oregon Trail Lament By Hannah Skipper 38. Journeying in a Time of Isolation By Beth Amos 40. 2 Minute Travel Review: Porto By Mike Flynn 41. The Idea of North By Ananda Barton 42. A Whole New World By Amanda Pizzolatto 45. Original Artwork: Different Worlds By David Glenn 46. Journey and Destination – A Theological Reflection By Sarah Bingham 52. Ipswich, Willesden and Walsingham, Three Marian Shrines in Sixteenth Century England By Tim Guile 57. Pilgrimage to a Small Island: An American Britophile's Reflection By Avellina Balestri 65. Leaving Home By Michael Goth 73. My Penn-Mar Journey By Wesley Hutchins
Editor's Note "A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes There is nothing quite like the thrill of starting out on a new journey, whether 33 location, experiencing a special you are boarding a plane to a far-off, exotic place for the very first time, or even just propping your feet up and cracking the spine of a new novel. Sometimes we all need a change of pace and space, a chance to open new horizons and absorb fresh scenery. Sometimes we need a home away from home, or a new home altogether. We travel for all kinds of reasons; excitement, work, pilgrimage, love, friendship, curiosity – the list is endless. Some seek out a pleasure trip to forget the cares of the working world in an exotic atmosphere, while others are immigrating to seek a better life for themselves and their families, despite the inherent dangers and deprivations such journeys prevent. Some seek the companionship of loved ones, separated by distance, while others aspire to find a connection with the land itself. Almost all religions have some pilgrimage traditions. Earth-based spiritual paths often ascribe sacredness to particular places in nature, from sacred groves of trees to stone circles to mountain ranges and bodies of water. In ancient days, offerings were left to the elemental spirits 41 in “thin places” where it was believed this world and the “otherworld” overlapped. Hindu, Buddhist, and Shinto pilgrims commonly associate shrines with different features of the natural world as well, believing that the Universe is One. The Abrahamic religions share as a commonplace of pilgrimage the city of Jerusalem. Across historical Christendom, pilgrimage locations range from St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to Hagia Sophia in Byzantium, the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in France, the Basilica of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in England. In the lands of Islam, there are various mosques and shrines of pilgrimage, for Sunni and Shia alike, and the hajj to Mecca continues to be one of the world’s largest annual pilgrimages. The world of mytholo and literature is full of epic journeys that function as types of individual pilgrimages,
enabling characters that represent universal archetypes to triumph over obstacles, advance in personal growth, and gain a re-appreciation for the joys of home. Indeed, one cannot fully know what they have until they have, at least for a time, gone without. From Ulysses of The Odyssey to the Pilgrims of Canterbury Tales, Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, the Pevensies of The Chronicles of Narnia, and Frodo Baggins of The Lord of the Rings, these figures resonate with our own trials and triumphs. Life itself might be seen as a journey mixed with laughter and tears, offering both suffering and redemption in the cycles of dying and rising within and around us. We all seek out the mysteries beyond our reach, be they the Cauldron that raises fallen warriors from the dead 33or the Grail that brings spiritual renewal and prosperity to the land. The Christian life is often said to reflect the journey to Calvary, that Via Dolorosa, the sorrowful Way of the Cross, which calls us to make ourselves vulnerable before God and put ourselves at the service of our neighbors, even unto death, in hope of the resurrection to come. We fall many times along the way but are always offered the chance to get up again. That, in the end, is our prize. The poet Rumi wrote: "Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come…” And so in this issue of Fellowship & Fairydust magazine, we prepare to embark on a journey and a pilgrimage all our own. We have packed our suitcases, strapped on our walking boots, and opened the submissions floor to the vast wealth of fascinating experiences and reflections, which our authors have been chomping at the bit to share with you all. 41Though this colorful and cra 2020 has upended the world as we knew it and clipped our traveling wings this summer, our imagination knows no such limits, and so we continue to soar, in hope that the darkest nights will yet give way to the dawn, just beyond the next horizon. On behalf of the Fellowship & Fairydust family, we hope that you enjoy this issue, and as the old Irish blessing goes… May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face; the rains fall soft upon your fields and, until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand. ~ Avellina Balestri, Editor-in-Chief & Beth Amos, Content Editor
2 Minute Travel Review: De Leon and Blue Springs State Parks in Florida By Hannah Skipper Less than an hour north of Orlando, you’ll find Blue Springs State Park. Situated along the St. John’s River, it offers canoeing, kayaking, swimming, a guided riverboat cruise, and camping. However, the main attraction really starts to arrive during the winter months. In 1970, researches tagged and traced fourteen manatees who’d come inland to enjoy the park’s year-round 72 degrees F (22 degrees C) waters. In 2018, that number had increased to 485 of the endangered gentle giants, packing in like sardines to enjoy the balmy temperature. About a half hour farther up the road, you’ll find De Leon Springs State Park. This park was originally founded around the supposed medicinal value of the spring and you can tour a little historical museum to learn about its history. You can also swim, canoe, kayak, go for a guided riverboat cruise, and camp. But the main attraction is a fantastic restaurant built inside of an old sugar mill. The Sugar Mill Restaurant’s most popular fare is pancakes that patrons make for themselves at their own table. Plan to come early to both parks as they reach capacity very quickly.
The Journey of my Life in Books By Mike Flynn I haven’t always been that interested in reading. In fact, up until I was about 16 years old, I was very resistant to reading books (a factor probably resulting from my dyslexia, which I wasn’t diagnosed with until much later in life when I attended university). My family tried for many years to get me interested in reading, but I just didn’t enjoy it or find it relaxing. As a last-ditch effort, when going on holiday to Cyprus to see my granddad, I came across an interesting book in the airport called 'Wolf Brothers,' by Michelle Paver. The cover art was fantastic, and really caught my eye, and I’ve always had an affinity for wolves, ever since I was little. Once I started the book, I just couldn’t put it down. It is a fond memory for me, as I was lying on a sunbed under the canopy of a large mimosa tree, with a warm light breeze gently ruffling the leaves as I devoured page after page. It follows the exploits of a young boy named Torak, who befriends a wolf cub and forms a strong bond with him. Over the next few years, Michelle released a further 5 books in the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series. Each time I purchased the hardback copy and read through each instalment with complete engrossment. Michelle has wonderful attention to detail, and her writing style, commitment to her characters, and character development are fantastic. It was a turning point for me, as this series sparked off a new-found enjoyment of reading, that has only grown over the years. In the ensuing years, I have read many more wonderful books and met a whole host of brilliant characters. I now always have a series on the go, taking the opportunity whenever I can to read. On the bus or train, while on holiday or before bed, at university while waiting for classes, or on breaks at work, I’ve always had a book to hand, whether it was a paper copy or on my Kindle (which, now that I was an avid reader, I received one Christmas from my parents).
It’s wonderful too, as each series I’ve read can characterise a different point in my life – whether it be Tamora Pierce’s many series which I read throughout my A-level years, the Witch Fire series by James Clemens, which I read in my lunch breaks at work during my gap years, or the Harshini series by Jennifer Fallon, which I read in my first few months at Aberdeen University – I can mark each stage of my life with a different series. Even better, when I pick a series up again to re-read, it takes me right back to that particular time in my life, bringing back all the familiar emotions and comfort that I felt at that time. It’s as if these fantastical stories are somehow intrinsically linked to my memories. I really owe it all to the wonderful writings of Michelle Paver, and the world that she has created, though, and this series will always hold a special place in my heart; which is why it’s wonderful that, as I am journeying through a new period of my life here in Italy (after relocating from the UK just over a year and a half ago), my favourite author should release a new line of books, carrying on the series with a brand new instalment called 'Vipers Daughter.' I’m a great believer in fate and feel that coincidences are actually the universe telling us things, and to have a continuation of the journey of Torak, Wolf, Renn, and all of the other wonderful characters in this series, alongside my own journey, is both a wonderful sign and delightful experience. Needless to say, I had already finished this book within days of receiving it, and I was most definitely not disappointed. But it is comforting to know that over the coming years, as I settle into my new life, I will be doing so accompanied by an old friend and that this too will become part of a fond memory to be relived again whenever I revisit these books. I owe a lot to Michelle for her wonderful book series, for opening a world to me that for 16 years I had determinedly avoided, and I look forward to pressing onward with both my journey and Torak’s. *** As a side note, that only makes me admire Michelle as an author even more, on the run-up to the launch of her new book, she started a monthly live video on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE4m4mN4zZjNLLT9qCWblYw/videos), where she answers people's questions, as well as hosting fun activities; such as quiz’s, contests etc, and disclosing upcoming details about her books.
She has even expanded upon this due to the lockdown, releasing an activity pack for children and teachers to use (https://wolfbrother.com/activities/), as well as continuing to answer her fan’s emails and questions in each video. I have even been privileged enough to have a couple of my own letters presented in these videos, as well as having some of my artwork and photos displayed on screen and commented on. I really look forward to each episode, as it’s interesting seeing what other fans have to say about this wonderful series. It is such an inspiring thing for her to take the time to do, and gives a huge amount back to her fans. I, for one, am very grateful for this. As an extra bonus, Michelle advised recently in one of these videos, that the Wolf Brothers series is also going to be made into a tv series – something else to look forward to!
2 Minute Travel Review: Montana By Samantha Watson
When you think of Montana, your first thought is probably of mountains, glaciers, and pine trees. Now imagine the complete opposite of that. That’s where I live. At the top of Montana is a stretch of Highway 2 called the “Hi-Line”, where the highest part is the Sweetgrass Hills to the northwest and Bear Paw’s Mountain (which isn’t as tall as most mountains) to the southeast. We have wheat fields for miles upon miles and rarely see another person, even when we aren’t in quarantine. There are less trees than people, minus a few spots in the Bear’s Paw. Despite what sounds like a flat, barren place, our area is truly beautiful. Have you ever seen the sunrise over a field of snow when it’s forty degrees below zero? It looks like a field of glitter. To be able to drive just minutes and be surrounded by the beauty of creation is something locals take for granted, but it’s the best part of being here. The majority of Montana is flat and full of wheat, but with a giant sky overhead and miles of sights to see, the Big Sky State is a little slice of Heaven on Earth
Eagle Wisdom Reflected sunset in a crystal ball, Golden shards of light in my eyes, Drifting in and out of focus and Leading me away from this place – To somewhere where there is no place To somewhen when there is no time. This is always the place of meeting, And I find myself, as ever, in the sky, Soaring with my friend nearby, Wingtip to wingtip and mind to mind. Below I can see dark forest lands, White mountains, green grass and silver – Occasional glimpses of streams and lakes. My soul is open to my friend; all my problems And my questions are as trivia to him. He will not give me answers, but help is allowed – Guidance for me to choose the right path. I ask the same as I have asked before, He turns to look at me - his beak is close now – We fly lower towards a silvery lake, And I see with the eagle’s vision: both surfaces, The shimmery reflection of the sky in the water, And the movement below, perhaps a fish or frog.
I felt compelled to write this one as soon as awaking from a shamanic trip. The words just poured out and it is what I see on such journeys. The eagle is, and was ever, my spirit guide and teacher in this lifetime.
By Nicholas O'Connor
We swoop together and he has a fish in his talons, While I caught a frog – I let the frog go back. A picture comes to my mind from childhood, Searching in rock-pools at the beach with a bucket, Again, the water hid so many secrets to a child – Shells, tiny fish, shiny stones, sometimes a crab, All wonders to me and the pleasure of searching. Is this my answer to look at the problem anew? Use an eagle’s vision to see beneath the surface, Of a person’s outward feelings and emotions? My friend looks at me and we soar high above, Now, I feel something rather than see a picture, That the landscape below covers many lifetimes, And my friend’s thought comes to me overall. Do not seek the answer of many lifetimes during The course of a single lifetime is my feeling – Sent, of course, to my mind from my friend. You and your soul mate were always so from life to life, You were always with her and she was ever with you. With that feeling, my friend and I part – he and his fish Towards the white mountains in the distance. And I fall, to surface again with my crystal ball.
2 Minute
Travel Review: Dales Gorge, Karijini National Park, Pilbara, Western Australia 330km from Port Hedland, and situated in the Hammersley Ranges, Karijini National Park has to be one of the most beautiful wildernesses on earth. The characteristically Aussie-red soil dotted with dry brush and the odd twisted looking tree, at first glance, seems just like any other part of the deserts which stretch throughout the Central Australian bushlands. It isn’t until you leave the bush camp and descend into one of
Karijini’s stunning gorges that you truly discover the treasures that this untamed land has to offer. My absolute favourite has to be 100metre-deep Dales Gorge. This gorgewalking adventure truly begins with a leap of faith from the ledges over Fortescue Falls into the deep, turquoise pool below. From there, you can either take the easy, handrailed route to the beautiful Fern Pool, or wade through the creek and start the 2km gorge trail loop to Circular Pool – a place still considered sacred to the indigenous tribes of the area today. The pool is fed by natural springs and groundwater runoff, which drips in a gentle warm waterfall down the mossy, towering red-rock cliffs which surround it. Don’t be fooled though, the pool itself is a blissfully cool respite from the hot Australian sun.
By Beth Amos
A Fragment of a Life By Ananda Barton It was almost dusk when she arrived in the city. The last rays of the red winter sun lighting the black river, a flag of night and blood. Caught up in the hurrying crowds at the station she stood, for a moment, bewildered, clutching her suitcase. Then she saw the closed car, waiting, just where Maria Louise said it would be. Ensconced in the warm, leather smelling interior she was whirled through the city streets, down avenues of glittering storefronts, past crowds waiting to cross. Over a granite bridge she spun, each pylon topped with a violent electric moon. Humming through streets lit by lamps, like grey stars, the car drew up in front an evergreen garden, from which a dim mansion rose. Walking up the garden path she inhaled the odours of cold, damp and night, a window cast a warm glow across the lawn. She rang the doorbell, footsteps echoed along a corridor, then, the door opened, and there stood Maria Louise, just as she remembered her.
From: Power, Ada May 1923, Soiled Dove: The Life of Minnie Rae Simpson, Fourth Reich in Argentina, Buenos Aires.
Traveling Through Ever-Changing Ireland By Kristin Wilson O.C.D.S.
Ireland 1982: Age 7 I had never traveled by plane anywhere. I’ll never forget that we went from Boston to Shannon via “Pan Am” and fell asleep. When we were approaching Ireland, we looked out the window as the plane came closer, and closer to the ground. My sister and I looked out the window as best as we could. Kathleen said she could see matchbox cars, and then we went on to say, “matchbox cows, matchbox houses…” until we landed in a different world that hit us with a culture shock that I will never forget. It was not because of the accents. I grew up listening to my grandparents’ Limerick accents. My father had the same accent when he got angry. It was not the Celtic look; my twin sister and I had, still have, the map of Ireland on our face. We fit that stereo-type more than some “real” Irish people. No, the culture shock we saw was in the gypsies who lived in caravans (R.V. or trailer) on the side of the road. My father told us they did not go to work, school or church. That was not all together true, as I saw some of them selling stuff at the market. I did not realize at the time that they were a close-knit culture. The culture shock was also that the girls on the streets of Limerick all wore dresses, even outside to play. It was like being in a decade long past. People did a lot more walking to shops, banks and churches. The houses, many of them were attached in rows but were compact with very small yards they called gardens, even if they were not growing food or flowers. I remember seeing a man riding a donkey, or something, with an open, wooden trailer behind it on the road where my aunt lived. I also remember sitting in the car waiting on a thin road while a shepherd guided sheep – or was it cows? – who had the right of way. And the smell of it. The farms smelled of manure and the cities made up for it with the smell of turf, which burned even in the summer back then. The smell of the burning turf made me decide that is what Ireland smells like. We climbed the steps of Blarney Castle. We traveled and waited in line. It was high enough that looking down could worry anyone who was afraid of heights. We bent down and could see the ground though the metal gate only to put our lips where many others from around the world had put there’s. Not very sanitary. Even with the man who worked there helping you not to fall over as you kissed the stone, it did not feel safe. But I, at the age of seven could say I kissed the Blarney Stone.
Ireland 1985: Age 10 As we were landing in Shannon, we remembered the time we saw the matchbox world below. I remember how excited my father was to be back in Ireland, after only three years. He was yelling with joy once we got into the rented car. We went to stay with the same aunt and uncle, played Irish games called Queenie and 4 Corners, running on the side street where not everyone had a car, and fewer had more than 1 vehicle. We walked to the same shop nearly every day to buy Irish candy. I remember how a girl on the street used a hula hoop to jump through. Some of the kids remembered us. One had started wearing pants. The swings in Kilkee were still there. We swung, traveling higher and higher, sitting together using a unique rope pully system. We stayed in a trailer park, and remembered 2 girls who also stayed there in the summers. They did not remember us from 3 years earlier, but we remembered them; Emily and Harriet. The greatest traveling we did that year though, was taking the ferry, a rented car included, from Ireland to the British Isles and eventually finding ourselves in London. The water was rougher than usual and my mother felt sick. We stayed in an old motel called The Celtic Hotel. Naive as I was, and being from New England, I thought it was named for the basketball team. My sister Erin lost a tooth and my parents told me it was them who put a quarter under her pillow, thus taking away the idea of the tooth fairy for me. We visited my Father’s first cousin Mary who lived in London. I remember her and how mad she was when the taxi would not let all of us in the cab at once, even during a down pour. I also remember a sign she had in her small home that said a lot of things including “Everyone writes on this wall except me.” We went to all the famous places we could in 4 days. We traveled on the English subway system called the “underground” quite a lot and one time ascended a flight of 100 steps to leave one entrance. I don’t know if I could do that now, or what part of London that was. We were getting used to climbing subway stairs and castle stairs as well as driving on thin roads up and down hills. We went up Tower Bridge to see the view of the city. That is the one mistaken for London Bridge. By the time we got to the top I found myself crawling up a small ramp on my hands and knees so I could see out the window. I do not know if I felt weak or was just afraid heights back then. What a way to travel.
