When You Can't Go Forward And You Can't Go Back

Land Of The Midnight Sun

I am sat in the cafe at Nordkape, the northenmost point of Europe. I look out on a clouded sky that will not darken for another month, lit by a sun that will not set until that time. I arrive here by fluke, providence and intention, by possibly the luckiest and best ride I've ever hitched. My driver, despite his Teutonic peculiarities, has become a fast friend and is one of the few people its possible to share a small car with for ten days without going stir crazy.

Its difficult to start at the beginning, every time I must introduce the circumstances that led to that very beginning, and they become in fact the beginning. So I will start with an event.
In Fatima, pilgrimage centre and pride of Portugal, I slept in the rain.

The weeks before had been fair and I'd slept outside almost every night. This night, walking around the austere expanse of the Sanctuario I felt the difference. There were spots of water now and then upon my skin, but I didn't want to waste my few euros on a hotel room, so as night fell I wandered to the outskirts of the town and entered the forest. Soon I found a dry and sheltered area with a bed of dry leaves and ivy. I put down my travelpack and the smaller rucksack which gripped my chest throughout the day. I also put down the sub-arctic jacket as a mattress, just large enough to protect my back and shoulders. I got into my old fashioned sleeping bag, as always the goose feathers flying everywhere as it is constantly in need of repair. As a final touch I filled the sack which held the sleeping bag with a few clothes and used it as a pillow.

Fireflys circled intermittently, glowing like small living embers. I lay, quite comfortable, congratulating myself for having such good sense and making the right decision. It was some hours
later that I felt the first drops of rain on my face.

The sound of the rain pattering off the leaves above my head came first to me, followed by a slight intermittent trickle on the bag. This didn't bother me, I was still quite dry and in no sense discomforted.

For a while I drowsed, awakened by the awareness that the sound of the rain was becoming more intense, and the pat-pat-pat of drops upon the sleeping bag becoming more frequent. It was then that my thoughts turned to getting a hotel room until I realised it was one in the morning and far too late. Perhaps a dry spot in town? This I rejected, I can't stand bedding down in urban areas and its impossible to get a good nights sleep.

There and then I made the decision not to move from that spot until the morning, no matter what the sky tried to hurl at me. Whether wind, lightening, hail, a monsoon, I would not budge.

The outer layer of the bag was now soaked, but still I was dry inside. Every now and then a big splat of water would find its way through the visor of my hoodie which was tucked down over my face. The sudden water in my eye would make me wince, but I didn't want to shift my position lest I bring the outer water into the inner sleeping bag. I was determined not to succumb to misery and self pity but that water in the eye was uncomfortable. In the end I pulled the sleeping bag up over my head, sacrificing a little airflow for a little dryness. Cocooned inside, my breath quickly warmed up the small, dark space.

After a little while I was too hot and stuffy, and had to occasionally draw back the cover and breath the cool, damp air.

The rain stopped for a while, the clothes I had on slightly damp now, the water stopping just short of reaching my skin. I thought now I might get some sleep.
But no sooner had I drifted off than the rain started up again, more insistent than ever. And the inevitable happenened, my clothes began to soak and saturate and I felt the creep of water across my body.

But this moment it caused me no distress. It's no different than taking a bath, or a shower.
Instead of despair I felt an increasing sense of invincibility, a rising victory feeling from the pit of my stomach. There is no suffering but the mind makes it so. The sensations on their own are meaningless, it is I who has the power to seperate the good from the bad. I took the multiple sensations of lying, soaked to the skin in a water-logged sleeping bag, with the rain continuing to fall and I labelled them neutral. The fact that I was still warm was noted with pleasure. I realised that merely lying damp but not cold cannot harm me, though I was sure that if I let in even the slightest bit of self-pity it would bring along shivers, sneezes and phlegm.

The hours past slowly but happily. When the rain at last stopped and the morning light came, I rose and surveyed the situation. I felt healthy and without the normal morning drowsiness. Most of my posessions were wet, but a ziploc bag protected the laptop on which I now write and I had no book or notepad. I took the clothes out of my makeshift pillow and was surprised to find them almost completely dry. I quickly changed into them and found myself miraculously warm and dry.

I wandered over to the Sanctuario and sat in the early morning Transubstantiation ceremony, where the faithul eat little wafers and drink little bits of wine, the body and blood of Christ. I tried to get a wafer, but was too slow and I felt it a bit too early for wine or even blood.

