And look! In through the window of the train carriage, next to his rattling first-class teacup, can be spied a notebook, which is aspiringly, if provisionally, titled: The Complete Guide to Britain’s Only Named Wind.

Marverlous! It’s about time someone wrote a book for Helm

…  I intend to capture its very spirit and I shall record it in detail for the Quarterly.

Capture it’s spirit! Did you hear that, Fitz? Bodge is intending to have a windy seance….

Charles, never underestimate the value of the amateur’s diary. Never dismiss oral evidence. Where would we be without it?

Sarah Hall’s newest novel, Helm, was another one of the books that accompanied me on my pilgrimage to rediscover my childhood stories as one who is now approaching his 50th year of living. Set in Northern England, on the entry point to the Yorkshire Moors, it’s premise recounts the story of Britain’s only named wind- Helm. The book opens with a quote from Edward Thomas (The Mountain Chapel),

When gods were young. This wind was old

Mass begins this, then, by delving into a cosmic origins story,

“In the beginning there was no Helm. Boring for the world, obviously. There were aeons before Helm arrived. The necessary arrangements had to be made, on the planet and in the sky. It would take Ages for Helm to be recognized, let alone named… But in the beginning nothing else had a name either.”

Before going on to tell of Helm’s wide angle view of history’s emergence and inevitable movement through time itself, here the story of Helm is drawing us into what we might call the eternal mystery, while similtaneously reminding us of the ways in which this mystery places us in direct relationship to this world that we know.

One of the more powerful moments of my trip comes from my tour through the Yorkshire Moors. Moving through the Howardian Hills, a landscape that emerges dotted with a mix of lavender fields, unsuspecting (and relatively new) vineyards, castles and Abbey ruins, we eventually make our way around to the market town of Helmsley, nestled in a valley at the entry point to the North York Moors National Park.

Part of this tour was supposed to include travelling on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway (hello Harry Potter), which is located here, and of which we did a drive by, but this was the one day of the week when it doesn’t run.

As stated in our email, in exchange we are given both transportation and admission to the famous Abbey in Whitby. A fair exchange in my mind, as that was my main destination on a tour that otherwise would have dropped me off at the town center adjacent to the bottom of those 199 steps up.

What the email didn’t say was that this exchange also meant we could stop at High Blakey Ridge, an incline sitting at the center of the Moors before winding its way down through Danby and a series of smaller towns leading to the North Sea. This is where I encountered Helm.

It’s something our tour guide prepares us for, walking through the lore that gives it it’s agency. He reminds us again about the force we are about to encounter before we open our doors, one that is as sure as the ground we would be standing on. “Let it hit you,” he says. “Experience it.” And here we open the doors to what can only be described as an otherwordly experience, encountering a wind unlike anything I have experienced before. Hall’s narrative suddenly breaks open, coming alive in a whole new way as I wander the hillside looking out over the valley, sheep gently grazing the one side, the expansive views opening up on the other. There’s something here that witnesses to the unbroken relationship between the intangibles of the sacred and the groundedness of the earth. Something that calls out and needs to be named.

This experience, rooted now in memory,  is what I carry with me to the North Shore, a town soaked in it’s own lore, the grand ruins of Whitby Abbey standing as its own witness atop those looming cliffs, looking out into the seas expanse as it keeps watch over the town. As writer Shayle Follows writes in a 20206 article for the Whitby Guide,

One of my favourite things about Whitby Abbey is that you do not even have to be standing beside it to feel it’s presence. It is always there, sitting high above the town, sneaking into the background of your photos and making every view feel a little more dramatic. Whether you are walking along the harbour, looking back from the beach, or exploring the cobbled streets below, the Abbey has a way of stealing the scene.

As Follows goes on to say, it’s easy to see why Bram Stoker was taken with this place. It’s why we endeavor to walk those steps at all, the very setting for what becomes his iconic novel. Here, standing at the top, with Robin Hood’s Bay looming in the distance on one side, Newcastle Upon Tyme on the other, is my introduction to the town sitting below, every turn of those 199 steps giving you a new and fresh vantage point to it’s rows of coloured houses and market shops lining the River Esk as it spills out into the North Sea waters.

Once you decend those steps and venture out into the streets, making your way to the Whitby Bridge, the central connection between the two sides of the river, you are greeted not just by that expansive view of the world, but a living, breathing culture. Crossing that river is where you enter into the story of Whitby, from it’s Viking heritage (as I learned, this is written into the town’s named streets: nothing like names such as Haggersgate to immerse you in its character), to it’s role in the story of Captain Cook, which you will find embedded in nearly every corner of it’s architectural design. It was here that Cook learned the ways of the sea and where the boats were built, eventually launching him into the pages of the history books.

A fun suprise here. Whitby is also home to Caedmon, cited as the English language’s oldest known poet. You can learn about him at the Abbey, but his presence stands witness to a fascinating and enduring story that reveals his own witness to this relationship between the natural world (anchored in his love for it’s creatures) and the enduring, sacred presence of the Divine, his poetry wrestling with the tensions inherent within that relationship from the vantage point of God’s love and God’s judgment. A cross memorial stands up by the Abbey documenting his importance, itself looking out over a town that remains a calling card to spiritual seekers. a town visibly marked by the gothic obsessions it happily claims as its birthright. Here Stoker’s words ring out into this intersection of these two working tensions, the expansive mystery being held in the chaos of the waters and the quiet dance of the humans seeking to name it where land and water meet.

The words of Stoker come to mind here:

There are mysteries that Man can only guess at which age by age may only solve in part

Recounted in an article for Time magazine by Dacre Stoker and JD Barker, Bram Stoker, in the summer of 1890, stopped at the library in Whitby and requested a specific title (The Accounts of Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia by William Wilkinson), to which he opened “to a specific section” and jotted in his journal. What follows is a map, outlining a journey that begins in London and ends on the shores of Romania, and the accounting of a shipwreck called the Dmitri, out of which the mysteries surrounding the history of this shipwreck, originating as it did from Eastern Europe, blends into the pre-existing Yorkshire myths regarding Barghest, a large black dog, which in this account was stated to be observed by the crew to have escaped the ship and run up the 199 steps and into the graveyard of St. Mary’s Church. The article describes the famed Irishman now finding a smile forming across his face as he sees what the article calls “a blurry place between fact and fiction.” A liminal space where the world just might be able to break open and unsettle our senses, and, dare one say, begin to make some sense. In a startling phrasing, the article states,

“Bram Stoker did not intend for Dracula to serve as fiction, but as a warning of a very real evil, a childhood nightare all too real.”

But the first 100 pages of the novel, which set the stage for Stoker’s alleged intent, were purged from it’s original form, out of fears coming from publishers back in London over the great evil of a murderer still on the loose, and what such a story might do to those seeking to control it. What remains still buried in history, perserved only through the bits and pieces of journal entries and writings from which we gain glimpses of it, witnesses to Stoker’s own uncomfortable relationship with what was being purged, namely his convictions about the true nature of this world we occupy and the nature of this thing we call evil.

Here I found myself thinking back through my pilgrimage, a pilgrimage that pushes through similar stories held in the pages of England’s vast literary voices. Voices standing in the midst of modernism’s persistant grip on the world of the ever emerging West, and wrestling with visions of a world now being buried underneath. Here sacred truths are being purged and redefined, traded for the rhetoric of what is being branded the age of reason, a rhetoric these voices found to be deeply ironic.

Stoker believed, as did the authors that share this same breadth of conviction, that truth, and its bedfellow reason, is found in the enduring power of story. This is what preserves truth and persists against our tendency to reject rationality in favour of that which we can control. To the modern world, any story that confronted the deep rooted fears of such an enterprise becomes reclaimed and reappropriated as lore, a fun remnant of an old world now purged of it’s original meaning and relegated to the field of the classics. A field now controlled by the newly claimed powers of it’s constructed academia. And yet, to dig into the history of these stories, to let this history speak, is to recover a very different story, one that witnesses to a very different understanding about what is true about this world that we both observe and experience, the very world the metaphors of these old stories seek to reveal.

Read through any of the plethora of articles wading through the complicated waters of our attempts to retreive Dracula’s origins story, and you’ll find this basic line being drawn in the sand: those who downplay Stoker’s convictions about the world he was trying to capture and reveal, and those who seek to bring that world to the forefront. The former, almost without exception, will inevitably lean into the vampire motif, believing that to dispel this in terms of the modern myth is to keep a story’s witness to the sacred and spiritual dimensions of this world at bay. And often, likely motivated in response, the latter doubles down on the legitimacy of a world of vampires, using the same modernist questions and approaches to prove such a world exists.

Both I think would miss the real point and fall into the same trap. The real question is, what is the shape of the world that this story is seeking to reveal. To what do the metaphors and symbols and images and creatures point. What gives these metaphors their power. What does this clash of myths reveal about the nature of all the world’s stories.

This is about whether or not this world has a spiritual dimension to which we ascend, or whether this world is defined according to the wanted materialism that hands the modernist  narrative its power over the world, to which we can then reduce the world to that which we can control.

It is known that Stoker drew inspiration from Emily Gerard’s article The Land Beyond the Forest, I find this a fascinating window into the mind of an author who was drawn to write about a world which we must ascend towards, a world which story could in fact reveal to its hearers, especially in the face of evil. It is the view of the materialist that dissects this story in terms of a modernist imposition, finding a split between nature and spirit and believing that the ultimate deconstruction of the spirit comes from proving that vampires are not real. But this is not how story works. This is not how the world Bram Stoker was accupying would have thought about these images, these metaphors. This story emerges precisely because of his conviction in a truth that transcends, a conviction that hands us a world which we cannot control. This, in my opinion, is the real source of that fear that sought to purge the book of the very history (the observation and experiences of the world Stoker was attempting to put into words and symbol) that tells us what he believed to be true. To be confronted by a world we cannot control is to have our wanted need to remake the world in our image undermined. It is to raise questions about the very modern enterprise that hands us this control. It hands us a world where our moral constructs do not have the power to define it, judge it, or control it, let alone make sense of it.

As I find in Sarah Hall’s story, theirs is a world where an encounter with the wind compels us to name it. This, I wonder, is what all of these stories are doing. This, I wonder, is what this pilgrimage is revealing. If the modern world that left these writers restless sought to remake the world in our own image, they found the power of story in the act of naming the world. This was their counter to what they perceived to be modernisms failure to make sense of the world, precisely because in naming it we are then handed a world that stands apart from us. That stands above us. Like the Abbey overlooking the town of Whitby, a story that then calls us to ascend those steps in order to encounter this reality as it is, something that then has the power to transform us, precisely because we cannot control it. A much more arduous and risky endeavor than reducing it to the whims of our wanted fancies and demands.

I would find this sentiment repeated as I return to those ancient walls and cathedrals of York, the clash between that modernist sensibility and the power of story highlighting the city’s own obsession with the latent spirituality inherent in Harry Potter.

Here, one of modernisms great apologists has penned a story that sparked a wanted need in it’s hearers: a need to re-enchant the world at long last. Perhaps against her own wanted intentions, the story has taken on a power all its own.

I think too about my later encounter in Oxford with a space shared by both Lewis and Pullman, two authors appealing to story for very different reasons, one seeking to reclaim a world buried by modernism through the telling of the old stories, the other seeking to bury the old world by reappropriating those old stories in service of the modern narrative. If ever there were a veritable expression of the present conflict, this would be it. What remains certain in my eyes though, is that the stories from which Pullman is drawing, the stories that permeated the world of England’s great literary voices, emerged precisely because of their shared conviction that the modernist narrative had failed to make sense of all the worlds stories, the very world they/we observe and experience. To encounter them on their terms is to allow them to speak, The question simply becomes, how does this speak to us.