Ireland 1996: Age 22 Traveling to Ireland this time we stayed at a different aunt’s house, though still in Limerick. Her sister, my great aunt who lived in New Jersey was there when we arrived along with their sister Maureen who lived in the home. It was beautiful to see them all together. Nothing like burnt Irish sausages after a long trip across the Atlantic. The home had its own quaint smell to it. Anie’s house was calming. We visited cousin’s we had not seen in years. We walked with my father’s uncle Liam to the beach in Kilkee. This time we got to jump into the Polic Holes of the Atlantic Ocean. Something my father did as a child. You have rocks all around, naturally put there, maybe millions of years ago. I had always wanted to go in. It was not just salty but freezing. I do not think anyone else went in except Kathleen and I, and maybe Liam. We went to Catholic shrine of Knock. This is where the blessed mother, Saint Joseph and Saint John the Evangelist all appeared silently in the little small town in Knock Ireland. While there, I got a large plastic bottle, and filled it from the fountain wall to take home with me. I was surprised how empty the place was. I learned later that a Mass was going on and my parents figured that if I knew that I would want to go. This time we drove North, The real North. We ran up and down the rocks of Giants Causeway. I had never seen anything like it. I had never heard of it until someone mentioned it. When we stopped to get something to eat you could tell by the decorations or the framed poetry on the wall hanging in the restaurant or pub, if they were Irish, or English, or better put, their religious or political leanings. My father told me not to bless myself before I eat in case – just in case. He had never been to Northern Ireland in all his life and did not have anything good to say about the English Royal Family. We stopped at a Bed and Breakfast with no rooms open. The owner gave us directions to another Bed and Breakfast which just happened to be in the middle of nowhere. A woman in a dress with dark curly hair opened the door. She had space for us and owned a ceramic head of a pope. I understood very little of what she was saying, though she was speaking English. We were not in Limerick or Clare or Dublin anymore. I do not think you could walk to a shop, bank or Church. What surprised me, even scared me a bit was the neighborhoods with barbed wire around them. Apparently, there were Catholic-Irish neighborhoods and there were Protestant- English leaning neighborhoods in the cities. My father had us keep the doors locked and stayed on the main roads.
Ireland 2018: Age 43 I had not been to Ireland for 22 years, almost half my life since I had last been. This time it was my parents, husband and twin sister Kathleen who went with me. Mark and I left from Boston, my parents from Warwick, Rhode Island, which was not an option last time we traveled. This was Mark’s first trip to Ireland and his first trip overseas. We stayed at Anie’s house. She and Maureen were not there. Anie had only recently died and her children let us use the home. It was strange without her, or any of her siblings still alive, save the one in New Jersey. We visited my father’s cousins on his mother’s side and father’s side, as always. It was different. It was more Americanized than ever. The Roma were no longer allowed to live on the side of the road, the old out door market was too crowded. It had been covered and the stalls were modern. They even have a fake McDonald’s chain as well as regular McDonald’s restaurants. It was not a bad trip. It was great being able to see the people and places. We went to the Stone Age (Neolithic) monument Newgrange, a site that is older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Giza. We had never been. We saw some young cousins who were not even born last time we were there. Throughout Ireland, there are many castles scattered about the country. Where else can you see modern houses sitting beside ancient structures such as King John’s Castle in downtown Limerick. They had even modernized that ancient castle. The path I had walked and biked on 22 years earlier was now an official bike/ walking path. The old “humpy bridge” was still there near the Shannon River. The old mixed with the new. Girls were not all in dresses. The smell of turf no longer lives in the air the way it did in 1982. We traveled down the N17 and we sang the song by the Irish band the Saw Doctors called the N17. This was on our way to Knock. This time it really did look like a tourist destination for pilgrims. We went to Mass and my mother and I got an Anointing for the Sick. We are not as young as we use to be. The lavish hills and fields of green surround Ireland. The natural beauty of the country is on full display everywhere you go. The one place we went which we experienced this beauty first hand was walking along the Cliffs of Moher. You get to see the ocean as you walk along for miles gazing in wonder at the world around you. It was beautiful and breath taking. From the outside we saw the house my father had lived in as a child. Tears well up, and I could go on and on. I guess they call it progress when things change. I call it memories that will one day be lost. God Bless the Irish May their culture never be lost to progress As long as they populate their Island Until heaven be their home Éirinn go Brách
2 Minute Travel Review: I Fed the Chipmunks at Creede, Colorado By Amanda Pizzolatto You might have all heard of Seven Falls in Colorado Spring, Colorado. It’s owned by the Broadmoor and it’s pretty expensive to get in, but it is a lovely sight. You can even feed the chipmunks and get a shirt that says “I Fed the Chipmunks at Seven Falls.” But if money’s an issue and you still not only want to feed the chipmunks, but also see some lovely scenery – oh, and you don’t mind the drive and hit other lovely places along the way – then maybe a trip to Creede, Colorado is the thing for you. It’s a little town centered between mineral deposits and was a mining town. The mines are still there, but are mostly boarded up, except for one that has been turned into a museum. It’s a cute little place, it only takes a few minutes to get through the town, and there’s a door that’s locked, placed on the side of a hill. Where it leads, no one knows, but it sure is a funny sight to see. The scenery is breathtaking, the hills are alive with bird song, and you can feed the chipmunks in Creede, Colorado.
Ships of Theseus By Lawrence Hall Every seven years, some say, we are renewed, in coded sequences not understood. Animal cells, well-timed, within us die. They leave forever, replaced and not refreshed. But even so, ourselves are still ourselves, and condemnations from the past endure, and praises, too, all of them a little worn, and the ‘remember whens’ are an ever now. The eternal Wind that was before we are, is the Forever in our little ships
New Adventures By Mike Flynn Exploring a new location, with its charm and atmosphere. Soaking in the rich new culture, the sights, smells, and things to hear. Excited anticipation; you wait for it to arrive. That first breath as you disembark, makes your senses feel alive. Walking streets and never knowing, what exactly you will see. From stunning buildings all adorned, splendid sights of land and sea. The fun new and striking culture, history full, rich, and deep, and the new and charming people, that you speak to and you meet. I adore these new adventures, each one different and new. The memories of these places, forever kept alone by you.
Travel broadens your horizons, and helps you to understand, that wonder waits all around us, experience close at hand. I wait for my next adventure, a fun new place to explore. Memories stored of places been, that I cherish and adore. I always feel urged to travel, must be coded in my blood. The rush of a brand-new exploit, sweeps me up like in a flood. So, until my next adventure, I’ll just explore through your sight. I welcome all your new journeys; let your travel wings take flight.
2 Minute Travel Review:
Madonna di Fiesole
By Jamison Noenickx One of the most memorable traveling experiences I have had was to visit the little town of Fiesole, outside of Florence, Italy. As the birthplace of the Renaissance, there is so much history there. Dig deeper and there is even more: artifacts of the Lombard people, even a Roman amphitheater. Away from the more famous works down the road in Florence, there was a simple and little-known clay sculpture there, a Madonna and Child, attributed to Filippo Brunelleschi. I think the moment I saw it was the moment I first understood what art was. It was so simple but captured either a genius or a love of craft that spoke to my very soul. Several years later, I developed a similar love for the poetry of Gertrude Stein. She is one of those poets that people either love or hate, but when I first read her work, I felt the same genius I had once felt in Fiesole. So, it caught me by surprise when I recently discovered that in the summer of 1908, she lived there. The one who wrote, “A rose is a rose is a rose,� a man who sculpted a Madonna and Child, myself, and countless others, our paths have all crossed, separated only by time.
Image Credit: https://thatsarte.com/blog/highlights/italian-clay-art-brunelleschi-madonna/
The Abbot of Langhorntown goes on a Pilgrimage By Yakira Goldsberry The Abbot of Langhorntown was exhausted. After the destruction of his town by a crotchety dragon, he had helped the people rebuild. But then the town was raided by a band of raving Picts. Once again, the Abbot had helped his people rebuild their lives. But when a group of axe-wielding Celtic nomads decided that Langhorntown was the place to raid, the Abbot had had enough. His nerves were frayed. His patience was stretched to the breaking point (he had never had a great allotment even before he became Abbot). The Abbot was convinced that Langhorntown was cursed. And in order to deal with it properly, he needed to take a moment to restore his faith in mankind. Or, as he told the brothers of the church, he needed to go on a pilgrimage. Really, he was just escaping in order to keep his sanity intact, but they didn’t need to know that. Once his dear friend Friar Ned finished packing him a sack of food, and Friar John had handed him a walking stick and prayed blessings over him, the Abbot set out on the road that led to who-knew-where. (He didn’t leave the Abby much. Nor did he ever venture outside the walls of Langhorntown.) Overhead, the sun was just beginning to rise, sending a flush of rose and violet into the deep twilight of the sky. Thrushes, sparrows, and doves all sang their morning duets from the thatched roofs and the branches of beech and elder trees. A cool breeze played through the bobbing daffodils and tulips that sprouted in the tiny yards of the homes that lined the road. The Abbot breathed it all in and sighed. Today was a wonderful day. When he reached the edge of the town, the Abbot paused and looked back. The townspeople were just beginning to rise. Some saw him and called out, their smiles wide and their steps light. Despite the fact that Langhorntown was the target for all things raid, the people remained cheerful and lighthearted. Something the Abbot admired very much. Still, after waving back, he turned his face to the rising sun and set his feet on the open road. Planting his stick in the dust, the Abbot walked. And walked. And walked. After much walking, the Abbot grew bored. He stopped, wiped the sweat from his brow and blew out a sigh. “The sun is entirely too hot today.” “I can’t help but agree with you,” a high-pitched, tinny voice replied. The Abbot jumped and looked about. “What?” he cried. “Who said that?” His pack shifted and a heavy weight suddenly lifted from his back. A boy made of wood dropped next to his side. The boy wobbled to his feet on limber joints, looked up at the Abbot and smiled.
“Hello, Abbot!” The Abbot groaned. “Oh, no, not you.” The last time the Abbot had met the wooden boy was the last time his town had been up in smoke. The townspeople had eaten all that was left of the stone soup they had made, and the Abbot had been famished. That was when he met the wooden boy, and he’d asked if the boy had any food. The wooden boy had asked him if he had any shoe polish. The Abbot had replied, “What would an abbot be doing with shoe polish?” The wooden boy had answered, “What would a wooden boy be doing with food?” then promptly decided to follow the Abbot around for the next three days. The Abbot hadn’t had a moment’s peace. It was a most distressing meeting. Especially since The Abbot had no idea wooden boys even existed. He had hoped to never see that wooden boy again. The sisters of Uplangtown Abby, Langhorntown’s neighbor, however, encouraged the wooden boy’s stay in Langhorntown. Occasionally, the sisters would pass through the Abbot’s village, and they would always bring with them a jar of shoe polish for the wooden boy. Unfortunately, this only encouraged the wooden boy and he thought it his duty to take up residence in the Abby, leaving the Abbot not a moment’s peace. Folding his little wooden arms, the wooden boy stuck out his wooden tongue at the Abbot. “Nice to meet you again as well, Abbot.” The Abbot huffed. “I haven’t the time for your tomfoolery. Go and bother Friar Ned.” Pushing past, the Abbot walked faster, determined to reach the nearest town by nightfall. The wooden boy skipped along beside him. “I already did that. Friar Ned told me to come with you.” “That scoundrel,” the Abbot muttered. “Well, go back and tell him you’re not allowed to come on pilgrimages with me.” “Why not?” “Because you’re—” the Abbot was about to say annoying but figured that wasn’t very Christian of him. Instead he said, “Too young.” Laughing, the wooden boy twirled in a circle. “Too young? I’m older than you, Abbot!” This the Abbot doubted very much, as he was the oldest member of Langhorntown, and he had the beard to prove it. It was a long, silky white beard that almost reached the ground, and he was very proud of it. This very same beard he tugged on now, thinking. “Well, you’re still a boy. And until you become a wooden man, you must stay at the Abby.” The wooden boy was now practically shaking as he laughed, his arms wrapped around his ragged tunic. “Wooden boys don’t grow like real boys do!” His laughter quieted and he squinted up at the Abbot. “Is that why you said I have to wait? Do you think I’m daft, Abbot?” Sighing, the Abbot pushed past the wooden boy and marched determinedly down the path. He had really hoped beyond hope his last words would help. Instead, he had offended the wooden boy and was most likely going to pay for it by getting an earful of chatter for the rest of the trip—including in his sleep. Because little wooden boys never sleep. The wooden boy did not disappoint. He launched into a tirade on stingy abbots and the unfairness of the world. The Abbot was tempted to say, “I know all about the unfairness of the world. My village was destroyed three times!” but instead let the boy rant. If he spoke now, his words would fall on deaf ears.
The path led the Abbot into a copse of trees and the wooden boy quieted. He stared up at the trees, wide-eyed, his tiny wooden mouth hanging open. The Abbot sighed. Finally, some peace. He picked up his pace so that he walked in front of the wooden boy and, after a while, began to hum to himself one of his favorite hymns. After quite a while of walking, the Abbot paused and looked back. The wooden boy wasn’t there. He paused. Looked around. “Wooden boy?” he called. Only the sound of rustling wings and the distant cry of a catbird answered him. He took a handful of steps back the way he’d come, scanning the underbrush. The bright green ferns waved at him, but there was no sign of the wooden boy. The catbird’s cry came again. It seemed distinctly familiar. The Abbot stiffened. That was not a catbird. “Wooden boy!” the Abbot cried. “Where are you?” “Help!” came the reply. “They’ve taken me!” The boy’s voice was coming from the northeast of the path. The Abbot hiked up his robes and raced forward toward the voice. It was slow going. Vines and bushes snagged at the Abbot’s feet and robes, and low-hanging branches thwacked against his skull if he didn’t duck. So, he shuffled along at an awkward jog that was more like a waddle, hunched over and uncomfortable. Up ahead, a path materialized from the underbrush that led in the direction of the wooden boy’s shout. The Abbot jumped onto the path and shot forward, no longer encumbered by the underbrush. He tucked his chin in, watching for roots, while following the boy’s voice. “Help! Help! I’ve been kidnapped, I have!” The Abbot couldn’t help but wonder who would want to kidnap the wooden boy. After all, he was not the most pleasant company. That and he constantly complained about the lack of shoe polish in the Abby, the only substance that the wooden boy ever consumed. Then again, the boy was made out of wood. And he was the only one in existence as far as the Abbot knew. And, despite the fact that the wooden boy would try the patience of Job, and very well almost made the Abbot quit his holy calling, he was still the Abby’s wooden boy, and Friar Ned would be very upset if something happened to him. Up ahead, the marauders came into view. One of them carried the wooden boy as if he were a baby. The wooden boy flailed his arms and legs and shouted with all his might. As the Abbot grew closer, he realized who exactly the marauders were. “Sister Mildred?” the Abbot called. Now, it seemed, the sisters had turned into kidnappers. Or, woodnappers, perhaps. The sisters froze in their flight and turned. Sister Mildred blushed under her head covering and smiled. “Hello, Abbot.” The Abbot leaned on his stick and gasped for breath. “What are you doing with my wooden boy?” Sister Mildred blinked. “Your wooden boy? I thought you said that you were tired of him.” She smiled dotingly at the wooden boy, who stuck out his tongue at her. “My sisters and I were just going to take him to Uplangtown where he could play with the other children.” “But Sister, you do know that you can’t keep boys in your Abby.” The Abbot raised one bushy brow.
Nodding, Sister Mildred looked forlorn. “We know, Abbot. But we just wanted to give him a loving home. There are several women in Uplangtown who don’t have sons of their own and—” The Abbot held up a hand. “I am sorry, but the wooden boy won’t ever grow to be a wooden man. So, no woman would want him as a son if he can’t inherit the property. Besides, I doubt the Abbess would want you kidnapping little wooden boys.” With a sigh, Sister Mildred nodded. “You’re right. How foolish of us.” She placed the wooden boy on his feet, and he ran to the Abbot, clinging to his legs. All the sisters of Uplangtown looked at the wooden boy with sadness. The Abbot placed a hand on the wooden boy’s head. “This boy belongs to Langhorntown Abby, and there he will stay until he wishes to leave. Which might be a long time from now.” The wooden boy looked up at the Abbot with wide, surprised eyes. The Abbot smiled back, an odd fondness in his heart for the wooden boy. Despite his being extremely irritating, the Abbot figured that God had placed him on this earth to strengthen his patience and resolve in case of another attack. “But don’t worry, sisters. Next time you pass through Langhorntown, you may bring with you as much shoe polish as you wish for him.” The sisters all expressed their thanks, then continued down the path to Uplangtown. The Abbot watched them go, before turning in the opposite direction. The wooden boy followed. “Did you really mean that?” he asked in a quiet voice. “Mean what, my boy?” “That I can stay at the Abby for as long as I want.” The Abbot smiled down at the wooden boy. “Of course, I did.” The wooden boy let out a whoop and raced ahead, running and jumping in his excitement. The Abbot watched, a small smile on his lips. It was a wonderful thing, seeing the boy’s happiness. The Abbot knew that he was going to regret his decision in about ten minutes, but for now, he let the boy’s happiness fuel his own, and he continued on his path to who knows where.
Jack in the Green on a Beltane Morning By Kenneth R McIntosh “Have you seen the Jack in the Green?” asked the English Rock Band Jethro Tull in their 1977 album Songs from the Wood. Yes, I have. I’ve seen him in numerous guises, as art, as a symbol, and in ancientyet-living rituals, known sometimes as Jack in the Green and also by his moniker The Green Man. This is the story of one such encounter. I’ll always remember where I was on May 1st, 2016. My wife Marsha, Friend and editor Ellyn, and I, were staying in a rambling Medieval house in Devon, England, where we were vaca-working on writing business. I was excited to be in Southern England as Beltane approached (May Day, formerly known by its Celtic name Beltane, was one of the chief festivals, the beginning of summer for the preChristian Celts). May Day morning, we started out at the magical hour of 3:30am and drove in the dark for over an hour between hedge rows, through unlit roads, arriving in the chilly pre-dawn at Haytor Rocks in Dartmoor. Dartmoor is one of the strangest, most haunting environments in England, both barren and lovely. Its desolate moors and dramatic rock escarpments seem like a Marscape at times, and Wistman Wood with its moss-covered dwarf oaks is the perfect enchanted forest. It’s no wonder Arthur Conan Doyle placed his story The Hound of the Baskervilles in Dartmoor.
