Friday Ramble - Journey

Journey comes from the Middle English journei, meaning day (or day's travel), through the Old French jornee and Vulgar Latin diurnta, then the Late Latin diurnum (meaning day), or perhaps the neuter form of the Latin diurnus, meaning daily or "of a day". The word claims kinship with journal, diurnal, and diary which comes to us from the Latin diārium meaning daily allowance or record. Somewhere in there too and predating 950 CE by a fair interval are the Middle English dæg; and the Germanic tag. At the beginning of it all is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *dhegh- "to burn".

The word harks back to the long ago time when we moved from place to place on our own two feet and measured our barefoot progress by the amount of daylight involved in doing so. There are some lovely synonyms for this week's word in our language: adventure, campaign, caravan, expedition, exploration, migration, odyssey, passage, peregrination, pilgrimage, quest, ramble, roaming, roving, safari, sally, seeking, sojourn, transmigration, vagabondage, voyage, wandering and wayfaring.

Journeying is not simply getting from one place to another place. When I say the word (and I am fond of it), I don't think of trips to school or marketplace, but of childhood rambles and a clear sense even then that life was an adventure unfolding - that something grand, magical and illuminating awaited behind the next tree or around a bend on the trail ahead. My childhood self spent hours watching leaves float down rivers of windfall light, how light turned the whole world dazzling gold as the sun went down at the end of the day. A child has no words for such things, feelings of wonder tugged at my sensibilities in those times. "Ready or not, here I come, seeking something magical, mysterious and incandescent, I know not what."

From those childhood moments that odd little girl moved on into college, adulthood, work, marriage, parenting and all the bumps and potholes in the shambolic road of life. Oh, there were snippets of fey knowing here and there, but the midlife journey often seemed to be "arrow straight" and running toward a flat horizon, nary a tree, a hill, a cantrip or a mystery in sight.

I am older now, and I am hopefully a little wiser for all my meanderings. In these creaky, eldering days, I think about the wind in highland trees and sunrises seen from the top of the cliffs above Dalhousie Lake. I think of migrating geese and drifting fogs in early morning, the way clouds seen from "up there" seem to form a sparkling road - one spiraling right out into the great beyond. There are glorious sunsets to be seen if one climbs the mountain at twilight, but they can be seen from the shoreline too, often in the splendid company of herons.

Here I am again, watching leaves float down the river in season, haunting shorelines with a camera and trying to capture that twilight moment when the world seems to be spun out of gold. The childhood sense of journeying and mystery that seemed to vanish during my frantic middling years has returned and so have my dreams. There are adventures in the offing, eldritch musics offered in the voices of the sirens.

Childhood rambles, school and university years, the straight line highways of middle life, these eldering days - they are all about community, wildness, light and grace unfolding. May there be joy and adventure on your own wanderings.