For me, re-encounterimg the writers and stories of my childhood in this place, not only continues to validate the restlessness I held as a young kid, it reminds me of why that matters to the questions I am asking. It asks me to wonder in a reality that is both beyond me and that invites me to ascend those steps in my continued seeking of the truth it wants to reveal. And, dare I say, it continues to ask me to risk giving up my need to reduce it to terms that I can control. What it promises in exchange is actual transformation, but even more so an invitation to participate in that transformed view of the world and its inhabitants.

A day in the Cotswolds. That’s what my tour was called (shout out to the wonderful people at Go Cotswolds, a small grassroots company with a small passionate team who will quickly tell you before the tour starts: there’s no way to actually see the Cotswolds in a day). Another early morning wake up call, but for me this is what vacation is all about.

The day will eventually take an unexpected turn, but for the time being I remain blissfully ignorant of that (eventual) chaos. This moment is about my continued journey into these spaces that informed my childhood as a young reader. I talked about what the Cotswolds are in my previous blog on my visit to Stratford Upon Avon. This day was about travelling to a handful of it’s greatest hits: Stow on the Wold, Bourton on the Water, Broadway, Chipping Campden, Snowshill, Bibury, Moreton on Marsh.

When I mentioned my interests in the literary side of the country, the tour guide got a slight gleam in her eyes. I am told they like to tailor the tour as much as possible to the interests of the travellers in each unique group, and this, it would seem, was an easy mission. After all, if, in the history of this place, all roads lead out of London, the great literary minds of my childhood had a special fondness for the Cotswolds.

Of note:

• Stow on the Wold is where Lewis Carroll found his inspiration for the titular character in Alice in Wonderland
• Tolkien’s presence is felt all over the place, having spent much time traversing these grounds, including the famous Tolkien Door (also Stow on the Wold), the Broadway Tower (which I think my tour guide worked in just for me, influencing Tolkiens concept of Amon Hen), the Rollright Stones (which we never got to see), the Bell Inn in Moreton On Marsh (where I got to sit where Tolkien once sat, soaking in the inspiration for The Prancing Pony), and the countryside. For Tolkien, these influences reach all the way up into Birmingham (where I will end up at the end of the day), the place of his childhood, where sites like Sarehole Mill, Moseley Bog, Perrott’s Folly hand us the mill in Hobbiton, the Old Forest, the two towers, and is also the location of the church where Tolkien found himself being mentored by Father Francis Xavier following the death of his parents.
• J.M. Barrie’s history at Stanway House, where he had an amateur cricket team with Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne (can you imagine!!??)
• T.S. Eliot’s history in Chipping Campden, where visits with a close friend inspired what became his greatest poem (Burnt Norton), inspired by the manor of the same name
• Beatrice Potter, who’s famous book was inspired by Gloucester (for me this was a drive by)

My favourite of the places was Stow on the Wold. Hard to beat standing at that door.

Bourton on the Water is small and quaint, and the sort of place you would want timed for a sunrise or a sunset. It’s popularity definitely means crowds.

This is similar for the famous Arlington Row in Bibury, a place that makes you long for a picture without the crowds, which is ironically why the crowds are there in the first place.

In contrast, the grand streets of Chipping Campden, a bigger center (relatively speaking), are conditioned for those crowds, offering a welcome market town vibe with a decent area to explore off the beaten (High Street) paths.

I’m probably not alone here I’m sure, but second to walking or biking the Cotswolds Way, which I imagine this space is really designed for, is driving the countryside. I had a taste of this on the hour long bus ride from Moreton on Marsh to Stratford Upon Avon, which is quite beautiful, and this would be equally true for the train ride running through the opposite side of this storied terrain. This brings you through small towns such as Shipston on Stour, Limington, Honebourne, Blackminster, Upper and Lower Moor, and bigger places such as Gloucester and Evasham, framing your windows with a novelesque, page turning journey. On our tour, crossing over to Broadway and stopping in Snowshill (the picturesque town that provides the home and backdrop for Bridget Jones), Cotswold Lavender was one of the sites which would, for watchful eyes, break open as you emerged from the Hedgerows in their brilliant colour.

And then of course there’s your companions for the day, a small crew of people from around the world. One couple from Michigan making their first trip to England at 80 years old (and still rocking it) to meet their family (and heritage) after a lifetime of never having the opportunity. A middle aged mother on a mission to get pictures of those lavender fields for her daughter, and a couple bound and determined to find their ways into conversations with the locals at every stop (and consequentially became our running commentary on the old wool producing families still residing in the area). Although sadly the only time I had with her was the drive from Stratford Upon Avon to Moreton on Marsh, where she would transfer to the other tour (secret Cotswolds, which ironically was the trip I initially signed up for before time restricted my ability to get to Stow on the Wold), there was a wonderful woman from Australia whom would have made a great conversation partner along the way.

In talking to a friend, I spoke about my overall experience with the Cotswold’s, suggesting that I am absolutely glad I went, I enjoyed experiencing it, but I am not sure I feel a strong need to return. I would qualify that statement by saying, if I did return, I would endeavor to see it from the vantage point of travelling the Cotswolds Way.

Slow travel that has the luxory of soaking in multiple days of sunsrises and sunsets from different angles. Which is to say, I absolutely see the allure and the magic of the place for many, and this, I think, is it’s element. The reason, If I was to throw out a guess, for my slightly tempered response is the simple realization of what this space currently is, at least when it comes to its popularity as a tourist destination: a retreat for the rich. A place you wonder through and admire while knowing it remains essentially untouchable for most of us.

A place where you get bits and pieces of the generational life which still remains, much of that still connected to those old world practicies (hang on to those encounters when they come along the way), but mixed in with the big money, where you have to assume these figureheads have distanced themselves, through their walled off estates, from the same streets we are treading in interest of grabbing those sought after shots of the buildings and architecture they (thankfully) have been forced (by law through regulation) to preserve.

Saying all that, I know that there is a whole world to discover underneath the present layers. This is the same world that inspired those literary voices. This is a history that reaches back to early settlements, that contains important pieces of the UK’s history. And certainly, the further out you get from the popular centers, the more connected you start to feel with this still active heartbeat. A world untouched by the industrial revolution. There’s an irony here. When I made the change from the secret cotswolds tour to the day in the cotswolds, it was with the voice of one of the ones running the company ringing in the back of my head saying, I get the draw of the big hitters, but my favorite is the secret cotswolds. I feel like this might have been the right way to go for me personally, looking back, however, here I was driven by the need to see that famous Tolkien door. You could say I am the problem. In fairness, this was the theme of my personal pilgrimage, and it was, legitimately, a single decision that meant choosing between being able to see it or missing it altogether.

So there, I suppose, is my easy ticket back. If I was to return, the secret tour would make a great pairing with the Cotswolds Way. That to me feels true to seeing the place in its element.

Leaving all potential regrets behind, my day in the cotswolds nevertheless left me with some pictures and some memories, some great conversations and some more to imagine. The final moment of my day was heading to see The Bell Inn, as this is where we ended (and technically started) our tour, in Moreton on Marsh. A picture perfect finish to a relaxing day. Now it is onwards to Birmingham and then to York

Which is precisely the point in which things begin to go off the rails (pun intended).

Initially Birmingham was a stop over for the night, allowing me plenty of time to explore some planned Tolkien sites shown above (the Oratory of Saint Phillip where Tolkien was raised by the priest following the death of his parents, and home of St. John Henry Newman) the inspiration for the two towers in Perrots Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks Tower- pictures taken from google), which are very close togetherbut a window of oppportunity to visit Whitby, which was high on my list, reorganized this evening around a later train to York (the meeting point for my tour of the Yorhsire Dales and Whitby. So plans shifted to a quick cab ride out to see the church and the towers during my stop over.

As things go, timing is everything, and disrupted trains can easily upend any tightly scheduled plans. Thus I arrived in Birmingham with just enough time to check out it’s famous canal front. I would have to live with existing in proximity (a 30 mintue walk away to be precise) to these sites, although I reassure myself with the simple thought that Birmingham would be the necessary middle point for a planned return to the U.K prioritizing Wales and the Lake District. In any case, this would be, as it turns out, an omen for the rest of the night.

Arriving in Birmingham, I was immediately hit by what, I could only assume at the time in my ignorance, was a convention of some sort. I am talking the crazed fanatics kind, where I found myself navigating through crowds decked out in costumes and riding a next level demonstration of enthusiasm.

Or maybe this is just Birmingham, I thought in the moment. What do I know. In any case, that twinge of regret over not trying to call over that cab and making a mad dash for my Tolkien sites still sits with me, but given what was actually going on- England, I find out, was playing in the World Cup- I am not sure that would have been either possible nor the smartest move in the end. Not to mention I am sure that cab ride would have been at minum 120 canadian dollars. 

But then again, given the chaos that was about to ensue, I was minutes away, as it turned out, from getting some extended time in Birmingham. That’s how things go. At least I get a decent story from it all.

After my quick leisurely stroll (more an opportunity to stretch the legs), I returned to the train station to board my train to York. All seems good. I do indeed board the train, and (a very full) train does indeed depart the station.

Mere minutes into my departure (I am talking 10 minutes in), I get a muffled announcement come over the intercom. I can’t quite make out what it’s saying, but I catch hints of some sort of disruption. I chalk it up to connecting trains and dismiss it, as I am on a direct line to York. Settling in for the couple hour ride, the next thing I know a train agent is making his way up the aisle, stopping to chat with the different seats as he goes. I get my ticket ready, as I assume this is what he wants. By the time he arrives at my seat I’m getting the gist that there is more going on and that this just might impact me after all. Sure enough, I get the same shared pronouncment that this train, which is supposed to bring me to York, is being shut down. And not just this train, but an ever lengthening list of trains now also going dark, one after the other. Something about an electricity shortage or something like that. Our next stop would be the end of the line, and efforts to then redirect us using different connecting trains was falling apart in real time. This included the final trains of the night going to York being cancelled.

As I mentioned, had this happened in Birmingham, this would have given me that extra time I needed to get to my wanted sites, given that I would have changed to the later train prior to it being cancelled. Anyone with experience in how this works knows that the station is obligated to get you to where you are going, which means when all else fails they end up putting you in a hired cab. Best case scenario would have been getting an extended stay in Brimginham and eventually getting that cab from there. As it was, a train packed full of people now found themselves stuck at this middle of nowhere stop,. To make matters worse, the heat wave and the main event (the world cup) seemed to have emptied every vending machine of water, the one thing I failed to stock up on before I left (or more accurately couldn’t, as they were sold out in Birmingham High Street station as well).

For context, I am now somewhere in the vicinity of the Nottingham area, which is also bringing up one of my other regrets: not being able to get out to Sherwood Forest, and that feeling that I could be spending my time there instead of in this station. I have deep affection for the Robin Hood lore, but it was one of those places that required the good part of a day using the train, and doing my research, while it’s described as a quaint stop (the city of Nottingham), the forest itself was more about the lore than a needed destination in and of itself. A nice place to visit, as I heard many say, but not a priority.

But the lore nevertheless was a big part of my childhood, so here I am, once again looking from a distance knowing I am in proximity to it, biding my time with an increasingly restless crowd decked out in costume and short fuses. I can confirm, I got way too much information about way too many of their relationships over the fading hours of this unplanned stopover.

