One of the pleasures of keeping a journal like this is the fairly frequent experience of a certain kind of felicitous serendipity. (Jung would have called it synchronicity.) I set out this morning to find some old notes about the life and work of the poet Jane Kenyon, having in mind stimulus to a new piece of writing about her gifts. I couldn't find those notes, but instead ran across a journal entry I wrote over three years ago while on a solo kayaking expedition in the Canadian wilderness. Despite its largely waterborne character, I called that journey a walkabout, because it seemed to share with that Australian aboriginal practice a sense of going where one is moved to go, without preconceived itinerary or pace or even conscious direction.
In the days of that trip I frequently returned in my journal thoughts to discoveries I was making, or that my travels were reawakening, about the character of walkabout. In one of them, devoted to solitude and companionship, I found myself returning to an earlier reading of a poem by Jane Kenyon. That I could have written those lines today was both reassuring and humbling--the latter because it brought to mind how few original thoughts I appear to have had in a lifetime, the former because those few seem, on the whole, to suffice. Their marination over the years has revealed dimension I'd earlier neglected, and sustained an experience of adventure. That marination continues as I circle back now upon the core themes I am slowly unpacking in these new Reckonings.
Here is what I wrote very early in that time of discovery, on Thursday, August 28, 2003, from the village of Bartlett, New Hampshire:
Walkabout as Companionship
When I first began to learn about the tradition and meaning of walkabout, I understood it as a solitary experience. I imagined a single person, laying down his ordinary, accustomed, everyday rounds to follow a mysterious calling; walking into some wilderness with no other guide than inspiration, care and alertness would provide.
There is truth in that image, especially if “wilderness” is regarded as a wide array of inner and outer territory that is unaccustomed and unpredictable. But it is the singularity about which I’ve come to have second thoughts, and the romantic notion of abandoning the everyday elements of our lives. Yes, walkabout entails the giving of oneself, the release of a self-imposed order that has gradually, over time, dug a narrow confining channel within which I’d grown used to living. And it’s already brought more sustained experience of solitude than I’ve ever known before.
But I’m coming to understand again (in my heart and bones, not just in my head) that solitude and aloneness are not the same, that walkabout, like authentic and wholehearted living under any circumstances, is essentially relational. I walk, to borrow Thoreau’s now hackneyed phrase, to a different drummer, more slowly, over less familiar terrain—but it is the character and quality of my consciousness, my open invitation to linger, the following of tracks I have not laid down, nor even anticipated, that make the difference. Like Thoreau during the time he recounted in Walden, I can return to my own Concord, to friendships and meals and gardens I have tended, and remain on walkabout.
More and more I’m realizing that walkabout is of its nature companionable. When I think of our own culture’s Songlines, I keep hearing the embracing, wonderfully extravagant voice of Walt Whitman, and of contemporary voices who sing of the compelling, astonishing intimacy of everyday.
A good friend, reading of my ventures, perhaps noting how deeply I was moved by the film, “Winged Migration,” sent me a poem of Mary Oliver:
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Speaking in another vein of such companionship in “the family of things,” I hear Stanley Kunitz talking with Bill Moyers about his and others’ life and work: “The echo that mocks us comes from the Stone Age caves. The poem on the page is only a shadow of the poetry and the mystery of the things of this world. So we must try again, for the work is never finished. I don’t think it’s absurd to believe that the chain of being, our indelible genetic code, holds memories of the ancient world that are passed down from generation to generation. Heraclitus speaks of ‘mortals and immortals living in their death, dying into each other’s lives.’”
Jane Kenyon
Jane Kenyon, who lived with the excruciating, immobilizing isolation of depression her whole life, knew as deeply as anyone the redemptive walkabout in her own garden, especially with her beloved peonies:
Peonies at Dusk
White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.
Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They’re staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.
The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it’s coming from.
In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.
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