Beneath the craggy granite outcropping at Haytor Rocks we gathered with a small crowd of folks to celebrate the Beltane dawn with Morris dances. The place is so isolated that the dances were done right in the middle of the road—and not a car came by to interrupt. There were three dance troupes there, with their attendant musicians. Onlookers were friends or family of the dancers. Part of the excitement being there was the sense that this was not a performance—at least not performance for a human audience. I experienced the dances as ritual, enacted for the land, the rising sun, the ancestors. No one is certain where we get the expression “Morris Dance.” Some suggest the word derives from the medieval word “Moorish” (Muslim), but that is by no means certain. We know these dances are older than the Reformation, because Protestants protested them—but how far back in history are their origins? Julia Somerset and other folklorists point to the Morris Dance tradition as a survival of pre-Christian rites having to do with both fertility and the resurrection of new life out of death. Some Morris dancers hold up deer’s antlers as they dance—why? No one remembers, but customs like that seem to give credence to an origin in the ancient nature religion. One of the troupes on this May Day morning was the Beltane Border Morris group. They perform with ashes upon their faces—recalling the prominence of chimney sweeps in May Day celebrations of the 18th and 19th centuries—and wear long shredded strips of black fabric. These dancers are referred to as “crows,” recalling the very ancient connection between corvids and the ancient deities of the land; the Morrigan who shape-shifted to crow, Bran the demigod whose name means “raven,” and Wotan the one-eyed All-Father with his two ravens “memory” and “awareness.” Their dance is combative: rows of dancers’ whirl and charge one another, screaming what can only be described as battle cries, and clashing hardwood sticks so roughly that chips fly. It’s dance, sport, and melee in one. Those folklorists who are inclined to see ancient fertility rituals in the dance will point to this as ritual combat between the forces of winter and of summertime, performed on Beltane as summer engages in climactic and victorious battle against cruel and resistant winter. And as another Morris troupe dances, a vegetative figure strides in their midst—our friend Jack in the Green! He’s wearing a camouflage ghillie suit, designed for soldiers and hunters, and a leaf-face mask patterned after the classic foliated heads in churches, and he carries an unmistakably phallic staff. He serves as a human maypole, standing amidst the dancers whose movements swirl round about him. While his outfit is modernized, this Jack in the Green stands in the place of countless leafy ancestors who have appeared on May Day mornings in centuries past, an icon of summer greenery once again filling the land. After the dance troupes have finished their choreographed rituals, the rest of us are invited to join the revelries.
A dancer hands us hardwood dance sticks— the closest comparison I can come up with is a baseball bat—and they show us how to dance in opposing circles, whacking our sticks against one another. We enter into the dance, gingerly batting with the staffs, gleeful as we join the ancient rite. And then, when the dawn has driven darkness off the moors and crags, the crowd disperses. The roadside that was filled with accordion music, the clash of sticks, and loud shouts, will be lonely and silent again. As I stood in the cold dawn of Beltane morning, watching the Morris Dancers and their friend Jack in the Green, there was a palpable sense of continuity with the ancient past. Those dancers silhouetted before the rising of the sun on this chilly morning, liminal between winter and summer, seemed to echo a primordial heritage. I look into the eyes of the Jack in the Green he seems to wink at me saying, “I am the symbol of your ancestors’ faith in the summertime renewal of the land.” Yet there is more to the enigmatic figure of Jack in the Green. He also symbolizes a deeply Christian understanding of the human predicament. In other chapters of this book I present cogent evidence for this little-known sacred meaning of the Green Man.
---Excerpted from The Soul of the Green Man by Kenneth McIntosh, to be published in May of 2020, with permission of Anamchara Books.
Limping Pilgrims These limping pilgrims, weary, wounded, maimed, even. Yet heading homeward, leaning on sticks and each other. And each step of the way leads to new wounds, fresh blood. Mind, body, spirit – all assailed by the hard road. Yet healing comes too, wounds scab, scar and fade, as the pilgrims open up, bare their marks and offer them. These limping pilgrims, the oddest mix of wound and weal, leaning on sticks and each other, following their limping God.
By Sarah Bingham
2 Minute Travel Review: Key West and Dry Tortugas By Hannah Skipper Key West brims with excitement and history. There is a fabulous museum with treasures from a sunken Spanish galleon, President Harry Truman’s “Little White House”, the Audubon House, and Ernst Hemingway's home, with the descendants of his original six-toed cat still living and bred there. Hemingway’s favorite cafe, Sloppy Joe’s, is also still open for business on Duval St. And the Sunset Festival, where tourists and locals alike gather in Mallory Square every evening to watch the sun go down over the Gulf of Mexico is a must-see with its fun carnival atmosphere. Just mind you watch out for the chicken who roam freely around the island! Seventy miles (113km) across the Gulf, and accessible only by ferry or seaplane from Key West, the Dry Tortugas is a little system of islands covering only 143 acres. Discovered by Spanish explorers and named for the sea turtles they saw camping out on the beaches as well as the fact that there’s no fresh water, it is the most inaccessible national park in the United States. The main attraction is Ft. Jefferson, an old Civil War era military prison whose most famous prisoner was the unfortunate Dr. Mudd. Scuba diving is also a popular activity.
This Homely Land By Amanda Pizzolatto
This massive land that I see, spread from sea to shining sea, is a very unique lot. It’s been called a melting pot, the land of the brave and free, the land of dreams and opportunity. A land with liberty for all, but home, that is its major call. For home is the proper word, for what else would you defend with sword? For home has its ups and downs. Home is full of smiles and frowns. Home sees life’s lessons through, while the winds of change and chance blew, taking us to so many different places, and showing us so many different faces. What will we learn, what will we see? Differences between the trees, or as a forest standing strong listening to a harmonious song.
UNDER THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE By Ray E. Lipinski
“The arches would rise more than a hundred feet, like majestic cathedral windows or the portals of a triumphant gateway” ~ John Roebling, Architect, designer of the Brooklyn Bridge It was the spring of 2016, the faint smell of tulips mixed with the gruff smell of asphalt were in the air. Walking up the steps from the City Hall subway station that familiar excitement that New York stirred up in my veins began to pull at my heartstrings. Having been to the great city three previous times, I had eluded this destination for one reason or another, but now I was almost upon it and my excitement was building with each step out of the station. Like coming up out of the depths of some medieval cave or a dark, dank basement a group of glimmering skyscrapers (I would later call the Sisters) greeted me with their concrete and glass “hello.” Just their hulking presence looming over me was like that giant warm hug from grandma waiting for you with a warm plate of chocolate chip cookies. “Welcome, she’s over there,” they seemed to say and looking over to my left, there she was, the Brooklyn Bridge. Having always been a history buff and lover of the grandiose, she had been on my bucket list for some time. With every visit to New York I was falling more and more in love with the city and with one of its gentlemen, Jeff whom I had met in Texas, a few years before, and who was already ten steps ahead of me walking onto the pedestrian ramp that would bring me closer to her. From the moment my foot stepped on the first wooden plank, my love affair began and after my first walk across her, looking back at the concrete jungle of Manhattan, it was confirmed, I was now madly in love with her and the city. It had only been a few minutes since I traversed the long walkway to the bridge and like a million other naïve tourists was shocked at the multitude of people and bicyclists covering every inch of space – silly to be expecting a vacant bridge like on the post cards. I thought to myself, “I wonder what it would be like to see her with no people around.” Nevertheless, I was in a state of euphoria with all the sites, smells and untold stories that were set before me. Brooklyn Bridge was more immense, grander, more beautiful than I could have ever imagined, and the mobs of people never stopped coming. A German soccer team in their red, yellow, and black uniforms came jogging past. A beautiful, tall, dark haired woman wearing Middle Eastern garb and a black strapless dress adorned with a huge diamond necklace was standing on one of the benches with the city as a backdrop while two photographers snapped her serious gaze. Young and old couples holding hands, some taking pictures, others engaged in conversation among the various street vendors with their wares set up, their own reflection of the bridge beckoning everyone to take a look.
Stepping off her for the first time I almost had a sadness of having to leave her but Jeff, who was always humming some country song to himself, said we had more adventures that awaited us. I said goodbye to my beautiful bridge, that iron goddess of steal and cable that would become my mistress, my muse, that old friend you wanted to run to and share your secrets with and tell all the ramblings of life. Little did I know at the time how many of those secrets and ramblings I would tell her. Walking through those two grand arches one can’t help but look up and get lost in their sheer and utter grandeur, capturing the kaleidoscope of history that has passed under her vaulted ceilings. I had my favourite places to go in the city, The Met, Central Deli in Grand Central Station, The Castle in Central Park, St John the Devine Cathedral, but no other place captured my heart and filled me with such a calm, soothing contentment as Brooklyn Bridge. I always visited her last and I would feel myself being drawn to her, yearning to walk on her even from way across the city. On a hot day in September of 2017, I was again walking with Jeff, my heart skipping a beat, taking all the mysticism of the olden metropolis in, walking with this man of beauty on this bridge of beauty, I was overcome with a profound sense of joy. We had been on-again offagain lovers for three years and trying to maintain a long-distance relationship between New York and Texas was strenuous at best, but with Jeff anchored in New York, that left only one scenario. A plan had begun to form a year ago on my last visit to the city at the thought of becoming a permanent resident. I was in love with him, in love with Brooklyn, in love with the city and as we descended down into Brooklyn itself and looking over the bridge, I could almost hear her, the Sisters and all of the surrounding skyline of glass and steel say “Yes, come join us, all are welcome.” So, on the journey back to Manhattan I jumped up on one of the metal beams, grabbing hold of one of the cables and like a drunken frat boy donned my best Frank Sinatra and began singing New York New York with Jeff yelling at me to get down before falling to my death below no doubt to be crushed by a giant yellow taxi cab, how ‘New York.’ The silly thought only added to my joy. As I jumped down onto those glorious planks, I could hear the Sisters and all the family of concrete monoliths breaking into applause. My mind was made up. I would move to New York. I told them I would be back soon and as if in answer a cool, swift, sweet breeze blew up from under the bridge and swirled around me as if they too were happy about my decision. The walk, cab ride, and subway from Tribeca to the bridge was horrifically hot even for this Texas boy and even after a refreshing glass of ginger lemonade, an avocado toast at Lenox Café, and being very New Yorkish, Violet and I were still covered in sweat. When we stepped off the C train and to the entrance of the bridge, we both agreed that the summer of 2018 was something out of Dante’s hell. As always, she stood in her regal elegance, her arches saying, “How nice, you brought a friend with you”. Yes, a very dear friend. Violet had been my girlfriend my Sophomore year of high school and while we had suffered a distant void in our friendship during college, we had reconnected in the early 2000s and now were as thick as thieves sharing the trials, tribulations, and struggles of our rainbow journey. I had just spent the last few hours telling her the shambles of my life. I had been in New York for about three months, so my plan to move had been a success. I knew which train to take and where, when not to take a cab, and quite a few wits and wisdom about the city shared by my now fellow New Yorkians.
But the dream where Jeff and I would live happily ever after and retire to a quant Florida beach house was over before it started, and that dream had become a nightmare; my life had pretty much imploded. I was lost, confused and a feeling of dark hopelessness had set in. My relationship with Jeff had become a horrible Greek tragedy with no one in the audience. I was so grateful that Violet had come to see me all the way from LA. She had had some of her own personal hardships and challenges and I knew she was the perfect Godsend to help me out of this mess. So, it was no surprise that we ended up smack dab in the middle of the bridge when I confessed all my secrets. In my loneliness and desperation for affection, a few weeks earlier I’d had a brief liaison with Samir, a beautifully, tan sultry Wall Street accountant from Iran, my best friend Sonya was dying from a four year battle with a seven consonant cancer that I couldn’t even pronounce the name of and I was torn with missing my family and two daughters and staying in New York trying to salvage something with Jeff. I loved New York; she was in my blood but for the first time the city had no reply. The sisters and my skyscraper friends had nothing to say. My bridge had nothing to say. But Violet, never one to let me linger in the doldrums, gave me her sweet smile, a long hug, and then a dose of sound reality. She informed me that Iran was a beautiful country in many ways and as a matter of fact, with an evil grin said, that thoughts of Iran always made her happy. I should, in her opinion give Samir a call and have some fun, put my faith in God with Sonya and relish the time I still had with her, cherishing the memories. Violet reiterated what a strong person I was and that I could handle New York on my own if I chose and that my family would always support me in whatever endeavour I was to embark on. With Jeff, she simply said “forget Jeff, time to jump that sinking ship, him and his nonsense.” It seemed that the bridge agreed with another breeze blowing around me and I felt I had received absolution. Back in the city I was refreshed with new hope and a new resolve and looking back at my Gothic beauty now lit up like a silver beacon, beaming in the night sky, I felt a calm, peaceful resolve and that ever-familiar cosmic connection to her. Three weeks later my daughter Kayla came to visit. My walk across the bridge with her was like Violet’s. I told her about the roller-coaster of my life and all the confusion with Jeff and the encroaching reality that Sonya was nearing the end as I had just found out she had been moved to hospice. A week after Violet left, Jeff and I had spent a Saturday that was like something out of a surreal romance novel. We had spent the day at the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, which is part of the Met collection, looking at medieval art, knight warfare exhibits and the utterly indescribable magnificent Unicorn Tapestries. Afterwards, on the way back to the subway station we were hit with a freak monsoon rainstorm and were inundated with hordes of screaming tourists trying to run for cover. We ducked under an awning with some crazy Jamaicans singing Reggae tunes, we were forced to buy umbrellas from a street vendor who I’m sure would have sold his children for the $30 we gave him and made a paper boat sending it down to a waterlogged oblivion down Hudson street with no chance of survival. We walked around a melting, flooding New York for two hours, soaking wet, just laughing at each other before ducking into a tavern for a hot meal, followed by a night of passionate love making to the sounds of all-night thunder. But dawn came and so did the reality of a broken relationship that was still broken.
I had impressed Kayla with my manoeuvring around the subway system, showed her in realtime what a New York minute meant and sipped on $12 lemonades while looking up at the Flat Iron building. Here I was again, walking on my wonderous bridge, pouring my heart out, feeling like a fool and a failure. What was my baby girl going to think of my idiotic, half-baked romantic ideas and belief that there might be a shred of hope? Well in true daughter form she told me quite matter-of-factly that I had nothing to feel foolish for, with the exception of holding out any hope of my Cinderella/psycho relationship with Jeff being salvaged and “it’s time to move on dad, seriously, now let’s get a drink at the Stonewall Inn and make a toast.” The next morning, we were on board a breakfast cruise going up the East River sipping mimosa’s and devouring spinach omelettes bathed in a French hollandaise sauce. The cruise started at Pier 61 in Chelsea, routed to the Statue of Liberty and up to the Brooklyn Bridge. I knew I had come to the crossroads and everything in my life was at an intersection with no detour signs. I knew it was time to decide, that the inevitable was here. Kayla could always sense my emotion and trying to be the strong father figure and holding back my tears through my dark Ray Bans, she just took my hand and squeezed it, “It’s going to be all right, you’re going to be all right.” At that moment we were just approaching the bridge, looming over us like a protective guardian. I walked to the back of the boat, the shadow of her now enveloping us as we crossed underneath her and began turning back. My mind became a TV reel of the last six years. The heartache, the joy, the dreams, the regrets, the multitude of rodeos Jeff and I attended in Texas and the hundreds of pizza slices we ate in New York cafes. All of the sadness and all of the laughter. The movie was over, time to shut the reel off. I looked back at Kayla, smiling in her white dress with animal prints, downing another Mimosa and my beautiful bridge as a backdrop smiling, hugging me with her friendship. I took the silver ring off my finger, having bought it at street festival in the city, a symbol I thought, of the love Jeff and I shared….and “plop” dropped it in the East River along with a million other trinkets lost in the drowning depths of mankind’s desires and broken dreams. Kayla left the next day. Sonya died the day after that and on one of the hottest days in New York, mirroring a Texas summer, I decided to move back home. Oddly on takeoff usually banking to the right, the plane turned north instead and made a loop around the city, almost as if on purpose so I could have a farewell look at the city I loved and to say goodbye to my beloved bridge. There she was, so tiny, flying a thousand feet above her. I pressed my head to the window and whispered, “you can’t keep me away darling; I’ll be back luv.” It had been one of Violet’s desires to visit New York during the Halloween season and in October of 2019 the two of us along with my other daughter Kendall hit the city, with a new resolve and vigor at enjoying life to its fullest. I had been single for a year and revelling in my new freedom with all the possibilities of the dating scene before me. Always saving the best for last, the three of us walked over that outstretched beauty of iron majesty talking about good times and lost loves. The precious moments of family members long gone and those friendships that stand the test of time. Snapping a picture of Kendall inside the arches, that familiar wind began to blow, and a surge of a happiness swelled inside of me as I knew the bridge was smiling at me in all her mechanical wonder.
Later that night in celebration of our last evening in the city, we took a dinner cruise that, like the previous one, would circle the great bridge. After indulging in a buffet of filet mignon, gorgonzola stuffed chicken and the best basil/red pepper pasta on the planet, we danced the night away to songs from our youth in a comradery of vodka and laughter and just the joy of being in each other’s company. I was happy. The captain came over the speaker and announced we were coming up on the Brooklyn Bridge. I left the festivities to go outside and as we approached her, I looked up at her luminous presence bearing down on me. “Hello ole friend,” I said. Pausing under her, once again I was lost to the passionate romance of wonderment that always tugged at my soul. Violet and Kendall came out and shared the view with me and after a while ushered me back inside. I took one more long look at her, my mistress, my muse, shimmering in her purple, glistening light. The reflection of the moon was now showering off her metal beams like angelic rays caught in a tempest storm. I was intoxicated by her presence, “I’ll always be here, till next we meet,” she said. I inhaled the sweet smell of the river mixed with the cool New York wind and exhaled, “yes my love, yes my love.” *** Epilogue – Spring 2020 I got a ding on my phone from my ole buddy Daniel, he had sent me a video. I had met him while living in New York at a dance studio by day and country western club by night off of 52nd and Broadway. Daniel is one of those multitalented persons, artist, singer, musician, and one of the best backup Broadway dancers I have ever seen. The video was a panoramic view of him walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. An elderly couple was slowly walking, holding hands, two joggers, one young couple taking a picture and one bicyclist. That was it. That was it. I remembered my thought when I took my first steps on her, “I wonder what she would look without all these people”. As Daniel passed the arches, the video played a sombre violin/duo and you could feel her emptiness, her darkness, her loneliness. A surge of sadness enveloped me like a Brahms symphony and tears streamed down my face as the video faded to black. I whispered to the screen “I’ll be back my love, traipsing across your timbers, holding on to your cables and gasping at your never fading beauty, I’ll be back”
Personal Journal – June 23, 2020 – Eight million infected worldwide with Corona Virus, 437,000 deaths. New Outbreak in China.
Oregon Trail Lament By Hannah Skipper When I was young, I traveled the Oregon Trail. I started out in Independence, Missouri and I went to the General Store. I bought a wagon and oxen and sometimes horses too. I bought plenty of food and medicine. Starting out, I was full of hope and dreams of glory. Victory was sure to be mine. But Oregon Trail had other ideas. I lost mother and father, sister, brother, and friends. Sometimes I died too. Other times, my journey simply ended in failure. There were many reasons for my demise. Cholera, dysentery, typhoid, or some other fever, poisonous berries or a snake bite, stampedes, flash floods, and Indian raids, bankruptcy and injury; they all spelled doom for me. It would have been nice to see the Pacific Ocean. and know that I had won. But I never reached that western shore. I never beat the game. The computer beat me every time. I’m older now, but I still ponder. This one thing, I’d like to know. How did the west coast become so populated? For I know no one who has ever beat the game.