Eventually we got word to follow the station worker out to what was now a fleet of waiting taxis. When I say waiting, what it ultimatley demonstrated itself to be was another angsty mob, this time apparently made up of every possible available taxi fighting things out for the right to the desired contract. This was a windfall for them. I changed hands no less than four times just on route to “a” taxi. After one heated exchange between drivers, what should have been taxis with six people each started to be emptied out, sending half full taxis on their way. I can only assume this was an effort to give as many of them a piece of the contract as possible, and/or avoiding an all out war. What started as six in my cab filtered down to two. Me and a Russian lady who lives in York.

I should mention: it’s now approaching midnight. Some Russian Vodka feels like a needed thing right about now.

When we finally arrive at York Station it’s definitely past midnight. My reserved hostel isn’t far away, but navigating it in the dark was still a fun exercise. The first thing that greets you is the old city walls. Walking through these gates, which reminded me a bit of our time arriving in Krakow, you enter the old city center. At one point what I assume to be a cat or a dog comes running by me with a significant sized prized prey in it’s mouth. What a greeting from the otherwise empty streets.

The further up I go into the heart of the old city center, the closer I get to what is the ominous glow of light emanating from windows reaching up and down the street. TVs. Pub after pub, restaurant after restaurant, home after home, all still with their doors open and tables packed watching the still running game. Eventually I arrive at my hostel. I should mention, I have never stayed in a hostel before. I don’t really know how they work. In this case I made my way into the building where I had to push my way through the crowd of people to find what I eventually discovered was the check in point at the bar. They gave me directions to the room. I grabbed my key and made my way back out to the central halway to go get settled in. My first instruction: find the door that says basement on it. I’m looking. I can’t find anything. A guy notices me wandering around and asks me what I’m looking for. The basement, I say. He says oh, it’s over here. He opens a door for me and I head down the stairs. Suddenly the door shuts behind me and I find myself in the dark. The door I came through locks on the other side., so I can’t get out the way I came. I start feeling around through the faint glow of emergency lights dotting the roof. Damp, old stone walls. Some shelves. How am I going to get out of here?

This went on for about a good 7 minutes, when the lights suddenly come on, and the guy from the bar is standing there. A split second where I am slightly uncertain about how this is shaking down, but he apologizes. The guy who  let me down here, into what appears to be the supply room, didn’t know who I was or what he was doing. “You went too far,” he explains in his thick British accent . He then guides me up a back way I never would have found in the dark, out the door and towards my room.

At this point I am more than ready to head to bed. I have no idea what the actual etiquitte is for a hostel, but I am also not too concerned at this point. Plus, it seemed like everyone was still up at the bar watching the game. So I throw on my phone’s flashlight and find my bed number- great, it’s a top bunk. I don’t change, I just find the closest outlet, toss my bags up on the bed with me, shut the curtains, and curl up around it.

Ping.

Dang it. I neglected to turn my phone notifications to silent. I pull back the curtain, crawl back down the ladder, and silence my phone. Only to find myself considering another dilemma. If I leave my phone down here how do I hear my alarm? If I take it up with me, how do I charge it? I consider that my first instinct to leave it on the ground charging perhaps isn’t the best move, and opt out for charging my portable charger and keeping my phone with me. instead. As I finally look to get what appears to be about 5 and a half hours of sleep before needing to get up for the next day’s tour, for whatever resaon I find the words of the cotswolds way marker back at Chipping Campden playing through my head.

“Now the light falls across the open field, leaving the deep lane shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon.” (T.S. Eliot)

Sitting adjacent to The Salisbury plains is an area known as the Cotswolds, a word that combines the phrase sheep pen (cot) with hills (wold), reaching back to the Roman introduction of the Cotswold Lion (sheep) into these still rolling hills.

Here is a world preserved in time, having escaped the sweep of the industrial revolution that turned it’s eyes instead towards the most illustrious coal mining industry further East.

Today it has morphed into a veritable tourist industry, where robust laws continue to ensure that the wealthy (outside of long term residents, the only ones who could actually afford properities in this area today) must adhere to strict rules regarding what they are allowed to build/rebuild/renovate/destroy.

These are fairytale villages, which is the draw for many looking to escape into this other-world, easy to romanticize as a quintessential image of the English countryside, representing a different age disconnected from the trappings of the modern world. And walking the streets of these different villages, it’s easy to fall under it’s spell, with it’s unique golden coloured stone drawing in vibrant glows and casting out unaided reflections amongst the old world architecture, moving here and there as it does with the ever sloping and rising streets. Some day, perhaps I will be able to do the 164 km path called the Cotswold Way, beginning at Chipping Camden, which is the easiest way to really immerse ones self in the interconnected villages that make up this once ancient seabed.

Perhaps a lesser known fact about the Cotswolds is it’s position as an inbetween place, consistently finding itself positioned between two warring sides. One might be surprised by how such an innocent setting could contain the bloody history that it does, and yet sitting between the Welsh lands to the West and the Essex to the East, bordering the Druids to the South on the Salisbury plains and the intruding northern tribes to the North, and most notably being the site of the civil war of the 1600’s.

It’s actually the civil war that becomes most significant to beginning my journey through this area, arriving in the town of Stratford Upon Avon, made notable as the birthplace of William Shakespeare.

If you are like me, Shakespeare represents something of a complicated relationship. A standard text in school, notoriously difficult to grasp, and yet the neverending onslaught of adaptations, stage, screen, and literary, are littered throughout my childhood.

Knowing little about the individual but knowing much about these stories became my window into exploring why he matters, not just to the story of this space, but to my literary pilgrimage. One curious source that accompanied me on this front is called Shakespeare and the Resistance by Clare Asquith. One of the fascinating things that comes from taking a fresh look at common histories is the ways in which perceptions and misconceptions are able to be overturned, which is precisely what Asquith’s well researched treatment of two of Shakespeares famous poems does (Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, published a year apart in the aging and dying years of the Elizabethan era, often sold as Medieval Englands true golden years).

What this window first reveals, which a growing body of research seems to be supporting, is that these golden years overshadow the real political turmoil now buried underneath. This matters to our understanding of England’s history. More so, it matters to our understanding of Shakespeare’s writings, and indeed the person behind the writings. As Asquith writes,

“In shakespeare we discover a man deeply engaged in the struggle to bring true tolerance and humanity to England.”

As she goes on to note, it would be “the change in tone in Shakespeare near the end of his life” which becomes our jumping off point for seeing his body of work through a different set of eyes. This change in tone, while long embedded in different theoretical musings, does reflect a change in demeanor, but what gets missed through handed down histories of the Tudor age is that this change reflects “that of a revolutionary, looking over a failed attemp at resistance towards the Tudor Monarchy.” Just to underscore how deeply this narrative of the Tudors, and subsequently it’s literary figurehead (Shakespeare), has formed the public consciosness of an entire era, Asquith writes about the present state of scholarship, saying:

“Now crumbling, this myth has for centuries formed the foundation stone of an England which dated the birth of its empire and the establishment of its national church back to the days of the Tudors, and adopted Shakespeare as its national figurehead.”

Here, on the cusp of the most bloodied years of England’s illustrious history, two civil wars which would result in the death of nearly 4.5 percent of the population of the British Isles (although more in number, World War 1 sits at 2 percent), sits a now romanticized era of advertised prosperity giving the eventual rebuilding of the British landscape it’s guiding myth, and it is the stories of Shakespeare, purged of it’s political edges, which get reconstituted as its central text.

It’s absolutely worth reading through Asquith’s carefully argued premise, but for the sake of a gross summarization: to truly understand the texts of Shakespeare, one needs to understand how such works operate in times/places of political control. Where texts must be careful in adhering to a given narrative, handed down by the powers, but where writers use the guise of these surface narratives to lobby hidden agendas and critiques of that power in their metaphors and symbols and language. This becomes a way of subverting the powers, precisely because readers of the time pick up on these working metaphors and symbols even where the establishment remains willfully ignorant.

This, Asquith argues, is what gives the change in tone in Shakespeare’s later writings it’s revelatory nature. This reveals the voice of an artist, who spent his life championing a resistance of the Empire and who is now looking upon the failed end result of his efforts: a looming civil war. Here hopeful optimism shifts into a feeling of despair, bringing all manners of existential questions with it regarding the point of it all on the cusp of a life now exiting the stage.

A much different portrait than the Tudor age we’ve been handed over the years. But this is what makes a pilgrimage like this worthwhile. Standing in front of Shakespeeare’s house, walking the streets of his inspiration, gazing over the percieved tensions now apparent in the legacy of the Royal Shakespeare Theater, which was showing the play The Cherry Orchard, starring Helen Hunt and Kenneth Braughn, this very night (perhaps one of my great regrets choosing not to try for last minute tickets to the sold out show, but the price tag was looming large). A legacy that reaches to London and it’s famous Globe, a reconstruction of the very playhouse which once sat on the banks of the River Thames as a grand statement of the Eliabehan era, housing Shakespeares plays.

This inspired me to think back on my own life, given that this pilgrimage marks my official road to 50. What does my life reveal on the surface? And what would my story reveal in light of such revisionist history? This is a question I ask, not because my life resembles anything like Shakespeare’s legacy (about the furthest from it), but because there’s something here that I think applies in important ways to any given life. The tension of existing in a world where we are woven into its constructs, a product of its dominant narratives, often in ways we don’t give much consideration, and yet also being marked by these points of resistance and diversion. We find this in the process of growing up, in the ways our young selves try to wrestle some semblance of our own story out of the expectations of a home, some sense of that sought after independance the differentiates us from our parents and our siblings amidst a shared upbringing. We find this in the ways this percieved independence then faces it’s own challenges of the institutions and expectations which we find in the world on the other side of this transition, on the other side of our “leaving the paramaters of this shared upbringing” seeking the allure of something we can call our own.

I do wonder if sometimes (or often times) I fall into the trap of thinking this act of resistance is, in and of itself, the viritue. Standing here wondering about this storied life, existing now, as it does, a ghost of a never ending reconstruction of the buried past, I consider the ways in which I can begin to see past this mantra I’ve been handed, which says life is just the continued process of opposing the past and replacing it with whatever comes next, and I imagine what it might look like to think more deeply about what a storied life actually means as an actual act of formation rather than simply an othering of the things we feel we must oppose. The ways in which my life, as all lives do, demonstrate this same push and pull that marks Shakespeare’s works, attempting to speak between these larger forces of hope and despair, even as it works to carve out a story in the middle, allowing us to become coherent participants in the plot.

A reality in which things like legacy lay far outside of our control, even as we find ways to believe that our choices, our actions, matter to something bigger than ourselves. A reality where all of our small acts of resistance walk this tightly strung line between forming community and subsequently driving wedges between it.

And then simitaneously asking, for all the ways we are lured in by these acts of resistance, the much more difficult question becomes, what is it that I embrace. This can come in the form of questions such as, what is it that I believe. Or the more probing question, what does my life, a life that is and will be ultimately be controlled by the interpretation of others, reveal about what I believe.

William Shakespeare can’t stand where I am standing now and look back over the long history of interpretaiton that ultimately persists beyond his control. His life, in many ways, is just as much the voice of the Tudors as it is now becoming an act of resistance. Both of these things are true about his legacy. And what hits me, somewhat hard, about recognizing this in this moment, is that in my own 50 years of living this is also true for me.

As something of a cynic I have long wrestled with this tension. As a young child, for whatever reason now lost to the passage of time, I became resltess with this notion of seeking a kind of integrity between my life and what I actually believe to be true about this world. By this I don’t merely mean the old adage of walking the talk, or ideas about ones life matching ones words. That to me is a dangerous moralism. What made me restless ran deeper than this. Something akin to Shakespeare’s adage, “We know what we are, but not what we may be.” It was more about seeing my life in light of a much bigger Truth that exists beyond me, and this insatiable desire and need to know what that Truth is. We know where we are, but not what it might be, that might be another way of rephrasing that.