It is an incredible place this Sanctuario. Built within living memory after three small children had a vision of the Virgin Mary, the faithful flock there in the thousands. It comprises a cathedral with all the typical Roman Catholic accoutrements, flanked by pillars on either side, with murals between and statues on top, all in white, everything, everywhere in white. A huge square that makes you feel tiny, a golden statue of Jesus, and a huge stick-figure crucifiction, modern art style standing about a hundred metres tall. To the left side of the square coming in there is an open air auditorium, where the priests and bishops give their sermons and adorations and the crowd mumbles, sings and prays along with them. The services are constant from three o clock in the morning to nine o clock at night, rotating through Portuguese, Spanish, French, German and English. It never lets up, this adoration.

I don't think Roman Catholicism is for me, I find it all a little too theatrical. I do not think we choose our religion anyway, but rather the choice is made for us. This is what the word of the gospels is at least, that Jesus said plainly that some are elect and called to him, while others are not. I am fairly sure that no light-bulb turned on in my head the moment I entered a church or saw a Bible. I am not one of the elect. But I do read the New Testament with interest, get excited when I hear the stories of Jesus, in the same way that I get excited over any book with a complex and intriguing hero. I also pray to God, and listen, which is more than many Christians can say. But still, I never felt called, elected or selected, never was anything so simple as swallow a vast tradition whole, never could I accept the requirement to believe what I'm told and only that. My mind wants to discover, to penetrate the flower that is the mystery of the universe, one petal at a time.

Tom and I had agreed to meet in the restaurant next to the Sanctuario but when I arrived there after mass it was closed. In fact everything on the street was closed but for one little coffee shop. I waited patiently rather than get a hot drink, my spirits high enough without the need for a caffeine kick. But by and by I thought it a good idea to sit in the cafe, perhaps to use their internet to tell Tom our original meeting spot was shut.

We have excellent timing together, Tom and I, in fact our entire meeting and hence the entire outcome of the trip were predicated on an instance of perfect timing.

Whilst on the Camino De Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route that runs through Portugal to the shrine of Saint Sebastien in Spain, I took a wrong turning. While walking this four hundred kilometre stretch the way is marked with yellow arrows and sometimes a blue sign with a sea shell on it.

I had somehow missed the sign and walked an hour to a road only to be told to go back. So in the heat and on the brink of mild frustration I retraced my steps and found the turn off.

I was perhaps fifty metres down this road when I saw a figure behind me wielding dual walking sticks. This was the first pilgrim I had met on the Camino and so naturally I struck up conversation. He was the only other traveller I had any sort of conversation with until the end of the journey.

This pilgrim was of course Tom, a German from Hamburg with a ruddy complexion, stocky and a little shorter than me, fair hair, blue eyes and a cross shaped scar on his right temple. While walking along we conversed rapidly, mostly on the subject of renewable energy. I told him such things as that sometimes still the sight of a turbine turning powerfully in the wind brings tears to my eyes, so happy and proud I am that we are making progress.

I mentioned that I wanted to go to France, Germany and Norway after the Camino and a while later he blurts out.

"You should know, I'm going to go to Norway through France and Germany, and.."

But before he can finish I'm already crying and laughing, thanking the universe, thanking Tom.
"...and there's space in the car, if you want to come."

It turned out that he had been hoping to meet a road dog who wanted to be navigator on this, the mother of all road-trips, just as I had been hoping to meet someone on the Camino who would take me north.

And because of this single, salient meeting I am now sitting in a restaurant at the northemost cape of Norway. Thousands of kilometres back we became further north than England, then more northern than Scotland, then we passed Iceland and mainland Canada. I am gazing at the the ocean that surrounds the polar ice cap, whispy golden clouded sky and blue-grey sea.

I think anyone who thinks they can adequately explain how such things happen is arrogant or deluded. Believe me, science zealots have tried to explain the concept of coincidence to me many times, new agers have talked my ears off about intention and manifestation, christians have used it to try and get me into their church and occultists asked me to sacrifice a goat with them, or something.

They're wasting their time, there is no adequate explanation that doesn't somehow choke the life out of these events. All you can do is nod towards this mystery, acknowledge its reality and its ineffability. Be grateful, not to anyone or anything in particular, just gratitude on the cosmic scale.

Looking at the light of this sun which never sets I form a new conception of what it means to be enlightened, or at least something close. Its very simple, my spiritual goal, what I long for. To cut down all the discursive thoughts, the comparisons and labels, the wonderings about the future or ruminations of the past. To cut them all down like sugar canes, to replace them all with one long moment of appreciation. Timeless appreciation, limitless appreciation, a grand, infinite marvelling at whatever appears to marvel at.