Journeying in a Time of Isolation
By Beth Amos
It would be an understatement to say that 2020 has somewhat changed our perception of ‘normal.’ I’ve been in lockdown with my family since February, which then stretched into medically recommended self isolation once lockdown began to lift; as three out of the four of us are in high risk categories. Shops closed, utility bills were temporarily suspended, and – despite already working online from home – my client pool dried up to a bare trickle. When I look out at the world, I see many people struggling to focus on anything past the new restrictions placed upon their lives. Many have thrown their excess energy and anxiety into creative pursuits – filling up the internet with crafts, art, entertainment, comedy, and endless positivity drives. Others seem to have regressed back to early childhood, their every communication sounding ever increasingly like an overtired child arguing with their parental units against bedtime curfew. It’s a bizarre state of affairs to say the least. It is a time of polarisation, where the angels and monsters in our midst are launching themselves into the light of day in droves all around us. Aside from my earnings, for me – being a lifelong introvert at heart – not much of my day to day life has changed. Some things have a weird new twist to them, like having to wash and quarantine the monthly shopping deliveries before bringing them into the house, but I confess that I don’t miss going to the shops at all, and there is a big part of me that has really come to love the newfound peace. I don’t have to stress about who’s going to be coming to my door anymore – no having to put up with annoying architects, or frustrating but well-meaning builders, no gas delivery men, or meter readers. I miss seeing my friends, of course, but I find that this new status quo has opened up a vast amount of time in each day; so much so that some days I don’t even plague myself with pangs of guilt at, from time to time, just putting my feet up and blissfully doing nothing. Better than that, with the peace has come a wonderful calm focus, allowing me to regain drive and concentrate on projects that, due to day to day stresses, have been sadly neglected and left sitting on the back burner for far too long.
I’ve never been a fan of the news – there is enough negativity in the world without all of the doomsaying of the tabloid-rag-level, play-pretend newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Sun, which clutter the newsagent’s shelves these days, screaming out at us that the world is out to get us and that everything and its uncle is going to give us cancer. Besides, the political world seems to currently be the domain of tantrum-throwing manchildren, rather than intelligent debate – it almost makes the Mail’s health and lifestyle pieces seem like Mensa level theses. These days I follow just enough to stay informed, but not enough to make me crazy. So, what has all of the above rant got to do with travel and pilgrimage? Well, quite a bit actually. With the onset of Covid, came the beginning of a journey of personal discovery and re-prioritisation, which has covered every level of my life, from the clothing I choose to wear each day, to the list of things which have come to matter most to me, even reaching as far as my ‘friends list’ on Facebook. In setting aside all of the pointless rubbish which has built up over the years, draining my time away like so many grains of sand in an hourglass, I find myself finally free!...or at the very least much freer than I’ve been in years and the Awen flows in, filling up all of the newly empty spaces. In the past few months, I’ve thrown myself into my studies, rediscovered my love of sketching, taught myself rudimentary watercolour, read several fascinating books, spruced up my author site, built a new chicken coop from solely upcycled materials, captured some fantastic wildlife footage of pine marten, wolf, wild boar, and roe deer in the forest at the bottom of my fields, sampled a selection of artisanal goats cheeses – which I’ve never tried before – and completed a course in the history of dream analysis and therapy. While it’s true that this year I won’t be collecting shells and bits of sea-glass on Scerne beach, or visiting Lago di Campotosto, my connection to the earth is only strengthened by this unseen enemy, which has risen to challenge the very core of how humanity exists on this planet. Through the luxury of my excess time and the medium of meditation conducted barefoot in the grass, I can sink my toes into the warm earth and travel wherever I wish to go, whether it’s lingering over a cool glass of sweet brandy sour at the café below Kourion, in Cyprus, or visiting the impressive standing stones at the Ring of Brodgar, in Orkney. Every molecule in my body is made up of the same material which forms all of existence, from the stars shining above us to the dark unseen world which exists far beneath our feet. This journey has made me realise that as my body, mind, and soul are an integral part of everything, no threat or enforced isolation can truly constrain me.
2 Minute Travel Review: Porto By Mike Flynn Last year I was fortunate enough to go to Porto, Portugal on a stag-do for one of my best friends. I travelled a few days earlier on my own, and had a wonderful time. I visited a multitude of places, including Torre de Clerigos, an indoor market, Livraria Lello (an iconic book shop with ties to J K Rowling), Jardins do Palácio de Cristal (a stunningly huge garden with fantastic views and peacocks wandering around it), Monument Church Of St. Francis, and a whole host of other sites, including a few bridges, a beach, and some river-side cable-cars. I was utterly blown away by the beauty of this place, with its architecture adorned with multitudes of ornate tiles, the views across this valley-strewn town were stunning and, to top it off, we all went canyoning with the most fantastic tour group. We traversed, zip-lined, abseiled, and dove, along the most stunning river canyon. The guides were fantastic; they picked us up from Porto and dropped us off again after taking us for a celebratory lunch. It truly was the most memorable of times, and I would greatly recommend visiting Porto. (https://www.oportoadventuretours.com/ - Who we used for the Canyoning – fantastic service and well worth it) (https://www.timeout.com/porto/attractions/portos-top-10-attractions - Some of the sites mentioned) (https://www.google.com/search? source=univ&tbm=isch&q=porto+tiled+buildings&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi385Op4tPp AhVCrHEKHTZBDgMQ7Al6BAgJEDY&biw=1038&bih=690 – Pictures of the tiled buildings)
The Idea of North
By Ananda Barton
Traveling North is to travel through time. In July, when winter cold gnaws the city, going North is going forward, into the spring. Warm days, blue sea, flowers verging the road. But to go North is also to go backwards. into primal lands, basking in the great Australian silence, where people still live in the Dreaming. To towns where the 1930s linger, to lost principalities, and remote fastnesses in leaguered hills.
A Whole New World
By Amanda Pizzolatto
You’re walking towards a slightly busy street. Cars zoom by at the intersection. A trolley dings as it goes by. People are walking past, some chatting on their phones, others talking to a companion. The scents of the wares of street vendors fill the air, popcorn, nuts, tacos, and hot dogs. One such vendor seems to be looking at you and humming. You notice that he’s standing in front of a theater, selling popcorn. You then realize he’s humming “A Whole New World” from Aladdin. You smile at him. He stops humming and smiles back, the smile going all the way into his electric-blue eyes. The joy in his face is so genuine, so bright, that it only makes you smile all the more. He waves as you come to a stop by his stall. “Well hello there! New to these parts?” he asks. You tilt your head. “Why yes. Is it that obvious?” He chuckles. “A bit, I’m afraid. It also doesn’t help that I’ve memorized every face that’s come down this way. What brings you to this part of town?” You shrug. “I wanted to see everything. I wanted to travel and see the whole world!” Your face falls. “But that will never happen, so I’m seeing everything in town, just so I don’t miss a thing.” “Well, traveling just to different parts of town can be more productive than traveling to other parts of the world,” he says. You blink. “Why do you say that?” He waves his hand towards the busy intersection. “Because you actually get to see more of one place and come to know its people better than your stereotypical world tour that just shows you the bare minimum, if even that.” He turned back to you. “Of course, when most people travel the world, they do just want a taste of the sights and sounds of the land. But to actually stay long enough to get to know its people? Now that’s a real experienced traveler. See, the sights and sounds of the land aren’t the only thing that makes the world a beautiful place; it’s the people as well.” He shrugs. “Besides, we now have the internet. You can travel from the comfort of your own home.” You sigh. “It just isn’t the same. Not the same as actually being there, getting the feel of the place.” “Ah, and there’s the dilemma. Getting the feel of the place also includes getting to know the people, so, you know, that kinda proves my point.” He grins. You look at him, bewildered. “You are kind of odd.” He chuckles. “Oh, you have no idea. But that’s part of what makes me, well, me.” He winks. You chuckle nervously. “Yeah, so I can tell.” “Oh, you can, can you? But you haven’t gotten to know me very well,” he says with a slight tilt of his head.
You open your mouth to answer, but pause. He has a point. You’re just basing this off of this first interaction, the things he’s only just said. You lean on the stall. “You have a point. How would someone get to know you better?” He smirks and nods at the theater. “Come back here at seven. Just tell them Matthew Bleu sent you.” You blink, feeling kind of disgusted. “You have a show about yourself?” “Eh, I wouldn’t say that, though I will be talking about myself. With as much as I’ve seen in all my travels, a little bit about me won’t kill you.” “Where have you traveled?” “Oh, hundreds of places! Spent a few months at each, so I’ve got quite a few stories to share.” Your mouth drops in shock. “You’ve spent months in hundreds of places? But you look like you’re only twenty-five!” He laughs. “Oh, I’m definitely older than that, much older than that. I know, I know, I don’t look it. Guess I’m lucky in that regard, got some good genes.” He shrugs. “So, this… thing tonight, you’re going to show us what you’ve seen or something like that?” He gives you a mysterious smile. “Why don’t you come and find out?” You purse your lips. You do kind of want to find out, but you don’t want to stay around if this guy really is narcissistic. “Will I be able to leave whenever I want?” “Oh sure, but I hope you will stay.” You blink, the way he said that made it seem like he knows you’re going to stay. You narrow your eyes. “You’re sure?” “Oh positive, I own this place. If security won’t let you out, I’ll suspend them. Sound good?” You nod slowly. “Alright, tonight at seven.” He grins. “Great! I’ll see you tonight then!” He waves as you walk away. You give a friendly wave back, but as soon as your back is turned, you begin to wonder if it was a good idea after all to accept his offer. But you do have to admit that you are slightly intrigued. After all, if you don’t like it, you can always leave. With a nod of your head, you have made your choice, you’ll go back, just to see what he’s talking about. *** You arrive at the theater promptly at seven. The theater looks almost completely different than it had earlier. The popcorn stall is gone, a couple of lights illuminate the sign outside as the sun finishes setting in the west, and two big, burly men stand outside the doors with their arms crossed. You gulp, but walk up to them. “Um, Matthew Bleu sent me?” You say more out of curiosity if it will work rather than if you remember his name. The men nod and step aside to let you in. You let out a breath of relief as you walk through the brightly lit corridor. That was a little easier than you’d thought. You notice posters out of the corner of your eye, and blink. What the heck? One is titled “The Laurel of the Caesars Trilogy” and has the image of a dark-skinned fairy with white butterfly wings reaching for a shimmering, golden laurel wreath. The one next to it has what looks like a leprechaun holding up a sword with a snake-like dragon flying in the sunset behind him and the words “Charms and Challenges” placed just above the sword.
You look at the other posters. “Hunchback of Ethael”, “Of Djinns and Dinosaurs”, “David Turner”, “Adventures of Dixie Johnson”, “Letters and Lace,” and many more, all showcasing shows, movies, and books you have never heard of before. Is this Mr. Bleu’s way of trying to advertise his own books, and movies? But that doesn’t make sense. Some of these look like they are well-made and like the public would adore them. Now your curiosity has peaked. Determined to know more and to find out exactly what’s going on, you head on into the theater. A stage at the far side of the room is well lit, but only red curtains can be seen. You see that other people have shown up. You can hear a few conversations about the posters seen in the corridor. As you thought, there is interest in many of them. Perhaps Mr. Bleu will show one tonight? You glance at the stage as you sit down. Speaking of Mr. Bleu, where is he? “Ladies and gentlemen, hold on to your horses!” Everyone jumps at the sound of Mr. Bleu’s voice as the lights directed at the stage turn around. They pause as the curtains part and Matthew Bleu comes out. You join in the applause. He bows as the curtains close behind him. “Thank you, thank you! You look like a wonderful crowd tonight! And you sound like one too. I couldn’t help but hear your enthusiasm over some of those posters in the hall.” Several voices cry out “yes!” and “I want to know more!” Mr. Bleu presses his fingers together. “Wonderful! I’ve got you all intrigued.” He waggles his eyebrows and then a smile spreads on his face. “I shall give you a little bit more to whet your appetite as I have a lot of ground to cover and can’t do it all tonight. Come back here every week if you want to know more. But first, those posters, ah yes, those stories, well loved by many generations!” You blink as murmurs spread through the audience. What? Well loved, by many generations? You have never heard of those stories before! “That’s because these aren’t from your world,” Mr. Bleu says softly. The murmuring stops and your eyes widen. He’s been to other worlds? “You heard me,” he continues, “these aren’t from your world. Would you like to see the worlds where these come from?” You join in the unanimous chorus of “Yes!” He grins. “Fantastic!” He grabs a hold of the curtain and pulls it back, revealing a starry backdrop. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my world.” You gasp as Mr. Bleu holds out his arms. His skin has started turning blue. “Welcome to my universe!”
Original Artwork: Different Worlds By David Glenn
Journey and Destination – A Theological Reflection By Sarah Bingham Travelling The majority of a pilgrimage is spent on the road, rather than at the destination. Perhaps for this reason, my most positive memories are tied into the journey rather than terminal places; the process rather than arrival. It is whilst travelling that friendships are developed - Heike and I still see each other regularly, a South African pensioner and I still email each other with jokes (folk met walking the camino de Santiago). It is on the journey that kindness is most frequently received and offered - a French small-holder called me over to chat one afternoon, and on discovering that I like cherries, invited me into the fruit cage to help myself off the (organically grown) tree while he went to get a bag so I could take some with me. It is the placing of self within a wide landscape that helps bring perspective – seeing a large European bird of prey (an eagle of some sort by its size) soar majestically through a valley after I had had a steep scramble down a hill into a meadow, reminded me that no matter how majestic nature is, God is more majestic still. It is the unexpected gifts of the road – a bright green praying mantis in the middle of an otherwise empty country lane, (my initial thought, on seeing such a green object, was “how sad that someone has dropped a sweet wrapper here”; it was only as I got closer that I realised what I was actually seeing), or a hummingbird hawk moth hovering over flowers in the border of a park, or a wind-bent, stunted apple tree bearing fruit at the edge of a field – that lifts the spirit and reminds the pilgrim of the God who is closer than breath and speaks through general revelation too. The tree held a particular resonance; I saw it on a day when Pritchard’s book had suggested walking with eyes open wide to see what God might use to bring his message. For me, the message was that even a stunted tree does what it was created for – having roots, a trunk, branches, leaves, flowers and then fruit. Even someone who feels stunted by life can be fruitful. It is as you travel that folk all around cheer you on and do their utmost to try to understand what you are saying. In a tiny village in Galicia, an elderly woman bent over with years and hard work, did not speak Castilian Spanish and could not read from the phrase book. She spoke the local dialect Galego, of which I spoke none. However, she did know the word peregrina, pilgrim, and could say “buen Camino”, literally “good road” and a blessing like the Irish “may the road rise to meet you”. I tried several ways of communicating – my few words of Castilian, showing her the phrase book, miming, and eventually just offering her a drink from my water bottle. We sat on a wall in the sun together for a time, before I continued walking.
Arrival Santiago de Compostela is a shock after the road. Although many pilgrims travel and refugios are frequently full or almost full, it is quite possible to walk all day and only see other pilgrims in the distance or at places you stop and sit for a while.
The footpath also runs woven through small villages and sometimes criss-crosses the main trunk roads used by vehicles and the bravest of those cycling the Camino, so it is common to see from a distance locals and traffic once you get closer to Santiago. However, once past Ponferrada there is only one large town (Sarria) on the walkers’ route to Santiago. There sounds, sights and smells assail you. Your dutiful palos, (which have brought you through thick and thin, beaten back bushes, kept stray dogs away, plumbed the depths of puddles and aided balance over rough terrain), now become a hazard, as they slip on the paving. If shouldered, they become a hazard to the crowd walking before and behind you. The cathedral is the goal of all pilgrims. At an office in the cathedral precincts, new arrivals present their pilgrim passport, which has been stamped along the route at regular intervals to mark the speed (or rather slowness) of your passing. After a brief questioning about why you have walked the route and what your immediate reactions are, the officers decide whether or not you will receive a Latin Compostela certificate of completion. This office is welcoming and encouraging and a place for those ahead on the road to leave messages for those coming after. I left a note for another walker which was collected while I was at Finisterre. However, the cathedral itself provokes a mixed reaction. Santiago is famous amongst other things for a giant censer, the Botafumeiro, which is only swung during designated pilgrim Masses. It takes eight men to swing it and is a sight to behold. Meant as a special blessing for pilgrims, it attracts tourists from all over the world; they fill the cathedral, save pew space for their family’s sight-seeing elsewhere in the cathedral or city, and jump up with their video cameras as soon as the men move into place. For the scruffy, dirty pilgrims trying to mark the completion of their pilgrimage with a service in the cathedral, who seem marginalised to those seats with little or no view of the altar, preacher or action, the reality of “normal” life is brought crashing home. And yet, even so, all over the cathedral pilgrims leave their little offerings from the journey. There are many places and collection boxes for donativos or financial gifts. The money is used by the cathedral to fund good works and keep the building safe. Less formally though, almost in an unspoken consensus, pilgrims gather small objects on route – when I was there with the three Germans, we had between us a piece of quartz, eucalyptus and oak leaves, pine needles and a walnut, chestnut and almond – to bring the road into the cathedral and offer thanks to God for a safe journey. We wrote out a simple prayer in Castilian, German and English that said “Thank You God for these gifts and the gifts you pour out on us every day”. We tucked the prayer and natural gifts high up on a ledge on one of the large pillars, hoping they would stay awhile before the cleaners removed them. There was a very different feel at Finisterre/Fisterra, where Heike, Bine (Sabine), Manu (Manuella) and I drove after we had had a couple of days in Santiago to recover. Along the way we stopped at a little beach and all paddled in a very blue, very warm, very sheltered bay of the Atlantic. When we got to the town, we were denied access to the refugio because we had not walked there. Bine and Manu did not have the money to stay in a hotel and planned to sleep on the beach. Heike and I did have the money, so we booked a twin room each and then went to find the others, telling them one room would go empty if they didn’t sleep in it. We then went out for a picnic and to watch the sun go down over the ocean. As we finished the meal, I thought how fitting it would be to share communion to mark the end of ‘our Camino’, but immediately thought too that as they were Catholic, I could not suggest it. (I should have known better, after being offered communion at all three Masses I attended and Heike suggesting that maybe God was trying to tell me something when I admitted it had happened a third time at the Cathedral).