What kept me awake at night, reading books like Charlotte’s Web and Watershipdown into the late, dark hours, was this unsettled feeling of a lived life that anchors itself in truths that might ultimately prove to be little more than illusions. And I don’t mean simply in the religious sense, but in all of the ways we build our lives on given convictions which drive our choices, which justify the shaping our our lives in our hearts and minds,. and upon which we find meaning and hope. As Shakespeare once said, “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” The issue here is, to be true to thine own self requires alligning ones self with what is true about this world. That’s the restlessness.

Hard questions for an adult mind, let alone for my 7 year old self. Those  who know me understand that I am never far from my next existential crisis. In this moment however, as I continue my walk along the River Avon, the medieval town ebbing and flowing with the different curves and turns of the winding pathway,  I was seeking a conversation between my adult and child self. A way of perhaps probing the nature of this restlessness at its core.

This will come with my ensuing tour of the larger Cotswolds area. There awaits the inspiration of its rich literary heritage, this area inspiring the likes of T.S. Eliot, Tolkien, Beatrix Potter, J.M. Barrie (this is where he wrote Peter Pan), Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll. Each wrestling with these bigger questions in their own way. But in this moment, what Shakespeare is calling me to embrace is this simple recognition: I can be an interpreter of my own life. I can be part of this conversation in the here and now. I don’t need to stay on the surface, I can do the necesary digging. I can learn how to allow the tensions to hand me a life which will likely tell mutliple stories all at once, the same life that, as all lives do, can also be told from multiple perspectives when seen from the numerous eyes looking in from the outside. Each with their own wanted and vested interests in the ways our lives intersect. To be reminded that those perspectives are also beholden to the same process as I am now engaging for my own story, and that I am likewise engaged in telling the stories of others in the same fashion.

Including the ways in which I am interpreting the story of Shakespeare in the here and now. To echo his famous words, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.” And yes, “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

And maybe, just maybe, we can allow ourselves to concede that Truth has a power all its own. That learning to trust this basic credal confession is the point, something that stands above my life regardless of how much access I have in this present moment to any complete knowledge of it. That learning to trust this confession is perhaps the greatest form of knowledge I can obtain.

What drove Shakespeare was not a rejection of a world bigger than his story, but a deep conviction that it existed. That the simple statement, there is Truth about this world to be obtained in all the ways in which it lays hidden, could motivate him towards challenging the marriage of Empire and Church that brought such bloodshed to his slice of existence. For him, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” rings true. And yet his own existential wrestlings utlimately rest on his most famous of sayings, “To be, or not to be, that is the (ultimate) question.” From this flows the ensuing hopeful expression, however much it gets mired by the qeustions of his waning years, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth (insert our names here) than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” With this reminder, I continue to step into the unknown of my own aged years.

Somewhere along my travels, upon hearing my itinerary, someone asks me what I thought of London. Not a difficult question to answer, but I did find my immediate, in the moment, off the cuff response to spill out suprisingly quickly. A two-word descriptive. How was London?, London I mused, was “a lot.”

This isn’t a bad thing. It does however feel true to my experience of an immersive, if entirely too brief foray into its people, its design and its culture. What I hear most often from articles or guide books is that London remains one of the, if not the most diverse cities in the world. This makes sense. What might have surprised me to this end is that it’s most dominant image for me as a foreigner, it’s particular British aesthetic and presence, while certainly woven into the whole of it’s fabric, is not really as on the surface as I might have thought. What does dominate the city’s modern presence, for example, is something like the strong middle eastern influences. Or the nature of its endless stretch of self contained neighborhoods, where you could choose to stay enitrely wihin the boundaries of a single neighborhood and still, save for the main stretch of it’s famed royal tourism, experience most of what London offers as a whole (which by the way, is a stark contrast from somewhere like New York City, where each neighborhood is its own distinct and required destination).

Or it’s coffee shops.  The sheer amount of coffee shops was truly unexpected for a place I associated specifically with tea.

Beyond this though, what makes the city so unique, to me anyways, is the way it has transformed itself through layers upon layers of this coexisting framework, with past and present seeming to exist as naturally as scones and afternoon tea. Or cream and tea. It presents itself as a rich conversation of the different facets of its story, where every corner, every turn, every hidden passageway, becomes a chapter.

It’s bittersweet this morning to feel the force of these last few days slipping away as I am boarding my train back at Paddington Station heading now for the Salisbury plains, or more specifically the old Roman Britain city of Bath. Here is where the larger story of England and Britain awaits. As the train departs into the subtle rays of the early morning sunrise, my excitement is building. Here I am, heading towards what is arguably some of Britains most sacred spaces, spread out across these flattened river plains.

“In Britain there are hot springs furnished luxuriously for human use. Over these springs Minerva presides and in her temple the perpetual fire never whitens to ash, but as the flame fades, turns into rocky lumps.” (Solinus Collectanea, 3rd century)

The first thing earlier travellers to Bath would have seen as they arrived within the city limits is the head of Medusa staring out from the temple-pediment over the old lands of what was then Roman Britannia. Scholar Miranda Green describes this in her book Sacred Britannia, suggesting that “the visible and odour-laden billows of steam” emanating from the hot springs would have immersed this site in a real sense of mystery and uncertainty.

One of the crown jewels of the famous Roman Baths is it’s display of the goddess Sulis Minerva, standing in it’s glass case as a clear demonstration of this fusion of the local (Sulis) and Roman (Minerva) Deities, marking the complex nature of the history of these grounds. Gilt Bronze sculptures from Roman Britian, as the descriptive reads, were incredibly rare. The unexpected discovery of this head helped to shape the story of this Romanized city on the southern edge of Brittannia, giving the Baths both it’s context and it’s story. This once standing and still marvelously preserved Temple would have stood beside the sacred spring, looking out over the great altar and then outwards into the city’s mystical presence, with the cobblestone streets weaving their way around the river Avon. This is something walking through the exhibit brings abanduntly to life. For me, there is something profound about walking these roads and navigating this space that dates back to the first century AD. Not only is it a window into the time of Jesus, it’s a window into the localized religious ethos of both the Romans and the indigenous peoples.

A second head adorns the complex. This is Gorgon (meaning, water god), which here is Oceanus, otherwiset known in the Celtic Tradition as The Green Man. This is recognizable as a face that is either surrounded by or dispersing foliage from it’s eyes, ears, and nose.

Something that I learned: You will find this image adorning many of England’s churches, according with the prominant Medieval era story about an aged Adam and his son Seth, whom returns to the gates of Eden seeking the oil of mercy. Here he is given seeds from the Tree of Knowledge, which he plants in Adam’s mouth upon his death. From this grew the tree that would eventually provide wood for Jesus’ cross, capturing the sacred story of rebirth, resurrection, and salvation.

In the case of Bath, travellers came here for healing, in a time when, according to Green, “spiritual healing went hand in hand with empirical medicine.” These were liminal spaces where the sacred coexisted with an accute awareness of the natural world, something you will find throughout the old celtic lands and it’s experiences with countless stories of the Fairies.

Eventually the demise of the Temple would come through rising sea tides, leaving a city that continues to this day be shrouded in certain mysteries when it comes to questions about it’s Roman origins. What we do know is that it’s demise goes “hand in hand” with the demise of the Roman occupation of Roman Brittania. In this wake, the city is perserved, and indeed revitalized, through the re-emergence of it’s own sacred story, sitting as it does in conversation with this visible Roman influence. When you step off the train, which I was privileged enough to do in the early morning hours before the city wakes up, you are hit with a sense of its quiet grandeur.

Yes, for anyone who has spent time wondering the cities and streets of Italian city centers, this feels undeniably Roman in it’s architecture and design and later Georgian influences. Yet what makes it so intriguing to explore is that it is also recognizably different. For as Roman as this space appears, you can’t escape the notes of ancient Britian giving the city a foundation.

In keeping with my literary theme, Bath is best known as the home of Jane Austen, who’s complicated relationship with the city remains perhaps the best window we have into it’s later, modern embrace of class systems and social customs. What’s interesting here is that, for all that has obviously changed over the years about the city, it remains defined as a place of retreat and sought after healing, with the old temple ruins remaining at the center of it’s now Georgian influence market town flare built on spas, food and leisure.

I confess, of more interest to me than Austen is the fact that I could stand in the spot where Mary Shelley wrote the novel Frankenstein. The physical history has since been demolished to make space for the touristy demands of the Pump Room, but you can still stand in that same space. Pairing this with my later visit to the famous steps of Bram Stoker’s Dracula still feels kind of surreal.

Ultimately though, what would capture my attention here on this part of my journey is that broader historical story to which Bath belongs and is now awakening in my own spirit. Later on in her book, Sacred Britannia, Miranda Aldhouse-Green speaks about the nature of religion, or spiritual beliefs, and its enduring power. One of the more profound learnings that can come from traversing the lands of Britain comes from digging into the relationship between the land’s indigenous beliefs and it’s era of Roman rule. Here we find this curious notion of standing in a space in-between, on one hand opening me up to experience something bigger than myself while simitaneously bringing that all to familiar story of Empire to stark realization.

Speaking of Bath in this sense, as a conversation between these two essential forces that seem to define our world, Green draws out an important observation about the larger historical narrative for those seeking to understand and for those seeking to find what it can reveal;.

“While old indigenous beliefs may have been forced to take a back seat during colonial oppression, they are often not dead but hibernating, biding their time on the sidelines until the tyrannous regime is ended.”

In terms of Bath, we can feel this tension in writings such as that of Emeritus in his 3rd century writings.

“This holy spot, wrecked by insolent hands and cleansed afresh, Gaius Severius Emeritus, centurion in charge of the region, has restored to the Virtue and Deity of the Emperor.” (Gaius Severius Emeritus, 3rd century inscription)

Green outlines from the ancient records such as Tacitus on the rebellion of Boudica in AD 60, how the most important part of the State Religion in Romes newly aquired province of Britannia was the Imperial Cult, and as it is with all such conquests, it was always the Temple which was the last thing to be rebuilt and the sacred symbols the last to be destroyed. This is how colonization worked. This is how you subjugate a people. 

Green digs deep and biting when she comments on this familiar and popularized idea that polytheism equals tolerance in ancient Rome, a rhetoric which you will find represented in much of Western academia, As she states, this is simply not accurate, and the story of Roman Britannia outlines why, including, as I will be visiting later, the history that runs through the all imporant story of the Druids of Gaul.

“The beliefs and cults of the conquering power will always take precedence over those of subjugated peoples.” And that subjugation is fueled by the ways in which Empire dismantles the sacred. If the Romans “brought to Britian a fully formalized, hierarchical religious system, based largely on that of the Greeks, they also introduced new technologies of worship: image-making on an industrial scale, and epigraphy.”

And perhaps more to the point,

“However inclusive romanitas was in its attitude to foreign religious systems, there was little doubt that, within the Empire, the gods and goddesses of Rome took precedence, at least officially.”

Thus Green outlines the reason for writing her book in the following sentence:

“The focus of Sacred Britannia is the manner in which the juxtapostion of two-cultures, each very different from the other… played out in the arena of religion and ritual.”

This is, in other words, how the whole of history plays out in relationship to these two forces.

What was striking me, standing on these grounds in this moment, imagining the ways this history was being shaped and built in this period, was the question of how this space was sought out precisely so that it might cut off the source of its own appeal to the sacred, it’s abiding connection to the sacred realities that shape these lands the Empire is reshaping. As will be a continued theme over the course of my trip, this space, which historian Ian Morris ultimately outlines in his massive work Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World, A 10,000 Year Old History, as one that is being uncannily peserved for us today through a brute fact of geogrpahical location, the question that follows any inquiry into these still standing structures is always, why did they build it here. Why did they tear down here? The colonization of and creation of Roman Brittania, the collapse of Roman rule, the developing history of the Arthurian legends, the invasions from the North, the rise of Britains medieval story. All of this leads us tothe same question, over and over again. This is, in fact, the question that allows us to resist subsuming the whole into any particular point in a given historical development.

