Journeys continue long after we stop moving, but there are moments just as we arrive in a place that all of us get to be explorers.
It’s almost two weeks since I walked out of Toronto airport and towards a long overdue bed. But that was not the end of the journey, I was just witnessing it from the receiving end. Previously-arranged meetings and a cascade of the mundane but necessary – unpacking the bags I had brought with me, equipping the flat I’d arranged before leaving, collecting packages I’d shipped - meant that the echoes of there continued to be heard here for some time.
Arrival is a slow process, continuing long after you’ve stopped moving. Sometime later, and quite by surprise, you find yourself somewhere else.
Two nights ago, I began to realise that I was here and tonight, just possibly, I think I may have arrived.
It’s hard to say for sure.
These things come in stages that are only distinct in hindsight. There are pretenders - excited moments of joyous novelty; yellow and blue fire hydrants in the street, and milk sold in bags. Or there are those sirens of supposed insight when my mind attempts to stretch the tiniest scrap of experience over a massive chasm of ignorance. Always unsuccessfully.
But the good stuff bides its time, dressing up in apparent normality before jumping out to to hit you with its difference bag. The bag is heavy. In it are a thousand shapes and shades and tones of voice, views and vistas, stories and dreams. Each one fashioned by decisions taken and not taken, moments shared, journeys taken, each rolling over the other a world away from anything I knew before.
Mine got me as I walked back tonight.
I’d been reading - a poem by Isabella Valancy Crawford, Malcolm's Katie - and still had some lines rolling around my head. I could write for a thousand years and wouldn’t come up with something as good as “smooth-coated men, with eager eyes”.
And that’s how it gets you. A couple of lines of poetry walk one way, then an apparently unrelated flavour of crisps saunters in the opposite direction, Emily Carr’s paintings from last week’s seminar are sitting at a table, smoking, casually chatting to a black squirrel. Then someone pulls out a cello from behind a tree and there’s a chorus of eighty singing Oh Canada.
I know that this moment is part of a longer journey - that arrivals build and dissipate, fade, return and, sometimes, collapse. But there is also that point when they first make themselves known. Perhaps its nothing more than expectation giving way to realisation, or the brief hiatus between jetlag and the first income tax bill, but I don’t think so. There are times when all of us are explorers, when we recognise that some part of us has stepped back from the light to allow another version of who we are and might be to take their first anxious steps. The moment when we arrive.
Images
Church at Yuquot Village, Emily Carr
War Canoes, Alert Bay, Emily Carr
Forest, British Columbia, Emily Carr
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