However, even as the two thoughts crossed in my head, Manu suggested we should share communion. Heike told the others that I led communion in my church (at that time, I went to an independent evangelical church), so they insisted that is what we should do. We held one of the most moving communions I have ever shared in, before returning to the hotel and the next day, to Santiago where two got on a plane to Germany and I got on a bus back to Madrid. Arrival at the destination, though, also means parting. This moment is delayed for those who have done their pilgrimage in an organised group, but will still occur for them once they are back at their original meeting place or home town. In Santiago I met up with a number of people who I had seen along the way, who either arrived before or after I did. With each one when I knew it was our final meeting, I wished them “buen camino para la corazón” (“good road for the heart”). My intention was to suggest that though the physical pilgrimage was over, the lessons and attitudes learned from the road might continue in their life at home. What I found most interesting were people’s responses. The majority of those who seemed not to understand and answered that they had finished the pilgrimage, were Catholic. The majority of those who nodded and wished me the same were New Agers. This “continuing pilgrimage” attitude made me even more ambivalent to the importance of destination, so that I felt at liberty to walk in France with a set time rather than set distance to cover. Whilst I was disappointed in France that my injury prevented me from covering more ground, I did not feel I had failed or let myself or God down by deciding at Tours that there was too great a risk of a snapped Achilles tendon in open French countryside to continue safely.
Analysis We live in an age when people endow places with importance. After car accidents on busy roads, or at a crime scene, spontaneous “shrines” appear. Sometimes these move beyond being temporary places marked by sad, wilting flowers, into sites permanently marked with a cross or sign with the name of the deceased. We honour fallen police officers killed in the line of duty with memorial plaques close to where they died. It may be that these practices are more rooted in folk tradition than faith, but in building bridges to the community, does the Church need to look again at what makes a place “holy”? What constitutes a site for gathering and remembering? Almost every faith community, and many a group within the New Age movement, sees spiritual benefit in making journeys that they will happily call pilgrimages. Destinations are chosen because of significance to members of that faith or group. These journeys can lead to life changing decisions. In a review that I wrote of Fedele’s book, I suggested evangelists would need to be careful about only using the argument that “Christianity works” as a reason for coming to faith, as the New Age beliefs of the pilgrims she studied also, at some level, “worked” to bring transformation. Are Protestant Christians robbing themselves of a means of spiritual blessing by not engaging with this ancient practice? God is everywhere but does that mean we often miss him hiding in plain sight? If every place is equally holy, does that make our search for him seem too easy? Does the desire to have to make physical effort to go to a place to find him play into our inability to accept salvation purely through grace alone? If we know we are called to be a pilgrim people metaphorically as well as perhaps physically, does the dissatisfaction on arrival at the destination reflect the deeper internal knowledge that actually satisfaction and a sense of “true arrival” will not be possible until we walk with God in the re-created new heavens and new earth?
My experience tells me that God was to be found just as much, if not more, in making the journey and through the people I encountered, as in the focal point of the destination. Is it then, the attitude of setting aside time and having a dedicated purpose of seeking God more actively in our surroundings, that marks the difference between home and pilgrimage, between “normal” and “holy” space?
Application Land and place were important in the Old Testament. Inge spends an entire chapter discussing the relevance of geographical place in Christian scriptures, particularly the Old Testament implications of ‘The Promised Land’. Whilst Yahweh was God of the whole Earth, rather than a localised god, he still called a people out to a Promised Land to be his own; his own witnesses and blessings to the other nations. It took a long time for his people to end up in their land, and that time gave them a rich understanding of being sojourners. Encounters with God happened wherever he willed, indoors or outdoors. Indoor encounters seem to be confined to the tabernacle and Temple (which were set up as places of encounter), but outdoor encounters happened in many places – for example, under shady trees, in a burning bush in the desert, at overnight stopping places whilst travelling and on particular mountains - and those places became identified as holy places, marked with altars or stones to remind people of the encounter. Particularly during the Exodus, God was with his people, and showed them when to move from place to place, providing for them in every place. This presence, in a modified form, continued with the tabernacle and the Temple after the land was settled. The Temple became the place to encounter God, hence the requirement to visit at least three times a year. Within the Psalms of Ascent, geography and place are very important. Only four of the fifteen psalms do not mention Zion, other geographical areas or topographical features. Potential dangers of travel and the safety offered to pilgrims by God are mentioned, as is delight at both the idea of travelling to Jerusalem and arrival in the city. Psalm 84 similarly focuses on the delight to be found at the Temple, a delight so deep that it is better to have one day waiting at the gate to enter, than a thousand days anywhere else. Kraus and Tate both emphasise that the one at the door is not someone with an official post within the Temple, but rather a pilgrim so keen to get into the Temple that they sleep on the doorstep. During the Exile, God’s people discovered his universal nature; he was with them in exile, even though they did not feel able to sing his songs in a strange land. Through his prophet, God instructed them to settle and be good citizens and bless the place where they dwelled. However, both Jeremiah and Jesus also tackled the false hope God’s people put in the physical place of the Temple – the belief that destruction could not come upon them whilst the Temple stood. Jeremiah 6 is a blistering rebuke for those whose faith is in Jerusalem, rather than God. Jesus warns of the destruction of the Temple. Perhaps that false hope is why, ultimately, it had to go? After the Ascension, with the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost and the new understanding of both God’s people and God’s temple, the focus on place shifted to fulfilling the Great Commission, which emphasises that heaven and Earth are within Jesus’ remit and that rather than gathering folk to one place to find God, he himself would go with them to the ends of the Earth as they proclaimed him. By his Spirit, God could be encountered anywhere. No one place was more holy than another. To carry the logic of divine omnipresence one step further, as the Protestants did in the sixteenth century, there can be no especially holy places, because God is everywhere, equally, in the hearts of the just.
Pilgrimage loses any earthbound, geographical focus and becomes a metaphor for the journey through life toward a heavenly goal. This logic has a certain intellectual elegance, but it strips the earth of sanctity and leaves us no place truly sacred to go during our earthly sojourn. --from Mary Lee Nolan and Sidney Nolan, Christian Pilgrimage in Modern Western Europe, reissue (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) pp. 337-338. Yet even as Christians, we recognise that some places seem to aid our encountering of God, our meeting with him. The Celtic Church referred to these as ‘thin places’ and they were often, although not always, marginal places – islands, wells, caves or cliffs. Somehow, the physical liminality of a geographic place invites within us a spiritual liminality – an openness to the Spirit that can be harder to experience in busier, more populated places. Wynn discusses reasons why liminal places may be spiritually important. Similarly, in the East, early saints frequently went to isolated places – the desert, a mountain – to wrestle spiritually and learn to know and love God. Others went to learn from them and in both East and West a parallel form of monastic community grew – with collections of cells enabling solitude and companionship. Saint Cuthbert famously separated himself from the other monks for times of retreat on a small island off Lindisfarne. There was also a mendicant tradition, although charlatans discredited this practice to the point where Benedict wrote stability into his Rule and later the church made mendicant monks illegal, although this form of pilgrimage remained within Orthodox practice. Historically, there were many reasons for going on pilgrimage to sites frequently connected to saints or healing miracles. Whilst the journey was important, arrival at a place where God had acted and might act again was more important. Asking for healing at a place where others had been healed, or being able to walk in the places where Jesus had walked, helped the pilgrim to ‘plug in’ to a spiritual reality that seemed less accessible at home. Post-Reformation, pilgrimage remained popular in Catholic areas of Europe, but declined elsewhere. Indeed, for a time, pilgrimage was illegal in England and Wales, though the site at Holywell continued to be visited. Religious wars saw a decline in, although not the cessation of, pilgrimage in Europe. As a more metaphorical understanding of pilgrimage took hold particularly amongst Protestants, there was less imperative to actually go on pilgrimage, although Coleman and Eade suggest ‘It is surely too limiting a perspective to see Protestantism as transposing sanctified travel on to a purely metaphorical plane. Luther had said that pilgrimage could be of value if done rightly, but also said it was better for a man to stay at home and use the money to help his neighbour! Through the twentieth century, there was a rise in Christian pilgrimage to traditional European sites, which Inge suggests restores the importance of “place” denied by the Reformation, and also a rise in religious tourism to the Holy Land, which may have been helped by relative cheapness of flights, meaning a tour can be done in weeks rather than months or years. Talking with a frail, elderly French woman in Santiago, she explained how upset she was that in Spain she was not perceived as a proper pilgrim because she was travelling by coach. With a group of other elderly or ill Catholics, she was visiting Santiago, Fatima and Lourdes. We agreed that pilgrimage was about the heart motivation, not the form of travel. I hope for her sake that her coach party spent time as a travelling community worshipping together and encouraging each other. If not, I do feel she would have missed out on something important.
As Jones says, ‘En route, many modern-day pilgrims feel the urge to open up their hearts to fellow travellers...and share at a deep level some troubling issue from the past. Those we travel with should be one of the means through which God speaks to us. Another element is the return home; both we and those left behind have been changed and how we reconnect is important. Every journey ends and both the destination and the partings we make reveal that we are not yet home, that there is more journeying to happen, whether physically or spiritually, practically or metaphorically. Rieger says ‘This journey ultimately points us to our true home, which is found at last where we least expect it: in the presence of God, who is often encountered in special ways in the unfamiliar.’ Indeed, until the new heavens and the new earth come into being, every arrival and departure is going to be ultimately dissatisfying. Whilst Revelation is written in symbolic imagery and metaphorical language, there is still a great deal of description of the city where one day God will dwell with his people, not least appearance, size and content – no Temple, a river, trees and a throne, and we will not feel truly at home until we live in that city.
ByTimGule
Ipswich, Willesden, and Walsingham, Three Marian Shrines in Sixteenth Century England Everyone likes a mystery. The story I am going to tell has elements of a good detective story: statues revered for centuries, royal agents bent on destruction of images, traditionalists trying to preserve sacred objects for future generations, and persistent pious legends of true images which one day might be revealed, and a devotion revived in the land of ‘Our Lady’s Dowry.’ And of course, like any good detective story, heroes and villains. You can make up your mind which are which from the likes of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. At the Reformation in England in the 1530s there was an orgy of destruction of images of saints, holy objects, crucifixes and crosses. Reformist bishops such as Latimer and Ridley lead the way. Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII ordered the plundering of shrines and monastic institutions. Pilgrimages, hitherto a way of life for ordinary Christians, were banned and the holy places despoiled. But what happened to the relics, statues and images from these shrines and churches? What if some had survived, hidden away or sent abroad for safe keeping? At the start of the sixteenth century, pilgrimages were part of the traditional faith of England and central to everyone’s lives. This was an experience which was extremely common in the medieval period right up to the reign of Henry VIII after which it was strongly discouraged by acts of parliament and the new regulations brought about by the religious reformers who had the king’s ear at that time. A pilgrimage is a devotional practice consisting of a prolonged journey, often undertaken on foot or on horseback, toward a specific destination of significance. It is a short-term experience, removing the participant from his or her home environment and identity. The means or motivations in undertaking a pilgrimage might vary, but the act, however performed, blends the physical and the spiritual into a unified experience. During the middle ages, people made pilgrimages for a variety of reasons. Many holy sites were believed to have a healing powers, such as Walsingham, in Norfolk. Pilgrims who had a sick loved one could seek divine help at a place like this, along with people who were ill themselves, and people who had recovered from illnesses could also come to give their thanks to God. Penitents would also undertake pilgrimages in order to gain forgiveness for their sins, or to shorten time in purgatory for themselves or for others. Basically, as a pilgrimage was a journey of faith, anything a person felt they needed God’s help for could be motivation for the journey. Walsingham in Norfolk was the most popular destination for a medieval or early Tudor pilgrim. For most Catholics at that time, Mary was of huge importance in their religious life. Mary, the Mother of God was revered and honoured almost universally in England at this time. More churches were dedicated to St Mary or other variations of her titles than any other saint. This practise was particularly strong in East Anglia and surrounding areas. Many cathedrals and larger churches had Lady Chapels and there were so many places of pilgrimage associated with Our Lady which were visited by rich and poor alike. A central part of the medieval Christian faith was the Marian cult. The English towns and villages most noted for medieval devotion to Mary in Britain were: Walsingham in Norfolk, the primary British shrine of Mary and known across Europe; Coventry; Doncaster; Ely; Evesham; Glastonbury; Ipswich; Lincoln; Pontefract; Willesden and Worcester.
Many abbeys and priories were dedicated to Mary, especially the Cistercian and Carmelite ones. Yet, actually, very many more places could be added to the list as devotion to Mary was common; most people could not travel far and needed a local place to visit on pilgrimage. On Lady Lane in Ipswich once stood a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Ipswich. The earliest reference to it is in the thirteenth century and, like other Marian shrines, it was suppressed in the 1530s. The Ipswich shrine to Our Lady was positioned in its own chapel instead of being placed in the local parish church. This sometimes happened if the dedication of the local church was not to Our Lady. At its height, it was a very popular pilgrimage site. Even today in Ipswich there are several churches with medieval origins with similar dedications: St Mary at the Elms, St Mary Le Tower, St Mary at the Quay and St Mary at Stoke. Notable visitors and events at the shrine of Our Lady of Ipswich included the wedding of Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King Edward I, to the Count of Holland in 1297. In the fourteenth century, both King Henry VIII and his wife Catherine of Aragon both visited the shrine separately, staying with Lord Curzon on Silent Street in Ipswich. Other famous visitors included Anne Boleyn, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and Sir Thomas More. More is said to have witnessed and recorded a miracle of 'Our Lady of Grace' involving the healing of twelve-year-old Anne Wentworth. In his book, 'The Supplication of Souls' he describes how Anne, daughter of Sir Roger Wentworth, suffered from seizures in which she would spasm, blaspheme and speak of prophesy. After Anne had a vision of 'Our Lady of Grace' she was taken to the shrine and laid before the image of the Blessed Lady. Thomas described Anne Wentworth as... ‘grevously tourmented and in face, eyen, loke and countenance so grysely chaunged...that it was a terrible syght to beholde’. However, in front of the audience she recovered ’perfytely and sodeynly’ as More recounted. It is believed that Anne, in recognition of this miracle later took her vows and became a nun. The fate of the statue of Our Lady of Grace, as the statue was known, is unclear. It was reported to have been transported to London in a cart and delivered to the house of Thomas Cromwell in order to be burnt along with the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham and other images. There is evidence that this was indeed the fate of some holy objects. Cromwell’s steward is reported to have remarked of the statue from Ipswich that it had ‘nothing about her but two half shoes of silver’. What happened after that is a matter of conjecture. There is a gap which is unaccounted for between 1538 and 1550 when it is believed the statue was smuggled away by sailors who set sail for Italy. It was a dangerous time to have such a statue in one’s possession at that time. We know the ship set sail and that the Italian sailors took refuge from a ferocious storm during the voyage. In return for their safe passage, the story goes, the sailors offered the statue to the people of the town of Netunno in the south of Italy. And there the statue stayed. It was and still is, treated with huge respect and given pride of place in the local church. In 1938 a historian of thirteenth century iconography, Martin Gillett examined the statue which the locals like to call 'The English Lady'. Gillett described it as being in the English style and noted that it was wearing two half shoes made of English silver just like the ones mentioned by Cromwell’s steward. Although the statue had been somewhat altered, various clues such as the folds in her clothes and the child's position on the right knee instead of the left all seem offer clues about its English origin. In 1959, whist the statue was undergoing restoration, an inscription was discovered under the right foot of the Lady. It reads ‘Thou art gracious’ in Latin. It is well known that Ipswich was the only shrine in England dedicated to 'Our Lady of Grace'. So, as we have seen, one statue at least does appear to have survived the iconoclasm of the reformers of the sixteenth century. Today, you will find a replica of the statue from Nettuno carved from English oak in the church of St Mary at the Elms in Ipswich. Another very famous shrine of the Virgin Mary was at Willesden, Middlesex, then just outside London. Little is known about how the tradition of pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Willesden began. A Visitation report of 1249 mentions the presence of two statues of Our Lady in the local church, one of which may have been the so called ‘Black Madonna’.
By the end of the middle ages the shrine at Willesden had become famous and pilgrims travelled many miles to visit it. By the early sixteenth century the shrine had become so famous that it was visited by royalty such as Queen Elizabeth of York. In 1517 William Litchfield, Vicar of Willesden and Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral died and was buried in the chancel of Willesden church before the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Litchfield also gave to the church a gilt chalice, ‘the same to remain to the use of the said Church and the honour of the Blessed Virgin for ever.’ This chalice is still in regular use in the church today. Sir Thomas More, Henry VIIIs Chancellor is said to have petitioned the Blessed Virgin under her title of ‘Our Lady of Willesden’. More’s biographer Thomas Stapleton (1535-98) says that More regularly made pilgrimages on foot to shrines up to seven miles from London, including Willesden. More visited during the first week of April 1534 and stayed nearby. However, some writers and clergymen in the sixteenth century spoke out against pilgrimages, shrines and statues of the Virgin Mary. William Tyndale (c.1494–1536) complained of those who continuously repeat: ‘Our lady of Walsingham pray for me; Our Lady of Ipswich, pray for me; Our Lady of Wilsdon, pray for me.’ He clearly thought that this invocation had little or no power or indeed merit. In 1527 the reformist priest Thomas Bilney (c.1495–1531) was arrested for preaching against pilgrimages, even doing so in Willesden church itself in Whitsun week that year. ‘You do not well to goo on pilgremage to our Lady of Walsinghan, Ipswiche, or Wyllesdon, or to any other place and there to offer for they be nothing but stocke and stones, therefore it were better to tary at home and pray to God there.’ These people may be seen as the forerunners of the changes in the faith of the nation during the 1530s and beyond. Willesden, like all the other shrines, was subject to the new laws and regulations. The statue, made of dark, ebony-like wood, was removed and disappeared. This fits the description of one made of dark wood which was reportedly burnt in 1538 by order of Henry VIIIs chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. It was said to be covered with gold, silver and precious jewels, gifts from grateful supplicants and pilgrims. An eyewitness described the shrine as standing beneath a canopy of silk between the altar and the nave and was protected by an iron grille. Richard Mores, Cromwell’s agent described it like this: ‘They have there an image of Our Lady in robes of sarcenet with stones; with a veil withal of lace embroidered with pearls and other precious jewels, and gold and silver… We did strip the image which we found to be of wood, in colour like ebony, of ancient workmanship, only save the upper parts thoroughly plated in silver.’ He added that the church was crowded with pilgrims. ‘Even at our coming there were five folk praying before it, two old men and a woman and a child, and one that had brought an offering of flowers.’ Even after the shrine’s destruction, as late as 1563, in the Second Book of Homilies, a newly reformed Church of England was still inclined to warn against idolatrous invocations to: ‘Our Lady of Walsingham, Our Lady of Ipswich, Our Lady of Wilsdon and such other.’ Clearly, the ordinary faithful of the realm had not entirely given up their Catholic faith and practises. It probably took a long time to stamp out the traditional faith of ordinary Christians. For the crime of being an ‘idolatrous parish’ the state imposed an annual fine of £13 on the incumbent of the parish and the vicar was also fined a further 26/- for having housed an ‘idolatrous image’. By far the most famous medieval shrine of Our Lady was Walsingham in Norfolk. Erasmus, the Dutch scholar, visited Walsingham in 1513 and was impressed by the splendor of the Shrine. He wrote: ‘There is a small chapel, which admits by a small narrow little door, on either side, those who come to salute our Layde; the light is feeble, in fact scarcely any, excepting from wax candles. A most delightful fragrance gladdens one’s nose.’ Of the statue in the chapel he said: 'When you look in you would say it is the abode of saints, so brilliantly does it shine with gems, gold and silver... Our Lady stands in the dark at the right side of the altar... a little image, remarkable neither for its size, material or workmanship.'