The temple here was built in 60/70 AD after the Roman conquest of Britian. This conquest ends in 300/400. The historical King Arthur emerges in a veritable dark ages in the 5th and 6th centuries, somehow pushing back against the conquerers from the north against impossible odds. Following the later recasting of the Arthurian legend, the larger forces of Western expansion then eventually have their say in the 12th century on, revitalizing as well the stories of Greek mythology as a wanted source and justification of it’s own abiding myths, which now become the story of modernism and western civilization built on a new British Empire.

And what sits underneath it all is this inevitable battle between the witness of these indigenous peoples in their abiding sense of the sacred, and the never ending story of the rising and falling Empires that seek to remake the world in the image of the Emperor. We often think of “Western society” as an enduring secularized symbol that somehow escapes the scrutiny of these basic truths about the way history works, with that reappropriation of the grand myths of it’s wanted origins, be it in Homer’s tales or the development of Arthur, acting in service of this imagined virtue of an inclusionary society and a unifying ideology. And yet, this is no more the case with medieval Britian or modern day America than it was with Roman Brittania.

As the great literary heritage of England suggests, this is what these minds were wrestling with in the midst of the great wars. The rise of modernism had left us with a world slowly being robbed of the single greatest tool that we have for making sense of all the world’s stories: the power of Story itself. Here the world of a now dominant Western Empire was continually seeking a narrative that was built on othering the past, cutting ties with what it deemed to be the old supersitions, and raising up it’s much grander myth of progress as the new wanted spirit of the age, and what gets sacrificed is the stories of these indigenous spaces.

Here’s what’s striking: Mary Shelley was a veritable prophet to this end, writing perhaps what remains one of the most enduring crtiques of modernism that persists to this day. She sits at the percipice of two worlds, knowing and seeing how history works. One could say something similar about Austen, with her stories about class and social systems appealing both to a hopeful yet lost romanticism while equally operating as a cycnical critique of the world she was forced to inhabit in their move to Bath.

Peer under the veil and what you actually find is the same old story of Empire, saving the eradication of the sacred witness for last and erecting it’s grand temples in ways that ensure the worship of it’s Imperial Cult remains the source of it’s enduring power. What makes modernism distinct in this regard is, in the recasting of it’s origins story using the old myths, here the West has a sweeping, catch-all dismissal of the sacred, allowing it to recast this history in the light of its ongoing redefinition of the modern myth. Like Rome, the Western Empire’s most definiing trait is the way it appeals to inclusion by quietly undercutting the witness to the sacred in these indigenous spaces, but it does this in it’s own distinct way. Religion is allowed to coexist precisely because it is defined, in modern terms, as human invention, and in so far as it serves the greater Imperial Cult of our time it can remain in the fabric of these modern socitieties, mostly as a relic that now becomes a plaything for the rise of a new academia. Once again, this is the thing these great literary minds were constantly wrestling with in their time, and it finds its own likeminded exprression here, for me, in the streets and temple of Bath.

Another common factor in my encounters with all of these authors will be the astonishing discoveries of just how connected they all were. I was raised on these stories, but perhaps ignorant about the ways in which they were fostering such important conversations amongst one another in their time. All bent in the same direciton: standing in the shadow of the enlightenments seeming failed experiment, asking to where do we look for a narrative that can make sense of all the world’s stories More shocking yet that these relationships can span the likes of Woolf’s widely documented cycnicism towards religion and a mind like T.S. Eliott finding his own vaunted cycniscm being held accountble to it. Even the likes of Lewis and Tolkien were not always on the same page. And yet, this simple, basic intuition that something had been lost and something needed to be reclaimed in this shift westward runs throuth the whole.

Standing there in front of Sulis Minerva, I wondered about what it means for this space to be called sacred. I wondered about the city that surrounded this Temple. I wondered about Britian. I wondered about the world. Indeed, as a Christian I wondered about this man named Jesus who was immersed in the very same world dominated by the very Empire that was reconstructing this space Where this conversation about gods and idols and images and Empire would come to dominate the themes and interests of the source material (the Christian scriptures) and it’s authors. I then think about the layers of history that follow the creation of this city, eventually handing us a prophetic critique like the story of Frankenstein.

I wonder about the witness to be found in these eyes now staring back at me from behind the glass. My eyes then looking fowards in my imagination, looking backwards. Seeking some Truth about this world that is able to make sense of all of the worlds stories amidst of this essential tension of the shape of a world always staring down the Empire in return. Here, in this space the longing for the sacred speaks into the visible agency of that Empire. It says, I’m not dead, one only need to look a little closer to find a world that is still filled with it’s witness. One simply needs to ask why this Temple was built here, in this space, why it was conquered.

I decide to take a stroll over the Pulteney Bridge, an old style market corridor filled with shops, and head straight up the large main street towards The Holburne Museum. As I am walking I notice a William Wilberforece plaque marking the residence of one of the great forces for abolition, bringing about the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. A plaque you also find near Victoria station at the spot where he died. I again wonder about the ways this witness to the sacred breaks through the noise of Empire.

I then come to river, now leaving the city limits to follow the towpath around to Bathhampton. At one point I come across an opening, revealing a view of Bath sitting down below in the valley. I pause for a moment. Here I am given a different view of the temple and it’s city, one that feels to tell a bigger story.

And yet, even here I am brought back to the sacredness of that early morning arrival. Empty, quiet with the sun gradually creeping around the corners of it’s narrow streets. Sitting down on the patio watching and waiting for the cafe in front of me to open, observing as the owners move about in their daily routine. Soon the streets begin to fill with life, locals showing up seeking cappuccinos and pastries, friendly faces bantering across open windows. The spirit of a place in full view. This, it seems, is indeed a sacred space. 

One of my earliest childhood memories reaches back to when I was around 5 years old, growing up in a north end neighborhood defined by it’s proximity to the railyards and the iconic steel bridge that spans it’s tracks, connecting downtown to this isolated hub of immigration and settlement. Here the neighborhood was our playground, made mostly of gridded residential streetes that led to a park down the block.

Somewhere in these memories, buried in what would become for us a series of moves from the North End to the Kildonan areas further East, is an image of an old tree. Despite my best efforts, I have not been able to track this old tree down. I’m not precisely sure which house or what age it belongs to on that timeline. What I do know however are the ways in which the image of this tree continues to capture and preserve the emotional presence of my childhood experience. It’s a tree we would visit together, finding in it’s branches a veritable fortress against the forces of that adult world threatening to impose it’s will on our desired acts of imagination. More vivid perhaps were the moments I would spend here by myself.

Once again, the memory is blurred, displaced, just out of reach. But there is one dominant memory that stands out above the rest. What I feel when this memory pops into my head is notes of transition. I imagine this moment sits somewhere between another move from one neighborhood to another. I can see myself on one particuarl afternoon making the trek to this tree on my own, grieving a loss of some kind. The loss of a space? The loss of a group of friends? A loss of a phase of my childhood? I can’t be sure. What I can do is follow this moment into what feels like an important part of my awareness of this veritable part of life: the act of growing up.

The famous children’s author and creator of the world’s most loveable bear, Winnie the Pooh, spent a good deal of time thinking about what it means to grow up in the midst such a strained memory. Gyles Brandreth’s revealing biography, Somewhere a Boy and a Bear: A.A. Milne and the Creaiton of Winnie-the Pooh, a book that takes us far outside the 100 acre wood and, in being less about the bear and more about the writer, into the complicated realities of Milne’s family dynamics, functions as a reminder of the ways in which our childhood stories emerge from the expansive nature of such adult lives. As author Mac Barnett notes in his recent book Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children, there is a deep rooted connection between our adult and child selves, as our childhood stories are, by their nature, being told by the adults. This fundamental truth about our childhood stories is precisely the thing that awakens us to the process of “growing into our childhood,” not above it or beyond it.

When I was first entertaining this idea of a literary tour of England, a means of encountering my childhood stories in light of quickly approaching 50 years of living, Milne and the 100 acre wood was near the top of the list of must visit sites. Somewhere in these stories, stretching from the shores of their England origins to their popularized Winnipeg ties and it’s continued migration up Ontario’s North Shore, sits one of those early voices of my childhood whom helped me to make sense of my own struggles and questions. Someone for whom the creaiton of these stories reflects a very real wrestling with the world his adult self was throwing into question.

For Milne, so much of his storytelling revolves around this playful yet weathered banter between the modernist mantra sweeping across England at the time and the memories of a lost world drowning in it’s wake. You can hear this in his famous poem, Now We Are Six. which juxtaposes this notion of growing up into our own wanted maturity with this notion of a sort of pre-existing Wisdom that can only be “grown into,” not obtained nor created.

“When I was five, I was just alive. But now I am six, I’m as clever as clever. So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.”

What he sought was the Wisdom of ones childhood, something he found in his growing fascination with philosophy and the philosophers. Here in this poem you find the idea that growing up has less to do with obtaining knowledge of propositional statmenents of facts as it does the discovery of a way of being, a way of living. Less to do with modernist conceptions of “forever,” enslaved as they are to the finite language of modern progress, and more to do with growing into an awarness of a “kind” of reality that has the power to endure. One way of knowing seeks to bring about an awareness of truth through a strident belief that to be an adult means to do away with our childhood selves. The other seeks to more fully understand a world our childhoods once knew and inhabited before the endless progression of loss threw it all into question. For Milne, this is the space where that infinte crisis of that clash between Life and Death can be grappled with, breaking open a world that, more and more, requires the singular greatest tool of our childhood selves in order to be obtained: the sacredness of our imagination.

Having returned from a morning exploring the old pathways of Dahl’s own adult inspiration, I spent the ensuing hours I had waiting for my next train to East Grinstead, heading towards the Southern shores of Brighton, enjoying a stroll along the Thames, the most important river in London’s history, and the same banks upon which London’s great medieval history was built. It’s a long stretch spanning the recognizable Tower Bridge on one side, and the area of Westminster on the other. Here is where you find the city’s larger than life processions of royalty and sacred lineage colliding, where the crown jewels of The Tower of London coexist with the honored graves at Poets Corner. There is something endlessly fascinating to me, taking in the image of the massive dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral looming  inbetween these two familiar (and heavily touristed) sites, about this peculaiar (to my own north american sensibilities) relationship that exists here between the sacred and the profane. The ways St. Paul’s Cathedral came to carry the monicor “the writers church.” Where, in what is arguably a far more realized “secularist” society than America, these robust conversations between ideas and mystery still seems to exist.

Here I let my mind wonder through images making up an imagined montage of this city’s emergence in time and space, where history and modernism now collide in an explosion of somewhat muddled ideologies. The more one wanders these streets the more one realizes the rich legacy of the one thing that still endures: a deep awareness of the importance of and the power of story in navigating this terrain.

My way to the train at Victoria Station brings me through St. James Park and Trafalgar Square (which was unfortunately gated off due to construction), and up towards the southern edge of Kensington Gardens/Hyde Park. This is where you find the famous Harrods Department Store and the old stomping grounds of Virginia Woolf, or further south the Churchhill Estates. Across the river sits the massiave Battersea Park, a view you get from the train as you pass by those iconic towers.

