Reflections
My name is Graeme James Walker, but I prefer to be known not by who I am, but what I have done, what I do and what I will do. And if it comes to pass, then let my name be forgotten also for the sake of my deeds.
460 miles is, in human terms, far. But by car, or train, or airplane it is not so far. By walking it is a long long way, by bicycle, less so. And one of the very slowest of all the ways is by water and in England, this water is our 2,000 miles of interconnected waterways: the canals. On these, the speed limit is 4 miles an hour and one can account for around one lock for every mile. And every lock can add 20 to 40 minutes to the journey. And with this understanding, we can see that canals are indeed slower than almost any method of travel. And as I strive to rid my life of speed, it is therefore the ideal mode of transport for a Graeme.
It took me a year to travel 460 miles and in this I passed through 411 locks. I was on a journey, a pilgrimage. It came to me with urgency and intense commitment in the middle of summer 2017 and by the end of the first week of August, I was underway - travelling on my narrowboat home from London to Hebden Bridge. At the end, I was to continue my training in end-of-life companionship, in bearing witness to our dying. The pilgrimage, I thought, was to that end. “If I am to do this work correctly”, I thought “if this work is about bearing witness to a journey, then I must understand what it is to journey and to that journey, I must also bear witness.”
So I began a journey; one that was hard enough, long enough; one that demanded of me work and energy and attention; a journey to warrant the title of “Journey”.
The canal is a reflective ribbon. It says, “Here is your land, Graeme. Here are your people.”
“Where are you going?”, they would ask and I’d tell them what I have told you. At first I told them my intention and then I told them what had happened as it happened and after. I told them where I was going. I did not want to arrive to my training in anything other than a sacred capacity. The countryside, the towns - I cruised my boat through them, I walked over them and bore witness and understood in the end one central lesson for me and my brothers: Shut up. Listen. A lesson worthy of a year.
I arrived in Hebden bridge, the sun shining as it does in July, the dilapidated industrial chimneys still and totemic in the valleys. My eyes shut, I recall how I’d been frozen into the canal in winter, how heavy parts of my boat had fallen off and had to be rescued. I remember how I’d been hemmed in by engineering works that seemed to work tirelessly in preventing my movement - first this route closed, then the next, then the next. No one travels the canals like this - I’d almost capsized the boat in high winds near Birmingham, almost sunk in the Manchester Ship Canal, almost lost everything. But I heard the Journey and listened deeper. The training began and I was glowing, having finished something, having come to the end.
It’s now October 2018. The glow is still there, but so is the realisation that in yielding to me the lesson as described, I am now, more than ever, equipped for my work - the work of listening. What lays before me is the work itself. I see the pilgrimage morph slowly into a life, into a calling. The Journey that I thought had ended was simply part one. I see now that I have been there and now, I must come back, so that I may continue.
The boat, my home, is to be moved again - this time south. I am daunted. Inasmuch as a person can know what lays ahead, in my previous year of travel I knew that people would come to the boat, to travel with me, to bear witness with me, of me and my Journey and for themselves. And this time, with autumn and then winter approaching, I am suddenly isolated. I need money to move, to take myself to people, to bring them to me. I need it to move through the land, to hear it and understand it, to hear its people and understand them. This is my responsibility and calling to which I am committed. The call to heal by bearing witness with eyes and ears and heart and mind, to the dying and to those who seemingly, against all odds, survive.
Even when moored, a boat is never truly still. I’ve been blessed with a new seriousness about my life. I know one day my body will die and so to life I offer my service with energy and joy and music and love. To it I offer, with my listening, the hope of agency, the possibility of quality. And here, at the threshold of endings and beginnings, I am in a wonderment at that possibility, beckoning to me as a dancing flame in the unmeasurable darkness of things to come.