This all came to an abrupt end. Henry VIII, annoyed by the church’s refusal to grant him the divorce he wanted and short of money to fight foreign wars, ordered the dissolution of the monasteries and in 1538 the Priory of Walsingham was closed, the 'Holy House' which was made of wood and dating from the founding of the shrine, burned to the ground. The statue of Our Lady taken to London to be destroyed, or so the story went. However, recently, the Catholic Herald published an article casting new light on the matter of the supposed destruction of the holy image from Walsingham. Two English art historians, Michael Rear and Francis Young, proposed just such a scenario in their article on 26th July 2019. Their theory is that a statue known as the Langham Madonna, a battered thirteenth century English statue to be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, could actually be the original statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, the most famous image of medieval England and the very one which was at the heart of the shrine there. But equally well, it could be, they suggested, a very near copy of medieval origin. The official story was that the simple wood statue of the Madonna and Child that stood beside the shrine’s main altar was hauled away and destroyed in 1539, when the Priory Church at Walsingham was torn down and its religious community dispersed by order of King Henry VIII after they had hanged the sub-prior but pensioned off the Prior of Walsingham. Contemporary accounts of the statue’s fate, though, are notably vague. So, what really did happen? Records list two different locations for the statue’s burning, one at the ‘heretics’ pyre’ at Smithfield and the second location in the court of Thomas Cromwell’s house at Chelsea. There appear to be no eyewitness accounts of the event. Rear and Young proposed instead that a substitution was made and that the genuine statue, was hidden by local recusant Catholics. Similar defiant acts have been described by Professor Duffy in his book The Stripping of the Altars. Rear and Young suggested that Sir John Grigby, the vicar of Langham, Norfolk, a small village six miles from Walsingham could be the instigator of this plot to hide the holy statue of Walsingham. Grigby had been arrested in 1537 as part of the ‘Walsingham Conspiracy,’ a brave but futile, armed plot to defend the shrine’s looming destruction. This had been hatched among the peasants of the surrounding villages by Ralph Rogerson, a yeoman farmer who was also a lay chorister in the priory church. Unlike the principal conspirators, who were hanged, drawn, and quartered, Grigby was somehow allowed to return to his parish to continue his ministry. Grigby’s most notable parishioners at Langham were the Calthorpes of Langham Hall, who resisted pressure to accept the new Anglican faith, remaining recusants, that is, those who would not attend the Anglican services. Another recusant family, the Rookwoods of Euston in Suffolk, inherited Langham Hall a few years later, in 1555. The family was believed to have attempted to hide at least one other image of Our Lady in the decades after the English Reformation. In 1578, whilst hosting a visit by Queen Elizabeth, Edward Rookwood was arrested when an image of Our Lady of Euston was found in his possession, hidden on their farm. The statue was destroyed, and Rookwood was imprisoned for this offence. But could the authorities have failed to notice an even more famous image also hidden at Langham Hall? Until then the idea that the Langham Madonna could be the actual medieval shrine statue had not seriously been considered. The statue was eventually passed to a saleroom in London before being bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum. Rear and Young suggested that there was an error in records passed on to the museum when the statue was bought in 1925 and that these records were later lost. There are, in fact, three villages in the east of England called Langham, namely in Norfolk, Essex, and Rutland. The London saleroom had claimed that the Madonna had come from Langham Hall, Essex, near Colchester, but this place lacked any association with recusant Catholics of any sort whilst Langham in Norfolk certainly did have documented connections with Catholicism. Six years after the Museum acquired the statue, Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton, one of the founding guardians of the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham, wrote in the journal the Tablet of the discovery of an ancient carved wooden figure in an old house near Walsingham. He suggested that it could be a copy of the Walsingham image, or even the original, ‘saved perhaps as other relics and holy things, by means of substitution being made for the purposes of satisfying the desecrators.’
Rear and Young thought that the Langham Madonna might possibly be a later copy of the Walsingham statue as devotional copies were common just as they are now. The Langham Madonna’s presumed thirteenth century origin could be confirmed through carbon dating. Circumstantial evidence was needed in order to prove the provenance of this statue. The Langham statue is remarkedly similar to the image on the seal of the Priory of Walsingham now held by King’s College, Cambridge. If the statue was indeed the Walsingham image, would it not have some markings to indicate what it was and where it was from? There is evidence that the Langham Madonna has a notch at its base that consistent with possible removal of a so-called, ‘toadstone’ which was mentioned in the account by Erasmus during his 1512 visit to the Shrine. A toadstone, also known as bufonite, is a gem or fossil tooth formally supposed to have been formed in the head of a toad and credited with therapeutic or protective properties and possibly an antidote to poison. It is an idea preserved in folk-memory that it represented Our Lady’s victory over evil and sin in the same way that later statues sometimes depict her with her foot on the head of a snake, representing the serpent in the Genesis story. We know from contemporary accounts that the statue wore a crown. A band around the statues head could possibly have been designed to secure the large crown known to have been donated by King Henry III in 1246. We also know that the Virgin sat on a throne from the evidence on the seal from the priory. A series of dowel holes on the back of the image could have been used to secure it to the throne shown on medieval priory seal. Much of this is supposition. More research is needed as it is as yet unproved that this is a medieval East Anglian statue or even the very image of the Virgin Mary which was so revered by so many for so long in the village of Little Walsingham. Pilgrims still visit the Slipper Chapel, the priory ruins and the Anglican and Catholic shrines. The popularity of Our Lady of Walsingham has not waned since the shrines were re-founded in modern times. In 2020 the Bishops of England and Wales rededicated England to Our Lady as her dowry. The many shrines of Our Lady, whether ancient foundations or more recent ones, continue to attract pilgrims, penitents and tourists. Bibliography Blatchly, J and MacCulloch, D, Miracles in Lady Lane, Ipswich: DK &MN Sanford, 2013 Chaucer, G, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Edited by W, W, Skeat, 1901 Davies, M, Marian Statue May be Medieval, The Church Times, London, 25th May 2020, Duffy, E, The Stripping of the Altars, Yale University Press,1992 Historic Ipswich Facebook Page Locker, M, D, Landscapes of Pilgrimage in Medieval Britain, PhD Thesis, Institute of Archaeology, University College, London, 2012 Pink, A, Piecing together Our Lady of Willesden, Blog https://andrewpink.org/tag/our-lady-of-willesden/ Rear, M, Walsingham, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage, Smith, S, The Madonna of Ipswich, Ipswich, East Anglian Magazine Limited, 1980 Vail, A, Shrines of Our Lady in England, Gracewing, 2004 Walsingham Village.Org Wells, E, J, Pilgrim Routes of the British Isles, Robert Hale, 2016 Young, F, https://drfrancisyoung.com/2019/07/25/our-lady-of-walsingham-the-mystery-of-the-langhammadonna/
Ipswitch Willesden Walsingham
Pilgrimage to a Small Island: An American Britophile’s Reflection By Avellina Balestri You are my first love, tossed by the sea of my soul. My blood has run with the timeless murmur of your rivers, and I have felt the stillness of your history stir a flame within me. You have fed with me your yawning silence that speaks volumes, your quiet concealment of your passion, your words of wisdom that strike through me and unlock the innermost chambers. I dream, and the water sings to me, like tears flowing, for I missed you, long before I saw you, like the lost part of myself I had never seen. I felt the pulse of you alive in me, and knew I was your child. When you bled, I bled. When you were in pain, the knot of grief tightens in my stomach. The root is far too deep to ever be pulled out, like the root of the heart. Your saints and scholars have carved your fame, your actors and orators have given you their voice, and the ghosts of the past mold you, and their breath still lingers on the fog. You have known heaven and hell; you have known the wild yearnings that drive humanity to the heights of glory and the depths of depravity. Yes, you have known them, and weathered them, and your cliffs stand tall against the waves. You have plumbed the depths, and felt the cold water splashed in your face. You felt the stripes of agony, criss-crossed and martyr-crowned. You know the nature of tragedy as the blessing of renewal, and the nature of comedy to cut and clear the eyes of men. Your gravity has been matched by your wit, and the masks of your theater tell your tale.
You are the land of the painted people, and the paint runs in my veins. You are both tame and wild, breathless and panting hard. You have been rough-hewn in your ways, and in the paradox of living, an island set apart, silver-set in the sting of the star-light. You are like lichen on the ancient wall, like the stag’s cry at twilight, like the sun-shot stained-glass, colors bleeding everywhere. They stain me unto the bone. So what do you mean to me in my heart? So many things it could break my heart. You are sometimes hard to love, eccentric, stubborn, impossible to understand, grounded in tangled roads and risen from a tangled constitution that was never written. You are imperturbable, rattling on with a lilting rhythm, and the world may think you speak nonsense. But in the end, your paradox is your most profound truth, and the flecks of gold mark the courage in your well-worn eyes. And my God, do they shine in my young eyes too, sparks from the forge that leave your language upon my tongue? You have birthed me, rubbed me raw, and caused me to gleam. Are you not still our mother across the tempest of time? How else have I pictured you in youthful dreams? Rain coming down in the summer, and the brooding comfort of a cloudy sky. The way the fog falls over grass so green it burns the retina. Old books from authors who seem to take you by the hand and pull you into the vortex of their borderless worlds, and the warm, sweet taste of tea and good company. Music that is soft, yet strong, like the Evensong chanted, and then music that is strong yet vibrating, like the skirl of the chanter. You remind me of Christmas, of carols with poetry so simple and tunes so haunting they could pierce the soul. You remind me of frost that crystallizes and the wildwood frozen in time, waiting for the thaw of spring, and the May ribbons strung upon the oak. My heart is made of such a tree, from which the shield of Arthur was carved and around which Robin Hood rallied his men.
You remind me of the lion and the unicorn, of the symbols of power and struggles against it. You are the ink that ran at Runnymede with the passion of blood, and the grand doors slammed at Westminster in the royal messenger’s face. You are thousands of forms and faces; you are swords cast into the lake and rosaries into the crowd. You are bound together by the ocean gale and an unspoken dream. You are contagious, and I have caught you. And I don’t ever want to let you go, your hidden warmth lightening flashing within a cloud. This is merely a shadow of all that you are, but are not dreams reflections of some eternal state, some deeper reality which we chase, that wounds us sore? You are an idea and ideal. You are simple yet complex, wonderfully indescribable, forever socially-changing, conflict-ridden, always growing while keeping faith with the seeds first sown. I love you most because you continue to be loved. Blood, sweat, and tears have been poured out for you, and so many wars have been waged upon your soil. You are no paradise, but instead a constant battleground. There is something here to sink one’s teeth into. It is the treasure always being sought after; it is the Evenstar always being reached for in the twilight of desiring. The journey is just as important as the destination, and the destination is home, though I am so very far away. This is a state of the mind, of the heart, of the soul. This is the Britain that can never die nor be defeated. May, 2019 So, I come here, come to England – finding her waiting for me, and then leaving her behind, has carved a map on my soul. Oh, my little island, do I have to go away so soon? There are too many fragile, aching sentiments left in me now, and I keep hunting for you everywhere I go. How can I explain that? Have I ever been able to, when I am not even from you?
Oxford - it's a posh and poised microcosm of old and new, students and tourists everywhere, the bright up side, and then the glint of a darker hue underneath, like puddles along the pavement... the beggars sleeping on the street, the cabbies and hotel janitors struggling to get by with prices rising, the sense of worlds colliding or flowing together, the conflict of class, still denting the atmosphere. Should not more be done to help those falling through the cracks, slipping off the margins? Is it so very hard for those in power to pay heed? There are the eyes of so many different sorts of people in a single day. The sounds of so many different accents. I've come to England, and also met Spain, Poland, Albania, Pakistan, Iraq, and India. I love hearing their stories, connecting with them on some common, human level, even briefly. I love seeing the flash of a smile, even a weary one, after a long day's work. And this is England to me more than anything. It has never been anything less than its many layers and dimensions. The lady at the front desk at our hotel is from the UAE. She has a brightly colored hijab, and fuchsia lip stick. She's pregnant, and we talk about when she's expecting. The cabbie from Spain has a family back home, knows every slick "short cut" that takes longer, and is good at yelling at traffic. Why does he remind me a bit of Han Solo? There are two Indian brothers who run a tech and tourism shop, and I try on the Union Jack sunglasses for the sheer fun of it, and have them show me through their Harry Potter inventory. The events manager at Lady Margaret Hall appears to me like an Anglo-Saxon shieldmaiden, for her hair and eyes mirror my image of Eรณwyn, like a page of a book come to life before me. The security guard there is a Welshman, and I manage to pull a few Rosetta Stone phrases of the old tongue for him, and he shows me the red dragon tattoo across his arm. Is he King Arthur come again, just a really eager rugby fan, or maybe a bit of both?
The English sky is still gray and glorious on late spring nights past the chime of 10, and I remember that I am in the north. I fall asleep easy there, yet always with the urge to get up every morning because somewhere, out there, was an adventure to be had. There is a sense that the whole world is buzzing about on this tiny island like some sacred hub, in its glory and its shame, in its beauty and its dysfunction, in its virtues and its flaws. It’s alive. It’s real. And the flags are blazing bright, snapping bold at the Randolph Hotel.
I become accustomed to walking with friends through the streets, moving in and out open plazas, feeling as if I am a spoke in a wheel, feeling a part of everything, everyone, my backpack slung on my back, plans to make, and places to be. I could live like this, if only life would offer it to me. There are so many new sensations, too much to taste, touch, and smell, a coursing, living thing, dappled and demanding, and I thrive in it. There’s the food – bland English food one might hate, but once you’re gone, you'll suddenly feel sad just thinking about it. The pizza without enough sauce or cheese. The “lemonade” that’s actually an abrogated form of soda. Honey-flavored ice cream that melts too easily. And the last bag of crisps which I didn’t want to eat on the plane, because that was the last of it, the end of it – bland, honest, filling British food. The oddity of British TV and radio. The game shows where the questions range from the absurdly easy to the easily absurd, and the news which keeps flashing from politics to the puffin population. For the game winners, you might win a stuffed animal and a tea set, and for the puffins, an audio on mating calls to put you to sleep. In the morning, the chances are that there will be a toss-up between nostalgic kids shows or two chaps in search of antiques, traversing oddly names villages dotting the coast. he taking for granted of old things, running fingers along centuries old stones, and breathing it in without counting the beats. The wandering in and out of places which were just begging to be explored, wishing there was more time to soak it in.
TThe strange sense that you’ve been there before, maybe in some ancestral memory. The even stranger sense that there will never be anything to compare, and everything else will seem but a half-memory – a half-dream. Or maybe this place isn’t the dream at all, but everything else is. In Anglican and Catholic churches, I see the Virgin's statues, and Christ's cross carved in stone, and my finger traces it. I listen to vespers, and see the effigies of knights. I find the Savior's Body lying dead in wooden form, and see the mural of the martyrs, of Campion the Champion at Oxford Oratory. I see Walsingham, and hear the murmur of pilgrims; there is rain in my face and cold air in my lungs, and my umbrella is broken and bleeding off the side. I want to stay longer, till I sink into the heart of these mysteries, and awake among the lilies of Nazareth.
Bad directions, politely given. Winding roads and frustrating roundabouts. The sun and the rain glinting or glittering along the bus and train stations. The humdrum boredom of getting stuck on a circular route to nowhere, and still feeling like you’re part of something bigger than yourself, something clear and cutting to your soul, something about being more aware of the beauty of the average. Is this why British authors have been so apt at telling tells that capture the mysteries and magic of an ordinary life? Nottingham - searching for Sherwood, and never finding it, getting pulled off a tram by security guards for certain confusion over tickets. I become fairly convinced I need to put them in legend retellings, as medieval guards, and we start to talk, and joke, while under partial arrest. It’s delightful. Slightly bizarre. And they let me off with a "you're a tourist" warning. And then one of them proceeds to try and lure me to his village to go see one of the many graves of Little John. Sometime later, I find myself at yet another bus stop, with yet another security guard, trying to help me find my way to the forest...only for him to also become distracted, and insist that I should, instead, go visit his own village, home to one of the many graves of Will Scarlett. Yes, he's earned a place in my legend-weaving too, along with the pub waitresses and concession stand workers who are pricelessly no-nonsense yet also wonderfully consoling about the plight of lost tourists. "Oh, bless you, love." There's a mall in Nottingham, somewhere to get out of the rain. I find myself very tempted to hunker down there for the rest of the day, as it’s much more sparkly than the malls back home. There are Disney shops in here, and a massive food court. And there's this lady that approaches us from the Build-a-Bear store, with the most inviting regional accent, and I am just about sold to get cracking with the fluff and stuff.
But no, my phone is about to die, and I must be off to get it recharged. And sure enough, at the charging station, I meet yet another gentleman working there, determined to redirect me to his, quite literal, neck of the woods, on the border of Sherwood Forest. His name is Robert. I am convinced he is some reincarnation of the Prince of Thieves, just gone into retirement in his golden years. And he insists we have to make it to the statue at Nottingham Castle before we depart. So off I go again. The statue - in the shadow of the ruins of the medieval castle, I catch my breath, as the rain comes pattering down, and pull up the hood of my jacket. It’s green, and I sit at the foot of the statue, where Robin Hood still draws his bow. I wander around the walls, and stop at each of the plaques, chronicling the most famous legends. I feel my heart beat high, as I read the words of a tale, about heavy purses lightened and noble "guests" wined and dined under a greenwood tree. And I now stand a part of it. I have always been a part of it.