The journey to East Grinstead, leaving from the quiet pomp of Victoria’s interior, opens up a slightly different countryside than the western route heading to Great Missenden. Once you cross the river and leave the city limits, you find yourself in a consistent string of suburbs, weaving around the Eastern side of Gatwick Airport towards the well preserved medieval high street of East Grinstead. The landscape doesn’t really begin to quiet until you leave Hurstgreen. That’s when the countryside opens up. I am aware in this moment that this will be the nearest I manage to get to Canterbury, reminding me of just how rich the English landscape is in it’s literary presence is overe this vast expanse of land.

East Grinstead is the closest train station to Hartfield, the location of Pooh Corner, where A.A. Milne lived on the edges of Ashdown Forest in his estate. Milne came up with his stories during his time at this estate, while he composed his books in London (at a house on 13 Mallord Street). When you get off the train you have to catch a bus that then takes you the rest of way to the relatively remote village of Hartfield. A fun ride for anyone not accustomed to travelling the narrow England roads.

Given that I had a bit of time to kill waiting for the bus, a line that runs straight down the East Grinstead High Street, it was an easy walk to this central hub, from where I could catch the bus at any number of stops lining the way. The town is known for it’s singular and lengthy extended High Street, developed in the 14th century to accomodate trade between London and the South Coast. it’s a stretch that runs on and on unencombered by the normal hedged rows and meandering corners that define most of these medieval centers. What makes it striking to see up close is the image of it’s buildings, all designed, as they described it, using old world timber and in a like model.

I spent some time perusing the different shops that line the way, exploring it’s bookshops, enjoying a coffee, and taking in the hustle and bustle of the crowds. And eventually I was off on another hour long bus ride straight into the even more remote countryside.

The first thing they recommend doing for anyone looking to explore the heritage of Milne and Winnie the Pooh, is stopping at Pooh Corner. It’s a small tea room with a lovely and suprisingly informative free museum and a shop. Here you can walk through the different rooms of the museum, getting a sense of who Milne was, and pick up your map which will guide you along the towpath, a path that becomes its own adventure as you cut through different estates and large fields, jumping fences as you go. The deeper you get into what eventually becomes the 100 Acres Wood (or Ashdown Forest), the more remote it somehow becomes.

One of the more important sites, which sits at the halfway point of the route, is Pooh Sticks Bridge, a small, wooden structure spanning an understated creek which is maintained by the heritage center. This is the famous location upon which we find that famliar picture of Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear hanging over it’s rails playing a game of Pooh Sticks. A sign dotting the site invites you to set your inhibitions aside and engage your imagination, giving you the rules for play. Further up you will come across the houses of Piglet and Owl hidden in the forest (Pooh’s house is before you hit the bridge). And further up still is a memorial.

I brought a picnic supper to eat at the bridge. I dangled my legs over the  edge and watched the current flow with the gentle breeze pushing through the shaded enclave nestled deep within the forest. A welcome space given the height and the strength of the sun beating down on those vast fields one has to cross to get here. The quote that hit me in this moment was Pooh’s wondering about the power of the river’s image when it comes to making sense of one’s life.

“Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.”

The true force of this wisdom comes from the simple observation that our adult selves tend to think such knowledge comes from reducing the world to something we can control and explain. Here at the river Pooh rediscovers the importance of that great mystery that keeps pulling us back . Such moments then carry the force of necessary revelation, a recognition that our adult selves in all this push to get where we think we are going have forgotten what it means to truly know what this world is. That we have neglected both the water’s source and it’s essential presence.

Here on this bridge Pooh comes to know what they seemed to always be forgotting with the passage of time, a simple truth about a moments permanence in the face of what becomes a persistant march towards never ending loss, if purely because such moments are what allow us to transcend the finiteness of such conceptions of time. Here, with Pooh, we discover that life is found in simple acts of play, in simple acts of friendship, in simple acts of love. This is the eternal shape of our existence.

There is something important that follows this revelation however. As Pooh goes on to say, “You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.” What was it for me to get back on that bus, board that train, and return to where I started at Victoria Station? How do we preserve these moments. How do we retain this knowledge?

What will it be to board that plane and eventually return home, having met with my childhood stories face to face? As Pooh Bear once said, “Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again.” However it is that I find myself here in this moment on this bridge communing with Pooh the philosophers, this seems to be the even greater challenge.

I do board that bus. I do get on that train. And upon my return to Victoria Station I take the long and winding path through Hyde Park/Kensington Gardens back to my hotel, moving with the slow setting of the sun as the path snakes along the gentle curves of the Serpentine Lake. Something strikes me at this point in my journey. For anyone who has traversed these grounds, you might notice a statue of Peter Pan on the far Western corner of the park. You might not know that it’s here where the famed story has its origins, telling of an infant seeking to escape the trappings of the adult world by flying out of his nursery window where he then comes to reside with the fairies and the birds at Kensignton castle, desperate as he becomes to never lose the knowledge that he has been gifted in his innocence. The statue stands at the place where Peter Pan lands in the book The Little White Bird, which becomes Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.

Perusing much of the commentary on the history of this legacy, it’s worth pointing out that the source of this tale stands at a great distance from what the story ultimately becomes, but here we find some of that shared, universal longing to give voice to what these authors saw as the most necesary and eternal questions regarding what it means to be human in a world that brings immense tension and struggle. That they consistently understood, this simple posturing that turns ones view back towards our childhood signfies that this is the place, if we truly desite to understand our questions, our adult selves must begin. As Milne ends his most beloved book,

“But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.” (The House at Pooh Corner)

For me, I wonder about the enchantment of that now lost tree. I wonder about why it remains a signficant part of my memories, for as clouded as it might be. Here in this moment I am able to imagine a little boy and his imagination still playing in this space, wrestling with the questions and seeking to make sense of things in the face of a world that threatens to steal it away. Perhaps, I wonder, that’s the enchantment I seek. If we must, as Pooh says, leave the forest to find life, it remains equally true that we are free to return when we need it.

And above all, watch with glitering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” (The Minpins, Roald Dahl)

They often say, don’t meet your heros. It’s no secret that meeting our childhood stories can have the same sort of impact due to the ways it can desenchant our romanticizing of these figures. My experience with her book Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, was mixed, a book that accompanied me on my pilgrimage to England to do precisely that- meet my childhood stories, but one of the things author Lucy Mangan does extremly well is cut through the noise of our complicated relationship with the past in order to reclaim these stories and figures as essential part of who we are. As such interrogations tend to go, how, we ask, do we approach these figures born from a world we deem not just foreign to our own, but somehow morally inferior. How do we, in other words, embody what it means to “grow into our childhood” in a way that doesn’t demean it or rewrite it.

In the case of Roald Dahl, a figure I am preparing to encounter on day 2 of my pilgrimage, we meet a (fill in the blank with children’s writer, wartime fighter ace, spy, celebrity, husband to a film star), whom would go on to be plagued by accusations of misogyny and anti-semitism.

The grounds by which Mangan prepares our adult minds to meet our childhood is the intentional undercutting of our modern pretenses. To bury the past by way of convincing ourselves that we somehow stand above it is to distance ourselves from the reality of our lives in the present. This practice, of “othering the past” has more to do with protecting our adult selves from the pains of internal critique than it does holding our childhoods to account. Where the needed process of growing up into our childhood is exchanged for growing out of it.

As Roald Dahl once said, “Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.” This holds true for Dahl. Traversing the grounds of his own inspiration must mean the same for me if I am to approach my childhood stories in a way that allows them to actually speak. After all, the minute we assume that we stand above the past is the minute we acknowledge that one day the past will stand above us. Which is another way of saying, this way of thinking leaves our judgments flowing back in our direction. One of the ways in which this journey was able to speak to me was by inviting me to seek a better narrative, a better way of understanding our relationship to our childhood stories, existing as they do in relationship to our childhood selves.

I wake up in that small, cramped room soaked in sweat and still aching from overextending myself the previous day. The cracked window hadn’t seemed to help, although I’m slightly grateful that there doesn’t seem to be any stray birds or other creatures taking advantage of that open invitation to share my accomodations. I might have slept. I’m not sure. What I do know is that my alarm is telling me to get up. The day’s agenda is calling, and the early sunrise spilling through that still open window seems  to be in agreement.

My next walking map directs me four blocks down to a breakfast place called Oatis, where I find an order of freshly prepared coffee and blueberry pancakes affording me a proper greeting to a new day.

Yes, that four block walk still resulted in me walking the wrong direction not once, but twice. My mental map can only get me so far when any and all sense of north, south, east and west has been completely overturned.

Before I leave, I grab an extra order of an oat-bowl to go (or to put it in proper English terms, to “take-away”), ensuring that I don’t need to worry about lunch. Cheap and convenient. The bus schedule says I’ve got seven minutes to catch a bus that is a 3 minute walk away.

At which point I once again walk out the door and head in the wrong direction. My eventual redirection leaves me watching the bus pass straight by my stop while I’m still waiting on the opposite side of the street for the light to turn green.

Actually, true story. That bus ended up stopping at the same light that eventually turned and allowed me to walk across. There I was, now staring straight at the driver waving my hands in order to get him to open the doors and let me in. To which he promptly ignored me. My first thought- what is this, Winnipeg?

Thus, there I am on the proper side of the street watching the driver take off without me. A slight panic sets in- I have 40 minutes to get to my train heading to Great Missenden, Roald Dahl’s hometown and the inspiration for his stories, and a decision to make. Thankfully I had printed off a walking map for preicsely this scenario. With one caveat: it’s a 35 minute walk to my destintion: Marylebone Train Station. Yes, I walked it. And yes, I ultimatey made it, grateful for the  one hour reprieve the train ride would offer me.

Unlike the train from the previous day, which brought me from Heathrow to Paddington, this trip introduces me to the simple joys of train travel in England. The route begins by meandering through the Southhampstead neighborhood before gradually leaving the city limits behind in favour of the lush landscape of the Croxley Hill Lakes region. From here it’s a serene mix of villages and greenery that confirms why the English countryside is considered an enchanting place. In an area essentially devoid of mountains, it is dominated by rolling hills, clear lakes, and medieval villages. The sort of landscape where you are afraid to blink for risk of missing another standing castle or stone abbey.

By the time the train arrives in Great Missenden, all of the noise of the city is gone. This is a different world defined by a different pace. Exiting the train bring me down a hill and straight into this village that one could swear was pulled straight out of any number of Dahl’s stories. A fairytale-esque landscape marked by a small high (main) street and a singular road leading up to the church on the hill where Dahl is buried.

I duck into the first building that greets me to grab a coffee. Here my attempts to order a simple drip coffee open up a conversation not just about coffee culture in England (if you want something other than the traditional espresso drinks you have to order an americano- because only north americans order their coffee like that), but about my travels. Apparently they found my accent “lovely,” and I got a whole backstory on the other north american whom had decided to move to their town and whom was the star of the show around these parts. Everyone loved it when Charlie (irony noted) would come in to chat, which he did on a regular basis. I never got to meet Charlie, but I did apparently make their day.

Coffee in one hand, my walking map in another, my pilgrimage takes me halfway up the high street to a hidden alley tucked between two buidings, which I don’t think I’ll ever get used to. Everytime I duck through one of these tiny passageways I start to feel like I’m heading down an endless rabbit hole that I might never come out of. I did learn something important though about these paths from my coffeeshop converstaion. One of the very real quirks about the English landscape is this concept of the right to roam. This is going to become the norm from here on in, but these pathways, or towpaths, essentially lead you through what here in North America would be deemed private land. Hence why these routes have all kinds of fun instructions, such as hopping over wooden turnstiles and fences, and cutting through large fields, and navigating through hedges sepearting one property from another. It might seem unusual to me, but this is in fact how these layers of history remain present and active in the life of the people. This is how one gets to these spaces that defined Roald Dahl’s own childhood experiences, and how locals continue to tread these same paths.