The mournful gray of the last day, an emptiness, when even the chatter of pubs feels downcast. I am used to pubs now – The Eagle and Child, The Ned Ludd, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem – each with their own story to tell, a glimpse of a social state of being I must leave. And all of this, this whole new world that somehow feels old to me, must be left behind. So many ‘ends,’ and slumping down in a hotel room, just listening to the pleasant, meandering British voices on a game show, eating the last piece of British pizza, and suddenly feeling as if I’m about to become an exile from the only place I ever truly wanted to be. I will miss being marked out by my accent by the man at the hotel who cleans up the rooms, and stops us at 11 p.m. to chat about world politics. "Oy, you're Yanks, are ya?" Heck, I’ll even miss those cheesy touristy things everybody laughs at, the royal key chains and stuffed Paddington Bears. Those miserably overpriced boxes of sweets. Those silly Union Jack sunglasses. I’ll miss them all, as much as I’ll miss laughing about their existence alongside friends. Yes, it’s the friends I’ll miss. The voice, the people of Britain – real, flawed, complicated, beautiful, crazy people whom I find myself missing like a part of my own heart, left behind across the sea. The Muslim cabbie who drives us to Heathrow for our return is a regular with us now, picking us up and dropping us off in our daily routine. He puts on a Sami Yusuf song from his playlist, and I'm able to name it: "Hasbi Rabbi". And the airport is a little world in a microcosm again, a ship in a bottle, and I linger there like a man marooned, looking at biscuit tins and Ramadan platters, and I want to stay for as long as I can, because at least I am still here, even in artificial surroundings.
On the plane, I cannot bring myself to look out the window before taking off. It’s too much, almost like a claustrophobia of some sort, but not the fear I felt on the first flight over. It’s just pain now… and turning, looking for people to be there who I’m leaving behind. It’s automatic now, after ten days being with them, but they’re gone. I can’t touch them or look into their eyes anymore. I keep thinking I see one of them, in anyone wearing a blue shirt. And I suddenly feel very alone. There’s an almost numbing sense that every hour puts me farther out of their time zone, so my Smartphone duly notes. So many things left undone, so many people I couldn’t meet, so many plans thrown to the wind – and yet it’s over and done, and I must be content. It feels like a must shorter trip home than it was over here, and I don't have the same fear that gripped me the first time round. But it doesn’t take the strange discomfort away, like a fish finding water, and then being yanked out of it again. It just makes my yearning grow to get back, somehow. I find myself watching a movie to take my mind off things in the plane. It’s my first viewing of Disney’s Moana.
“I’ve been standing at the edge of the water, long as I can remember, never really knowing why…” “I wish I could be the perfect daughter, but I come back to the water, no matter how hard I try…” “Every turn I take, every trail I track, every path I make, every road leads back..." "To the place I know where I cannot go, where I long to be…” “See the line where the sky meets the sea? It calls me. And no one knows how far it goes..." "If the wind in my sail on the sea stays behind me, one day I’ll know. If I go there’s just no telling how far I’ll go…”
Leaving Home April 1968
By Michael Goth
Trax Records was a favorite hangout for high school and college aged students in the Rogers Park section of Chicago. Nicolette Dupree stopped in on most Tuesdays – new release day – after classes let out at Alexander Hamilton High school, where she was a senior. As her home was only a few blocks from the high school, she walked home from school on most afternoons. Trax was in a small strip mall along with a family owned bakery and drug store. Up until the previous February she had walked home from school with her best friend Alexandra. Two days after Valentine’s Day, Ally had dropped out of school and runaway from home to join a hippie commune. One located in an abandoned and city condemned building near Chicago Stadium. It was now halfway through April and she had not heard from Alexandra – her closest friend of 10 years – since. As she entered the record store, she looked around, her eyes coming to rest on a lanky long-haired man in his early 20’s. Nicolette had spoken to him once or twice and had learned that he played the sax in a jazz fusion rock band popular in the city. The young musician often came into Trax to buy records – rock, jazz and some classical – and handout flyers advertising up-coming shows by his band. As she walked further into the store, Nicolette was greeted by a salesclerk, a young woman not too much older than herself. The young girl was dressed in tie dyed shirt and high-rise jeans with fringe bottoms. In a white sweater and black skirt, Nicolette suddenly felt overdressed. She gave a warm smile to the Trax associate, who had helped her in the past and who she believed was named Angela. It had been late the previous year that she and Ally had come into Trax and her best friend had bought The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by Pink Floyd. The previous summer Ally had been obsessed with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Nicolette had loved Pepper too, but Ally had started smoking pot, believing it would heighten her connection to the music. She knew that Ally had always had emotional problems. She had reminded Nicolette of the character of Lisa Shilling in the novel Lisa, Bright and Dark. On some days, Ally was fun loving and full of laughter, while others she was cut off and distant, lost in her own world.
In October, Ally’s older brother Bobby – who she had worshipped – had been killed in Vietnam near Khe Sanh by a Viet Cong sniper while his platoon had been on patrol. Bobby had died instantly, and his C.O. had blown the V.C. out of the tree to his own death. Ally had not been able to deal with the pain that had been eating her up like a ruthless cancer. What had made matters worse was that in their own sorrow, Ally’s parents seemed to have essentially forgotten that their daughter was even alive. To Nicolette it frequently seemed that Alexandra’s parents had blamed her for living while Bobby had died. Ally’s only solace had been through music, her only escape, drugs. With The Piper at the Gates of Dawn on constant play, Ally had started dropping acid near the Christmas holiday and had slowly begun to lose her grip on reality. Nicolette walked over to the new release wall where recently released albums and ones that remained bestsellers were located. Albums that included Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles, Disraeli Gears by Cream, After Bathing at Baxters by Jefferson Airplane, and Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. She already had Magical Mystery Tour and John Wesley Harding and wasn’t interested in the others as she didn’t much care for hard rock. After scanning the shelves several times, she found the album that she had come in looking for… Horizontal by The Bee Gees. While getting ready for school that morning, she’d heard the album’s latest single “And the Sun Will Shine” on the radio and had finally made up her mind to buy the album’s latest single, “And the Sun Will Shine”. Besides for the music itself, Barry Gibb was easy on the eyes. With the obvious exception of Paul McCartney, Barry was probably the sexiest man in rock n’ roll. Pulling strawberry blonde hair back behind her shoulders, she looked at the track listing on the L.P.’s back cover. Besides “And the Sun Will Shine” there was the previous two singles “World” and “Massachusetts,” the later a sizable hit late the previous year. She took the album and walked over to the check-out counter, and the salesgirl who had greeted her earlier, came back behind the counter. “Find everything okay?” smiled the clerk, who’s Trax name badge identified her as Angela. Nicolette had thought so. “Yeah, thanks for asking,” Nicolette handed her album over to Angela. “Oh, good choice,” Angela smiled. “I love ‘Massachusetts,’ ‘And the Sun Will Shine’ is good too.” “Me too,” said Nicolette. “When I was getting ready for school this morning, I heard ‘And the Sun Will Shine’ on the radio. Honestly, I’ve been thinking of buying the album for a while now since I liked their first album so much.” “Okey-Doke, your total will be $3.49. Oops, I forgot to hit total. Make that $3.76.”
Nicolette handed Angela a $5 bill and the salesclerk handed her back $1.74. “Would you like your receipt in the bag?” “Sure, that would be great.” Angela handed Nicolette a Trax bag, the girls exchanged goodbyes, and Nicolette walked out of the store – and into a commotion. About 20 feet up the street, a Volkswagen Beetle was pulling up to the curb with a squad car – cherries flashing – right behind it. Two beefy looking members of the Chicago Police Department climbed out of the squad car, and walked over to the Beetle, hands on their service revolvers. To Nicolette it appeared as if the officers were looking for trouble. By the looks of the half a dozen young people gathered around, they were thinking the same thing. A man and woman – somewhere in their early 20s – got out of the passenger and driver sides of the car. The officer near the passenger side pushed the young woman onto the park lawn and ordered her in no uncertain terms not to move, causing Nicolette and those around her to gasp. Though she was too far away to clearly make out the words, Nicolette thought she heard the officer on the driver’s side of the car tell the young man to join his friend (probably his girlfriend) on the lawn. He did as he was told without argument. The police officers began to search the car… the glovebox, under the seats, between the seats. She suspected they were looking for drugs. One of the officers pulled the keys from the ignition and with an angry look on his face, walked back to the trunk, opened it and began to rummage through its contents. Again, finding nothing. With a look of uncontrolled anger and hatred on their faces, the officers grabbed the young couple, threw them up against the side of the car and began to frisk them violently. Still not finding the drugs they were hoping for, one of the officers tossed the keys into the grass, then both walked back to the squad car, got in and drove away. “So much for civil liberties,” said a young man dressed in a monk’s robe that she had not noticed before. “I sure hope they are okay,” said Nicolette shaking her heads sadly. The robed man walked over to the Beetle and asked the young couple if they were okay. Once they got back into their Volkswagen and drove away, he walked back to where Nicolette was standing. All the other spectators had returned to their previous business. “They seem okay, if a little shaken.” “That’s good,” said Nicolette. “Thanks for checking on them.” “Seeing whether people are all right or not is one of the things that I do. I’m sure that you are wondering why I’m dressed the way that I am.” “Yeah, the thought crossed my mind,” she smiled. “Well then, let me start out by introducing myself. I’m John.”
“I’m Nicolette,” the teenager shook John’s hand. “Nicolette Dupree.” “It’s nice to meet you, Nicolette. I’m a member of a commune.” “Oh,” said Nicolette sadly, thinking of Ally. “Why would that make you sad?” said John. “By the look on your face, it looks as if you don’t approve.” “Two months ago,” she said sadly, “My best friend, Alexandra, dropped out of school and ran away from home to join a hippie commune.” “I’m sorry,” said John kindly. “I really am sorry to hear that. I’m not a member of that sort of commune though.” “What type is it?” asked Nicolette with curiosity. “To answer that,” said John, “first, I must ask if you know who St. Francis of Assisi is?” “Of course,” said Nicolette. “My family is Catholic. We go to St. Nicholas.” “I know it well. In our commune, or as we call it, our Franciscan Order, we try to help the community in any way that we can. We live a quite simple life, based on the teachings of St. Francis. We spend part of our day in prayer and meditation. We also grow our own food. We often grow more food than we could ever possibly need, so we donate it to local churches, liked St. Nicholas, to help the community, by giving to the hungry.” John sighed sadly before continuing. “As you are no doubt aware, the world is turning upside down even as we speak. The ongoing war in Vietnam, rioting across the nation, racial tension. We try to provide spiritual guidance to those who need it. We believe that we offer the community a direction away from hate, violence and fear.” “It certainly needs it,” she replied. “Wouldn’t you like to see all the nations of the world – including our own – just put away their dreadful weapons of destruction. And wouldn’t it not be a beautiful day if everyone answered with, ‘Okay’?” “Yes, it would.” “That’s our goal,” said John kindly. “Well, young lady, I’ve taken up enough of your time. I would like to give you something though.” John reached into one of the deep pockets of his robe and took out a booklet, which he handed to Nicolette. She recognized the picture on the booklet cover of robed St. Francis preaching to a flock of birds. “This is just a little bit about St. Francis and our community.” “Thank you.” “I hope that you have a blessed evening.” “You too,” said Nicolette kindly. *** It took her around 10 minutes to get home. Once inside the house, she walked into the kitchen and placed her bag and purse on a chair at the kitchen table. Her mother, Maggie, who was chopping celery near the stove, smiled over at her. “Hi, Mom.” Nicolette gave her mother Maggie a kiss on the cheek.
“How was school?” she asked her. “Okay,” said the teenager without much enthusiasm. School had not been the same since Ally had dropped out. Nicolette had other friends, of course, but it just wasn’t the same without her best friend of a decade. “Where’s Fahlin?” Fahlin was Nicolette’s 12-yeaer old sister. “She’s over at Anna’s house. She went their straight after school. I told her to be home by 5.” “What’s for dinner? I couldn’t help but notice you cutting up celery.” “Oh, you couldn’t help but notice, huh,” said Maggie jokingly. “Do you need any help?” “No, I should be okay. I’m making barbecue beef for dinner.” “Fahlin doesn’t like Sloppy Joes,” Nicolette smirked. “Yeah, I know. I don’t decide what to make for dinner based on Fahlin’s eating habits.” “She’s at that picky eating stage. She’ll grow out of it.” Nicolette held back a yawn. “I’m going to lie down for a bit.” Maggie stopped chopping, wiped her hands on a dish towel and turned to face her daughter with concern. “Are you okay?” “As okay as I can be, Mom. It’s only been two months.” “I don’t mean just about Alexandra,” said Maggie siting down at the kitchen table across from her daughter. “Is there something else bothering you? Something happen at school?” Nicolette thought for a moment. “When I was coming out of Trax, the police were pulling over two young people in a Beetle. The officers were physically abusive towards both, and gave the car a once over looking for something… probably drugs. When they didn’t find the drugs, they became even more abusive. Both physically and verbally.” Maggie shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry about that. That was uncalled for.” Maggie was thoughtful for a minute before continuing. “Nicolette, I know that there are bad cops in Chicago. You must remember though that there are really good ones too. Don’t let incidents like what you witnessed this afternoon color your perspective of all police officers. Many of them are caring, kind human beings who like to help people and put their lives at risk to keep the rest of us safe.” “I haven’t,” said Nicolette, unsure if she really believed it. Maggie stood up and walked back over to continue dinner preparation. Nicolette got up from the table, went over and gave her mother a hug. Maggie smiled, hugged her daughter and kissed her on the cheek. “I’m going to lie down for a while.” “Okay. I will let you know when dinner is ready.” Nicolette took her purse and Trax bag and went to the bedroom that she shared with Fahlin. She kicked off her shoes and lied down on the bed. She was asleep within moments. She dreamed of Ally, drugged out, living in an abandoned building with other drug addicts.
She was asleep within moments. She dreamed of Ally, drugged out, living in an abandoned building with other drug addicts. *** She awoke to her sister staring at her, a mischievous look on Fahlin’s face. “What are you looking at?” asked Nicolette smiling. “Not sure,” said Fahlin jokingly. “I’ll let you know when I figure it out.” “Brat,” exclaimed Nicolette in mock surprise, picking up a pillow and tossing it at Fahlin, who rolled over on her back giggling. Nicolette looked at her watch. It was 5:23. “Did you just get home?” “Yeah, why?” “Just curious. Mom said you’d be home at 5:00.” “I was actually five minutes late.” “Did Mom say anything?” “About being five minutes late?” “No, about you being an idiot. Yes, about being five minutes late.” “She didn’t say anything. I don’t think she noticed.” “She noticed,” Nicolette giggled. “How much do you want to bet that she has you do the dishes tonight?” “Oh, I hope not!” With the sound of a knock on their bedroom door, Nicolette and Fahlin looked in that direction and saw their mother standing in the doorway. “Dinner, ladies,” said Maggie. “Do I have to?” whined Fahlin. “Yes, you do,” Maggie said sternly. “This isn’t a restaurant, Fahlin. You’ll eat what is being served.” “Come on,” said Nicolette to her sister. “It’s not like she makes us eat liver.” “Liver is tomorrow,” said Maggie matter of fact. “Gross, oh gross,” exclaimed Fahlin. “Seriously?” Nicolette asked, surprised. “No, not seriously,” Maggie smirked. “Now, let’s eat before it gets cold.” The girls got up from their separate beds, Nicolette slipped her shoes back on and then she and Fahlin followed Maggie to the kitchen. Their father, Jim, a six-foot-tall man with the reddish hair that both his daughters had inherited, was at the table reading the Chicago Tribune. “Hi, Dad,” she said, kissing her father in the cheek before taking her place at the table. “Hello,” smiled Jim. ‘Hi, Daddy,” Fahlin also kissed her father on the cheek and then sat down at the table. Jim folded his paper and placed it on the table. “How was school?” “Okay,” said Fahlin. “In Social Studies we read about Frederick Douglas. Do you know who he is, Daddy?” “Yes, of course. He was a slave on a southern plantation.” Maggie smiled over at the stove, while stirring the barbecue beef. “You
know, Fahlin, your father and I went to school too.” “Yeah, but that was a long time ago,” said Fahlin. “Daddy, why were black people slaves?” “Not all of them were,” said Jim. “Too many though.” “Why?” “They didn’t have any rights,” said Nicolette. “They were considered as ‘less than human.’ Something that hasn’t changed a whole lot.” Jim was thoughtful for a moment before continuing. “I think there’s been some change. Not enough, I agree, but some change.” “Not anywhere near enough,” said Nicolette. “Two weeks ago, I was walking home from school and a colored man was walking on the opposite side of the street. A cop car pulled over, the officers got out of the car and started to frisk the man for no reason other then the color of his skin.” “Your mother said that you had a similar experience this afternoon,” said Jim sympathetically. “Yeah, I did. It was two young people.” “There is a lot of tension between young people and the police because of the war protests.” “That doesn’t make it right.” “I wasn’t implying that it was,” said Jim. Nicolette sighed. “Many of the protests that the police break-up with violent force are peaceful.” “That’s true,” nodded Jim. “Others are not though. And when going into a crowded situation, how does a police officer know that a peaceful demonstration won’t turn into a violent one?” “Dad, it sounds like you are defending a police force that turns to violence,” said Nicolette sadly. “No, I’m not. Not at all. I’m just asking you to look at a situation from two different perspectives. Much of the conflict in this country right now is that no one appears to be able to see something beyond their own perspective. Nicolette, you are going to learn that life is seldom black and white. There is a lot of gray.” *** After dinner, Nicolette went back to her bedroom to play her new record. First though she kicked off her shoes, sat cross legged on her bed and began to read through the booklet on St. Francis and the community that John belonged to. She was drawn into what she read. For the next week, she became preoccupied with the teachings of St. Francis of Assisi and found comfort in the idea of a community based on love and shared idealism. Upon high school graduation, she planned to attend the University of Illinois in Chicago to study child psychology. She still wanted that, but she had also begun to hunger for some spiritual fulfillment on a level that she could receive just attending Mass once a week. Something to make sense
of the war, the racial tension and Ally’s descent into madness. On Friday, she made two phone calls, then asked to speak to her parents in the living room after dinner. Fahlin went into the master bedroom to watch Star Trek on her parents small black and white television set. Jim and Maggie sat down on the couch and Nicolette took a chair facing them. “I would like the two of you to see something.” She handed her parents the booklet on St. Francis. “They day the two kids were pulled over and harassed by the cops, there was a man named John there. He’s part of this community.” “I’m not sure I understand,” said Maggie, confused. “I called the admissions office at UIC this afternoon. My scholarship can be deferred for a year. I could start in the fall of ’69.” “Why not this fall?” Jim was equally confused. “At dinner, about a week ago, you were talking about perspective, Dad. The truth is, when Ally ran away, I lost any sense of perspective. Her brother Bobby being killed in Vietnam, what it did to her, the violence I see and hear about every day. I feel lost.” She wiped tears from her eyes. Nicolette composed herself for a moment before continuing. “When I was reading about St. Francis, it’s like I found some answers, and some peace of mind. In July, I am going to join that community for a year. Then next year I’ll go to college.” “Would you be allowed to even leave the commune,” asked Maggie with concern. “Of course, Mom. It’s not a cult. I can leave whenever I want.” “Aren’t you just doing the same thing Alexandra did?” Jim frowned. “No, I’m not. Ally dropped out to lose herself. I want to find myself, and as I said, it’s not a cult. I can leave any time I wish. I still have every intention of going to college. Please, trust me.” A few moments passed then Jim said, “If that’s what you want. You have our blessing.” “We support your decision,” said Maggie. Nicolette hugged both her parents, each of whom embraced her in return. Nicolette Dupree joined the Community of St. Francis on August 28th. The same day a riot broke out between demonstrators and members of the Chicago Police Department in Grant Park, near the headquarters of the Democratic Nation Convention. She prayed, meditated and lived off the land, eating food she had grown herself. She found happiness and peace. In July 1969, she moved back home and one month later began college.