Eventually this towpath arrives at Angling Spring Wood, which was both Dahl’s personal playground and the backdrop for Fantastic Mr. Fox and Danny the Champion of the World. This path takes you in a large cricle through a meadow and up to a farmhouse lookout over the countryside, eventually landing back at the High Street where you find such landmarks as the Petrol station from Danny the Champion of the World and Maltida’s library. Right in the center of High Street is the museum, marked by a replica of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory gate, and housing a recreation of Dahl’s writing room with real world items (the chair being the most iconic).

The height of this journey leads you up the hill to the old church, still looming large over the town as it keeps watch. Underneath what (I think is) a giant oak tree surrounded by benches is Dahl’s grave, with footprints from the BFG walking from the benches to the gravestone. The BFG was, and still is, my favorite story (and adaptation) of Dahl’s. It taps into these themes of learning what it is to belong in this chaotic world, and about the nature of growing up and forgetting our childhood. It is the story that most captures the spirit of my present pilgrimage, and the one that draws me most intimately into the life of this compplicated writer. Here I find this image and invitation to learn what it means to grow into our childhood, not past it or above it, and this is really what drove Dahl towards wrestling with the tension of his raw and direct observations about life and it’s brute nature on one side (you can see that in the often sharp and direct handling of his characters in terms of the child-adult relationship), and finding hope in the power of story. In the power of the book. To borrow from the BFG, “Don’t gobblefunk around with words.” Rather, learn what it is dream like a child, and to let that childhood temper your cycnism about the adult world. You can definitely feel how these woods, the quiet setting of this town, became and remain a sacred space for doing just this. 

Mangan suggests that at it’s core, Dahl believed the writing process begins and ends with telling a good story. Not a lesson, not a morality tale, but a good story. All else follows from this. Apart from this the world cannot make sense. Apart from this the author can only expect to stand above the inherent power of this simple truth about the human experience rather than being informed by it. One of the beautiful things for Mangan about stepping into these stories as an adult is finding these glimpses of an author who was above all else human. A complicated creature who was aware of his quirks and shortcomings You can see this in his writings, which, as Mangan points out, far from being misogynistic are littered with a wanted humility we might miss, for example, in the strong female characters whom grace his pages. In many ways this was a man whom was a product of his own time and place and all of the complex parts that shaped it (beginning with the backdrop of war), but whom found himself restless, seeking those hidden truths reminding us that this world is, in fact, shaped by magic. I loved this thought as I contemplated my own complicated legacy and story on the train ride back into the city, eating my oat-bowl and dreaming about my next adventure. If the morning was spent connecting with the magic of a good story, the afternoon would be bringing me to the doorstep of A.A, Milnes fascination with philosophy. For now, I have an hour to read.

The last time I was on a plane was 12 years ago. It was the summer of 2014, and we were on our way (from Winnipeg) to Kyiv, embarking on the next phase of our adoption journey

12 years doesn’t feel like a long time in one respect, but planning my recent trip to England made me feel like I’ve just time travelled to an entirely different era. While I pale in comparison to many, once upon a time I would have seen myself as a fairly seasoned traveler. Planning yearly, if not twice yearly trips had conditioned me to the different tricks and money saving methods that made it possible as a genuine budget traveller. It’s not that the years since our trip to Ukraine have been absent of travel, rather a change of life and routine had left it streamlined and fairly contained to simple trips within Canada and over the border. Certainly I felt things shifting over those years still, where small things that once made sense no longer did, but planning a bigger trip like this felt like I was being thrust headfirst into a wholly unfamiliar world, where I no longer knew the rules of the game, and where the more I tried to make sense of things the more lost I started to feel. Given that the biggest changes felt to be the tangible absence of personal contacts in a system now fully immersed in the impersonalized nature of data and tech based tools, these sorts of walls between what used to be a more hands on and grassroots process ensured that it remained very difficult to to find help in navigating this process, let alone to find ways to budget well.

Perhaps a bit of poetic overlay there with the fact that this was commenorating the official road to 50. Everything seems to be a reminder that I am at the age where the world increasinbly seems to leave you behind, where so much of yourself becomes obsolete.

More poetry given I am travelling to a place with more layers of history to be accessed in mere days than I could possibly encounter in multiple years of exploring my own backyard (which I love, it’s a different kind of history).

I found myself thinking back on this process as I stepped off the plane and into the maze that is Heathrow. The shock of being very much out of practice with this whole jetsetting thing. If you’ve never been, whatever image you have in your head about the sheer size of this airport, trust that there is no way to overestimate the reality of how big it actually is. In a kind of quintessential British fashion, my first real shock about occupying a world not my own would be immediately throwing things into chaos by walking on the right side of those long corridors rather than the left. Only to be met by a never ending barrage of “sorrys.” The second would come from my first experience of that singular phrase which is now permanently burned into my brain: mind the gap. 

At some point I find myself boarding the train, jet lag and luggage in tow, officially emerging from the mostly windowless miles of artificial light into the light of day as the train hits the now open track.

Hey, they told me it rains a lot over here, so things are already looking up.

Here I move through a long series of industrial neighborhoods, making my way to Paddington Station, holding my piece of paper in front of me as I count down the different stops, afraid of losing my sense of orientation. So much of this particular stretch of trainline hides your surroundings from your view, but I will say, it’s makes the entrance into Paddington that much grander.

And yes, the rumours are true. The much loved bear becomes your vital travel companion at this stage in the game, with his own fish out of water experience modeling what it is to emerge from that train into a befuddled mix of daze and wonderment.

Bumping into the throng of bodies all making their way to different platforms (and seemingly making you feel as though you are the only one who has no idea where they are going or what they are doing) as your mind is running a mile of minute. Your eyes glimpse what will become the first of many paddington statues, which somehow helps calm your nerves just a little. You pass by what will also become the first of many encounters with Costa Coffee and the local Sainsbury’s grocer.

And finally I have exited the station, stepping into the larger than life square where I am greeted by the sights and sounds of what could be any major city. The steady movement of bodies down the sidewalks, the familiar sounds of crawling traffic and honking horns. There are small signs that distinguish it. A red double decker bus passes by as I am fumbling for my next piece of paper, in desperate need of a map. Buildings that, although occupied by modern businesses, feel like they were built in the 1600’s. Over to my left I see the large Paddington store engulfing everything else in it’s block, to my right signs for the Little Venice canal.

Orientation at this point begins with one simple task: make my way to where I will be storing my luggage for the day, a task which immerses me in a fact of London that will plague me for the remainder of my day: there are no street signs, only signs (if one is lucky) printed on the sides of buildings at major intersections. Miss those (and some of them are conveneiently obscured or entirely absent) and you’ll be walking blocks trying to figure out where exactly you are. Which is to say, a luggage storage station that was supposed to be a 5 minute walk away turned out to be three wrong turns distanced from where I eventually found myself 15 minutes later. But eventually I made it. 3 pounds and a luggage tag now meant I was free to start my wandering.

When it comes to travel my mantra is simple. I am always looking for the trifecta of coffee, the waterside (rivers, lakes, oceans), and the bookstore/movie theater. Whatever else I build around those three things (which of course will include food and ice cream) is my window into a given place, and typically my favorite mode of experiencing these things is through the simple joy of walking. In the planning stages of this trip I had come to terms with the fact that some of the familiar big hitters, beginning with the Tower of London and Buckingham Palace, would need to be skipped in order to accomadate my priorities. Here my agenda was, once again, seeking out the stories of my childhood by way of England’s rich literary heritage. And what better introduction to London than Charles Dickens.

Search online and you’ll find a plethora of organized paid and self guided tours of Dickens’ London, available through a single google search. Most of these are the same, some branch out into a few off the beaten path surprises, all share this essential caveat in common: experiencing Dickens’ London requires employing your imagination. Beginning with his living quarters from 1850 to 1860 at Tavistock Square (which is no longer standing, instead featuring buildings that are part of a larger medical district), and stretching all the way to his frequenting of the still functioning Covent Gardens and his fascination with St. Paul’s Cathedral (famously called the writers church). These are all sites that once reflected, as Alastair Schanche notes in a 2026 article for London X London, a time of population boom, industrial development, “foggy skies and cramped slums,” and, my favorite line, a distinct “mix of misery and excitment.”

Befitting my own aims, Dicken’s once said,

If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish.”

Thus, walking in his footsteps, while channeling the spirit of a man who was particularly fond of the late evening and night hours, becomes an exercise in imagining the Victorian era of his time lying underneath the now revamped neighborhoods, and often in plain site amidst the rows of still standing townhouses and old pubs/restaurants.

His museum, a small, intimate, and revealing look into the author’s life, is the cornerstone of all of the walking tours of course, built as it was in the house that served as a location for the earliest years of his writing career (The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickelby, and Oliver Twist). Before getting there however, my own trek would take a detour around to 221B Baker street, which was of course made famous by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his now infamous creation of the renown detective, Sherlock Holmes (and funnily enough, is not an actual address, floating inchorently between two disconnected house numbers).

Here stands the preserved victorian era setting that brings the world of Holmes and Watson alive (for true enthusiasts there is also plenty of self guided walking tours available, but a little ways away on Northumberland Street is the Sherlock Holme’s Pub, which features a recreation of his living quarters).

I arrived in the early morning hours coming off a long haul flight, so before stopping at the museum I headed to the highly recommended Bill’s Baker Street Restaurant (one of a number of locations), where I indulged in my first full English breakfast (fyi, the rumours are true. For the celiacs of the world, London, and England for that matter, treats you like royalty. If you find a menus worth of options in one place, you are guaranteed to find another one the next building over. Same for vegeterian/vegan options).

When in London.

I loved the Sherlock Holmes Musuem. I loved it even more on a full stomach. Maybe a bit less in the heat wave (it persisted through the entirety of my travels, including these early moments of exploring mult-floor victorian era rooms without air conditioning). Similar to Dickens, apparently he never used to wear that iconic hat (in Dickens’ case he hated the hat), and so much of what has come to popularize his presence for us today are later additions (such as the phrase “elementary, my dear Watson.”) Perhaps what I found most fun was seeing the relationship between Doyle and the authors that shared his city with him (from Sayers to Wilde). Everyone was invested. And hey, I would think most of us can understand why.

My self guided “walking tour” now took the long way around back to the Charles Dickens Museum. My next stop would be the Marleybone location of Daunt Books, with it’s infamous “travel section” located in a gorgeous interior lined by shelves and a large, stained glass window.

This would be the first of a handful of London’s literary institutions that I will visit, and without a doubt was probably my favorite. It’s not massive by any means, but it’s the sort of place that nevertheless invites you to get lost in it’s many intentionally placed corners.

Mental note: I’ve got one bag, and I have to lug it around England. Make good, rational decisions. Or don’t and thank yourself later.

From Daunt Books, I made my way up Regent Street, a long, winding street taking you past the massive Waterstones Bookstore (think an oversized version of Chapters or Barnes and Noble), Hamley’s Toy Store, and London’s Oxford and Piccadilly Circus’ (grand intersections in the vein of Times Square).

Here if you veer left up Coventry Street you end up in Leicester Square (or it’s a very short walk across St. James Park and you are at the Mall, the grid like area containing Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey, an area I was saving for the next day). At Leicester, a quaint, picturesque square, you are now connected to Charing Cross (fun fact: this road gets its name from the little known Eleanor, a past Queen who’s immortalization involved the longest cermonial walk in history, ultimately ending up here where you will find the last in a number of crosses that still dot the routes (see the wonderful book, Eleanor: A 200 Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen by Alice Loxton).