My Penn-Mar Journey In late February of this year, I traveled north to meet my good friend and our editor-in-chief at Fellowship & Fairydust, Avellina Balestri, for the first time. My dad took me to the airport that morning, and though it was cold in Savannah, GA, I knew it would likely be colder up there in Maryland and Pennsylvania, so I packed in the event that I may need extra layering. It was probably excessive, especially considering that I’d already packed church clothes for attending Mass with Avellina and her family, gifts for them, a first aid kit, hand sanitizer, several hats and caps, and my laptop computer. Additionally, I took the further precaution of wearing jogging leggings underneath my pants, and this was on top of my peacoat, University of Georgia sweater hoodie, and scully – courtesy of the UGA hockey team. In order words, I had packed quite heavily, which meant I had to pay extra, though it was a small price to pay to ensure that I had everything I needed (or rather, wanted) for this first-time trip. Dad and I went over everything once more before we parted ways and I went on to the airport concourse. The Savannah-Hilton Head International Airport is a small facility that is simple and easy to get around. In under two minutes, one can walk from the curbside through the check-in area and concourse, before standing at the security checkpoint that precedes the terminal gates. While the check-in area is pure modernist utilitarianism, the concourse is inspired by Savannah’s 24 signature town squares in our National Historic District, with park benches, trees, classic storefronts, and lampposts, and a Victorian-style clock all topped with a skylight evoking old railroad stations. It, therefore, served as a last taste of home before embarking on my journey. After getting through security, I made my way to the waiting area and helped myself to some of the Biscoff cookies my grandma had given me. All the while, I was in contact with Avellina via Messenger as we anticipated finally meeting each other for the first time.
ByWeslyHutchins
There was some question on how this weekend would go, for she had come down with kidney stones a week earlier and this had threatened to upend the entire visit. However, she was determined to proceed since we had been planning the visit for nearly two months and desiring to meet for nearly six years. We would have to scale back our plans, but otherwise, try to put together something to make the visit worthwhile. At last, it was boarding time and I quickly found my way to my seat, which I allowed to be randomly chosen to keep the ticket affordable, and thankfully, it was a window seat. The sun began to rise over the horizon, and I got out my iPod and earphones while paying attention to the flight attendants going over the safety procedures. Shortly afterwards, we backed away from the terminal and took off at 6:30 AM, and I soon settled in with my music playing, looking forward to getting some rest after having not slept while I packed and prepared all night. However, it wasn’t long before I woke up and realized that the geography below appeared to be consistent with the tidewater region of Virginia and Maryland, which meant we would soon be in Baltimore. There was no point in going back to sleep and at any rate, I was enjoying the view outside above the clouds. I believe we flew over the Chesapeake Bay and thought I had seen the Washington Monument from a very far distance. There were times when the plane would turn in a direction, which resulted in it turning almost onto one side, which sometimes meant looking almost directly down at the ground or water beneath me, and I was grateful when the plane righted itself. Just before 8:00 AM, we touched down at BWI Airport and as we made our way to the terminal gate, I contacted my parents to say that I had arrived safely and messaged Avellina as well. Waiting for me were voice messages from Avellina’s dad saying that any plans for that day were canceled because – as he said – her mom was “putting on the clamps” due to Avellina’s condition and the fact that it was not only cold but windy – thereby meaning a wind chill that was not good for her low resistance. This was disappointing, though I knew it was a possibility, and totally understood the need for precaution. Nevertheless, I had held out hope that we would meet that day and make full use of the time available, so I felt a bit lost since this was my whole purpose of being there, but Avellina advised that I should go on to Gettysburg and start sightseeing on my own.
Upon disembarking, I made my way through the enormous BWI Airport. Officially known as BaltimoreWashington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, it takes its name from Baltimore of course, but also Washington, D.C., since the two cities are only about 45 miles apart, as well as Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American justice of the US Supreme Court, who was a native Baltimorean. Wandering about, I looked at information containing the history of the airport and looked out across the closed-off outdoor observation deck, where you can view the planes landing and taking off, along with other airport operations. Well-ahead of schedule, I made my way downstairs, but still fretted over what to do since I was not meeting Avellina that day. Eventually, it dawned on me that there was no need to go straight to Gettysburg and we both decided that I should see some of Baltimore itself, particularly Fort McHenry and the Inner Harbor area, and I had a church friend who I could visit along the way as well. With that, I collected my luggage and got on the shuttle to the rental car facility. I was early but went to the counter anyway and was greeted by a man who noted this and looked at my reservation to see that I had chosen a four-door Nissan pick-up truck for the weekend. As if he was reading my mind, he asked if I had picked the truck for its price since it was the most affordable option, and I tried to say – clumsily – that it was my preferred option. He then said that he could upgrade me to an SUV at no additional charge, and without hesitation, I accepted it – a Nissan Rouge – and I made my way onto the roads of the airport campus. With the assistance of GPS to get the lay of the land, I eventually found a Burger King for breakfast and used my time to notice that Fort McHenry and the Inner Harbor were in different locations. I decided on Fort McHenry since it was a national monument whose survival of bombardment by the British during the War of 1812, with its flag still flying, inspired Francis Scott Key to write what would become our national anthem. Arriving at around 11:00 AM, I went inside the visitor's center to pay the admission fee for access to the fort. From here, I spent the next three hours helping myself to not only the fort, but its expansive grounds, including the Sea Wall Trail from which I could see the Inner Harbor and downtown Baltimore, the various ships that were docked, and the outer harbor to the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
It was very windy indeed, but I came prepared and was able to enjoy the views and walk around in otherwise perfect weather. During this, I was able to look up at the fort itself, came across a group of ducks who make this area their home during winter, and saw statues of Orpheus and of Major George Armistead, who was the fort’s commander during the British bombardment. As for the fort itself, there was more walking to be done atop its ramparts and among the cannon battery facing toward the harbor, as well as within the central area of the fort, with its underground tunnels and bunkers, and18th and 19th-century buildings housing various exhibits about significant people and events throughout its history. Between these and the film that was featured in the visitor's center, I learned that the fort was actively used in various capacities through World War II, and can still be used in a military role during a national emergency. Furthermore, due to its significance in American history, it is the only national park to be designated as a “National Monument and Shrine”. Upon leaving, I headed to the Inner Harbor, but with it being after 2:00 PM and parking being a bit pricey, I judged that it was time to head on to Gettysburg, but stopped for lunch at a Chick-fil-A before making the hour-and-a-half drive. This part of the journey saw my surroundings change from urban to suburban to rural and the heavily-trafficked interstate became quiet twolane country roads. I listened to upbeat music to keep me awake after a long day and little sleep. Along the way, I saw Avellina’s street appear on the approaching road signs, and took a detour to pass by her house, after which I soon crossed from Maryland into Pennsylvania (hence, the Penn-Mar region). By 6:00 PM, I had arrived at the motel in Gettysburg and was finally able to get some rest in my simple, yet comfortable room. Later, I contacted my parents, grandmother, and my church friend to let them know that all was well, before going to the nearby Perkin’s restaurant for dinner, during which I contacted Avellina to tell her about my day, check on her, and discuss possible plans for the next day. With my stomach satisfied, I went back to the motel and headed to bed for good that night. The next day was beautiful and so cold that there was a brief round of snow flurries which quickly melted on the ground, but the winds had died down. After having a breakfast of self-made waffles, toast, and juice, I
Avellina was still not at 100% but was determined to meet at the food court of the Outlet mall at around 1:30 PM. Upon leaving the motel, my first stop was at Wal-Mart, where I purchased some Lysol at the behest of my grandmother, who had called me early that morning with concern about coronavirus and wanted me to spray the car and my room. As I drove on to the Outlet, my anticipation continued to build for this long-awaited meeting. Chatting with a person on phone and Messenger, receiving Christmas cards, and looking at them in photos is one thing, but to meet them in person is on another level because you have a physical connection and face-to-face conversation, can do activities together, and get a better sense of who they are up close. Upon arriving there, I parked at the food court and waited on Avellina and her father, and when they pulled up, I felt a wave of joy and happiness in my soul, for I was finally meeting my dear friend for the first time since we met in 2014. Indeed, I believe she too was very grateful for this moment to have finally happened. We exchanged hugs, and I was able to shake hands with Mr. Balestri – with his clearly identifiable New Jersey accent – who shepherded us inside due to the cold. He appeared to be quite sanguine, with a gift of the gab that made me feel warmly welcomed, and after a while, he took his leave to allow us time together. Avellina and I went on to partake in pizza, french fries, and cinnamon pretzel bites – the latter of which, she goaded me into, and they turned out to be delicious. We engaged in loquacious conversation mostly centered around our favorite topics and interests, trading jokes, and how this visit was finally taking place after years of talking about it and our friendship being hitherto limited to cyberspace. It really did feel like meeting an old friend, for she was everything I expected from her photos and the communications we had previously shared, and I believe that both of us greatly appreciated connecting face-to-face for the first time, even if the circumstances weren’t as favorable as we desired. After having broken the ice over lunch, we took a brief car ride over to Christmas Tree Hill, one of the shops in the Outlet that offers home décor, gifts, jewelry & boutique, and other wares – with a particular emphasis on Christmas and holiday-related themes. It had that warm ginger aroma one associates with Christmas and there were Christmas trees, Santa displays, nativity scenes, winterthemed paintings, but also items of a more general, patriotic, or even summer flavor. As we walked around, my mom called to check on me, and she and Avellina shared a brief conversation for the first time. We crossed over to Book Warehouse, where we went our own way to view books that were of interest to us, with me looking through the politics, biography, and current events sections, while she spent time in the religion and fiction sections. Around 5:00 PM, Mr. Balestri had returned and it was time for us to part ways, but this had been a good first meeting and we looked forward to the next day.
Later, I contacted my church friend, Antoinette, who lives about 40 miles south of Gettysburg, and made arrangements to visit her that evening. Driving down most of what I had traveled yesterday in reverse, I arrived at her house just after 7:00 PM. Antoinette had moved to Savannah many years before, where she and my mom developed a close bond as professionals (mom being a doctor of education and Antoinette being a dentist), and she became like an older sister to me. Now married and living in the Baltimore area with two children, she has remained close to us. We talked about my travels, meeting Avellina, discussed life in Savannah, our families, and how she has been doing up there – all while eating seafood and having her little children running around with dynamic abandon. They are a lot to handle, but I enjoyed playing with them, and this part of the trip turned out to be a pleasant bonus. Around 9:30 PM, I parted ways to return to Gettysburg with the feeling that this whole trip was worth everything it had taken to organize it. Despite having eaten at Antoinette’s house, I stopped at a Wendy’s to get a chicken sandwich meal, and upon returning to the hotel, I chowed down while looking through the gift bag Avellina and her dad had given me earlier that day. There were several gifts, including trinkets from her trip to the United Kingdom last year for the Tolkien conference sponsored by F&F, as well as a beautiful card with a lovely hand-written message about us having beaten the odds to finally meet face-to-face, and I looked forward to continuing this on Saturday. However, in the early morning hours, I experienced an awful stomach ache, perhaps due to overeating or some form of food poisoning. Whatever it was, I couldn’t leave the room and made trips between the bathroom and the bed – hoping I’d get better before it was time to meet Avellina, for we had looked forward to meeting earlier than we had previously. However, she messaged me that she wouldn’t be available until later and that we’d be limited to visiting religious sites, but suggested that I go to some Gettysburg sites and take pictures. Instead, I took advantage of the extra time to pull myself together. Eventually, I had recovered sufficiently to get dressed, wash up, and head out to meet Avellina and Mr. Balestri, but before that, I stopped at CVS to pick up some mints, Tylenol, and Ginger Ale on the recommendation of my grandma to help ease the stomach ache. Though I was feeling better, I informed them of what had happened and upon meeting them at the Outlet, they made sure that I was doing okay before we drove separately to Emmitsburg, Maryland. There, we visited the National Shrine of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, a site that is dedicated to the first American-born saint of the Catholic Church. We entered the enormous, breath-taking basilica – built with marble and other fine materials, and extensively decorated with beautiful artwork, but I was shocked when Mr. Balestri – who once worked at the Shrine – informed me that it had been built in 1965. There, we lit candles at the tomb of Saint Elizabeth, before going downstairs to the museum to view a film about her life and legacy, and then made our way to the gift shop. There, Avellina looked through the books and jotted some of them down for purchasing later on Amazon,
while also assisting me with gift selections for my family. Throughout all of this, we took pictures at several locations, including in the sanctuary, the Gethsemane Niche, and at the massive painting of St. Vincent de Paul. Most of the commentary as we went through here and the other religious sites was provided by Mr. Balestri, and on the outside of the main building of the Shrine, he pointed out the buildings that were home to Saint Elizabeth and her religious works. Just before we left, my mom called to check on me and also had a warm conversation with Mr. Balestri. We then traveled south to Mount St. Mary’s University and ventured into the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception. Unlike the Seton Shrine, this was built over a century ago but was just as beautiful in its architecture and artistry, and I particularly found myself entranced by its rose windows. High above near the dome, I was able to see the representations of the four Gospel evangelists – Matthew the man, Mark the lion, Luke the ox, and John the eagle. From all angles, as I walked around the front of the sanctuary near the altar, I could take in the majesty of the place and feel the presence of God, and Mr. Balestri pointed out the shrines and statues that were of significance. Off to the side were a drum set, microphones, and stands for instruments, which were there for some Masses catering to the university student population, though it appeared that he was not a particular fan. Outside, from the top of the stairs leading into the door, I could view the vast expanse of land across the horizon as the sun was setting. It was a breathtaking sight, for the building is located upon the top of a hill, allowing for views of the area below. We took pictures at this point, but with the air rapidly getting colder, we quickly made our way back to the cars and drove back into Pennsylvania to attend Mass at the Sacred Heart Basilica in Hanover. Founded as Conewago Chapel in 1730, it is the first American Catholic church (and perhaps in all of North America) to bear the name “Sacred Heart” and in honor of this, was raised to minor basilica status by Pope John XXIII in 1962. The current structure was built in 1787, making it the oldest Catholic church stone building in America. As we went inside, the Mass was already in progress, and Avellina and Mr. Balestri briefed me, as a non-Catholic Christian, on what to do and expect. In the sanctuary, we stood at the back, though eventually got a chair for Avellina out of the nearby confession booth. Some parts of the Mass looked and felt vaguely familiar to my own religious traditions, though Mr. Balestri provided helpful guidance and commentary to facilitate my understanding. The music, as well as the sermon, were quite good and there were times of familiarity, such as the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed, though still differences to be observed. When it came time for communion, I chose to go up to the front with my arms crossed over the chest to receive a blessing from the priest, since that was the most respectful thing to do as a guest. After the Mass, we lit candles and I stood in awe of the sanctuary and its painted ceiling – another fine example of religious artistry. While I am not Catholic, it was hard not to have an appreciation for the Basilica and the other sacred sites. Upon leaving, we drove to Olive Garden to join Avellina’s friend Kat for dinner. My stomachache from earlier had cleared up substantially, and not having eaten yet, I was looking forward to a hearty meal. It was, in many ways, a suitable way to end the day, and Mr. Balestri left us young ones to enjoy ourselves and it was a pleasure getting to know Kat, who is a librarian and Avellina’s go-to person for attending movies, going out to dinner, and other engagements. Over the next two hours, we engaged in conversation about our favorite interests, including Titanic, Harry Potter, Robin Hood, and other fandoms, as well as Kat’s talent at sword-fighting. The food was good, but the stomachache had crept back – due partly to having eaten several appetizer bread and mozzarella sticks – I wasn’t able to eat all of my spaghetti meal, and Avellina hardly touched her plate, but otherwise, we had a good time. At the end, I presented the Balestri’s
with their gifts, which I believed were representative of Savannah and Georgia, and I’m glad we were able to have a gift exchange for this first-time meeting. It was a meeting that came to an end about as fast as it began, but I felt satisfied when I shared a final hug with Avellina and bid her farewell. Nothing went as planned, but at least we’d done it and laid the foundation for future visits. Certainly, I was appreciative of her for being a trooper and was grateful to Mr. Balestri for driving her and being a helpful, informative, and witty guide. At his request, Kat graciously lead me back to my hotel in Gettysburg and I prepared for my return to Savannah. After a few hours of sleep, I awoke to check out of the hotel at around 4:15 AM, filled up the car with fuel, and headed back to BWI. Already ahead of time, my flight was delayed, so I got breakfast and Mr. Balestri called to ensure that I had made it to the airport and that all was well. We had a good conversation about the weekend but agreed that future meetings ought to be in warmer weather for everyone’s sake, and I brought up the possibility of a visit to Savannah. It felt as though the ice had been broken with regard to us meeting face-to-face and he told me more about himself, his career in vaudeville, and the Tolkien conference at Oxford. It was a conversation I was pleased to have, not only because he helped to keep me company, but because it was good to get to know him better. Finally, the plane arrived and we said our good-byes. With the flight substantially delayed, I asked mom to get me from the airport in Savannah, since my new arrival time would have caused a schedule conflict for dad. Once again, I was fortunate to have a window seat and as we took off, I looked out across the landscape and said to myself, “till we meet again.”
Credits Cover art by Byrnwiga Interior graphics by Mike & Beth Amos Content proofed by Beth Amos, Ben Smith, and Mike Amos.
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