I’m breaking in here to say, at his point in my pilgrimage I suddenly realize I forgot to take my portable charger out of my luggage when I stored it. Whatever ambitions I had of keeping my phone in my pocket were now fully going to be realized, as those power bars were running dangerously low in the dead of this heat. I am genuinely at the mercy of my walking maps now.

On the other side of Leicester Square is a single section of street that reaches straight across to St. Martin’s Lane (London’s theater district) called Cecil Court. Welcome to London’s “bookstore street.” And chocolate. But more imporantly, more books, and more books, and more books. In this case, old, rare books. Imagining trying to preserve these titles through a trip and another flight home, I again called on my rational senses. to pervail.

If that’s not enough to capture my attention, a short walk up St. Martins has you at Covent Gardens. Fun fact: Covent Gardens is the oldest residential square in London. When you walk through this area, imagine it at the moment of it’s transition from the old city to the modern city we know today, transforming over the 1600’s through the gradual reimagining of a city reaching beyond it’s old city walls. Here Covent Gardens, one of it’s most recognizable market squares, transitions from a once kitchen garden for Westminster monks into a meeting place and trading center bustling with crowds.

What I wanted to note here for the purposes of my interests is that this area became one of Dickens’ old haunts, which stretches from these very markets, past the Old Curiousity Shop (which of course informed an entire book), and up Fleet Street to Ye Old Cheshire Cheese Shop and Blackfriars.

Given the still preserved old city landscape of this area, this is where your imagination is free to come most fully alive. I wonder at the London of his own percieved fascination, the river lying on one side, the industrialized epicenter on the other. It’s one thing to take in the sites and the smells, it’s another to imagine these streets in a time when poverty and upper class systems existed side by side on the edge of the whole modernist vision striving to come to fruition, in an age where lanterns pierced through the common rolling fog and diseases ran rampant.

Heading north again, I had scheduled afternoon tea with The Mad Hatters Tea Party at Sandersons hotel. If you remember, my phone was now essentially dead. My first instance of my printed walking maps failing me. All thanks to a confusing discrepency between New Oxford street and Oxford Street. I will admit, at this point, given a day on foot in the heat, that feeling of being lost definitely starts to carry a bit of extra weight. Thankfully though, after putting a series of puzzle pieces together, I finally got my orientation through what has now grown into a series of rather large high rises.

What greets you upon arrival is the fountain laden sitting area designed to transport you into another world. Keeping with my literary theme, a voice that I would be crossing paths with later on in my trip when I got to Oxford (Lewis Carroll), this was a nice touch, and certainly a welcome reprieve. Whether or not I would do it again, it’s a quintessential tradition made of tea, scones, sandwiches and desserts that is guaranteed to be more than even the most ambition patron can tackle.

After doing my best to make a dent, I payed my bill and continued on my way, beginning at the British Museum and Russell Square just down the road, and movimg into the gradually quieting streets with low lying buildings and old, victorian architecture that eventually brings me to The Charles Dicken’s Museum. I was one of a handful of people there, making my way through the multi-floor house which includes a wonderful exhibit on the “women who made Charles Dickens.” In a very real way these are the personas that continue his story following his death, and the museum does an excellent job of letting you feel the flow of that narrative from start to finish. I think what most spoke to me here, aside from getting to see his writing process layed out in such a visual fashion (the meticulous efforts he gave to the old world craft was truly inspiring), was imagining a young, uncertain voice finding his way and the legacy that emerges from that. For me, Dickens was always a writer who helped to connect, for my young mind, disparate worlds together, be it the rich legacy of storytelling that somehow pushed its into my own modern setting with it’s particular set of universal concerns and questions in tow, or the life of this figure whom seemed to hold such an enduring and eternal fascination with a world filled with tension, both wonder and suffering. Or even being one of the earliest voices to collapse these arbitrary lines between modern genres, especially when it came to normalizing what was a very real penchant for horror. 

I will cite one of my biggest regrets here. Dickens’ grave is located in the famous Poets Corner in Westmintster Abbey, something you can only see with an official ticket. This is where a number of the great literary voices of London and England’s history are buried. Circumstances did not allow me to get there, which was part of my plans. I did however still get plenty of pictures of the Abbey itself from the outside, and I stood peering through the open doors with a picture of Poets Corner in hand. 

I walked out of this museum feeling like I was beginning to see the relationship between story, storyellers and story-hearers in a new light. The power that this can have. The way it brings complicated creatures, author and reader alike, into these spaces that can take on a life of their own. I remember reading how Dickens never saw his life as having the impact that it did on both people and culture. He wanted and expected a quiet burial, and got the opposite (an honored one). It just reminds me of how connected our lives are to the world, and the worlds, that we occupy, and how deeply embedded story is to the ways we see and live and understand this world. To stand where such important aspects of my own life took shape and came to fruition was humbling.

Much here to accompany me on the next part of my pilgrimage, which was to see John Wesley’s gravesite, chapel, and museum. Here though my story takes a turn. Remember that dead phone? Well my walking map once again has led me down a dead end, this time due to a single street name that ultimately shifts to a number. What is a single direction is actually a bunch of sharp turns down different blocks following this numbered route. The issue was, my directions stop at “go straight at (insert street name).

Did I mention it was dang hot out? I stoppped at a cornerstore to grab some water. Here was the first time I opened up my wallet to actually use a small amount of cash I got from the currency exchange center before I left. I hand it to the guy behind the counter. He hands it back telling me he can’t take it. I look at him puzzled. “Euros” he says. I can’t take Euros. I need Pounds.

Turns out when I asked the teller for money, at which point I specifically stated I was going to LONDON (for whatever that’s worth), I inadvertently asked for Euros without thinking. We both had a good laugh, and then both of us blamed Brexit. Nothing like getting into a healthy discussion on politics in a foreign Country with someone you’ve just met.

T

I came back to this friendly corner store worker after finding myself coming to that dead end. He pulled out his phone and helped direct me where I needed to go. Unfortunately I would have to settle for the statue and glimpses inside Wesley’s Chapel. I would however continue to bring the importance of this space alive through my reading of two books, the first being Perfect Love: Recovering Entire Sanctification by Kevin Wawtson, a robust history of Methodism and it’s central theological commitment, the second is Love Divine: A Wesleyan Systematic Theology by Thomas McCall. Here my interest in Wesley connects back to my family heritage. Somewhere along these lines, moving from here through England and into Ireland, are the roots of my dad’s side, with my family found in a legacy of itenerant preachers travelling with Wesley, and Methodism’s eventual seeding of the Pentecostalism that I was born and raised within from both sides of my family. This stuff I knew loomed much bigger than my individual life, but what I so appreciated about being here was simply being able to imagine the ways in which our roots, and even further the different ways we respond to those roots, and even at times challenge these traditions, can help us make sense of why we have the questions that we do. Where certain awarenesses and concerns and values emerge from. While I am not Methodist, I can see that theology of sanctification built into my lineage in a rich way. The ways I was forced to grapple with these theological realities comes from this long history. For me I find that endlessly fascinating. In some sense, I am here because they were once there. in this space, on these grounds building, unbenknownst to them, the foundation for my own inherited life and journey of theological inquiry.

From here I begin the journey back to Paddington Station. The path takes me up to the Coal Drop Yards, the old market grounds where you will find the Word on the Water Bookstore, a bookstore on a boat. This boat sits on the Regent Canal, a towpath (the common name for walking paths all over the UK) that runs from Victoria Park all the way to Little Venice, which is situated right behind Paddington Station. In-between is the Camden Market or Camden Locks, which seperates the river at this junction point, climbing up to the level of the market and then carrying on around the northern end of Regent Park.

My intention was to walk the whole towpath, but my body met its limit. I ended up stepping off of it at the midpoint of Regents park and decided to take a Black Cab (just to say that I did) back to pick up my luggage.

From here I found my way to my hotel for the evening, just at the far edge of Kensington Gardens, very close to the Palace grounds and the Peter Pan statue. A small room with a nice bathroom and, yep, you guessed it, no air conditioning. My feet were killing me, but it was so hot in my room that I actually decided to head back out. Notting Hill was just a few blocks away as well, so I grabbed an ice cream and tried to bide my time for some of the cooler night air to settle in.

In these quiet moments, with the long days holding the light well into the late hours, I spent time thinking about what I most admired about this unfamiliar place. It had been merely a day, and yet it felt like I was a long ways from where I started when I first arrived at the platforms of Paddington. The authors I read cited the true power of this city not in it’s big attractions, but in the hidden spaces. I recalled learning from a local that “hidden gardens,” closely related with Secret Gardens, capture this sense of a city built through layers and layers of storied history. A garden is another word for yard, and what makes London so unique is all these yards, some big, some small, that were once walled off or hidden from view get unearthed and become part of the modern landscape. They become spaces to seek out, to find and discover through alleyways and lanes and seemingly random corners. As I heard one person put it, “the secret garden is a hidden, magical sort of place that is disconnected from the rest of the gardens… not tied to a specific time or place.” Here they are referencing the story, but it applies to the ways London becomes a space built to contain this kind of magic. The same idea spills over into hidden courtyards, and squares. This is where I found places like Belgrave Mews, or Spital Yard, Goodwins Court, Grotto Passage, or Pickering Place (London’s smallest square). When you add in the fact that at any turn you might be passing by one of the city’s oldest pubs, the old haunts and childhood homes of endless figureheads and writers and inventers, and what marks this city is a city of endless discovery and exploration. Learning the language of the city becomes your most important skill, laden as it is with symbols and story.

Welcome to London. Pleased to make your  make your aquaintance.

Someone asked me later on during my journey as I ventured deeper into England, what I thought of London. My one response: London is a lot. I am still figuring out what that means, but it’s not a bad thing.

What I do know is that in some spiritual sense a piece of me belongs here, although I am only just learning to what end. I might live worlds apart, but in many ways this sort of journey is about uncovering the ways in which we are all connected.

I’m sitting in our upstairs room by the printer, slowly and methodically printing pages off for my upcoming trip, now one day and one sleep away. Pages of walking directions in an effort to ensure my first day there, an early morning arrival, is as prepared as possible. These walking directions are the product of weeks and weeks of creative planning, piecing together a concoction of priority sites and off-the-beaten path detours based on my shelves of old and newly aquired travelogues, travel books, and guidebooks.

For anyone interested, here are a few of my favorites (also including Rick Steeve’s great travel guide on “England”)

Full disclosure, this is my favorite part of travelling. A quiet mantra I came up with for myself and that I often repeat: being there is the aim, wherever “there” happens to be, but the process of bringing the trip to life is what sustains the journey. In my case, “there” is England, beginning with my eventual arrival in London.

Truth be told, I could describe any trip I take in the same manner. That sense of invigoration and excitment. The anticipation. The act of imagining these places and experiences I am about to encounter first hand. I’ll never outgrow that needed sense of wonder. This trip though is slightly different. Not simply because the trip is marking my official road to turning 50, but because this particular trip has been one I have been planning for a long time now.

With a caveat. Had you asked me a number of years ago, this particular trip commemorating my 50th would have, without a doubt, taken a different shape and a slightly different path. That path being through Ireland, not England. Ireland has been on my life list ever since becoming aware of my family heritage. It was my dad’s side that once found it’s way across those lands to Ontario, Canada, where our more immediate lineage became fairly well documented. It wasn’t all that long ago that those lines were eventually able to be connected across those waters to our family back in Ireland, via pictures that look like they could have been copied straight from our own extended family photo frames.

A slight hesitation, a twinge of concern, ended up redirecting my focus.  I knew that Ireland was the kind of place that required an investment in getting a car and heading out into the countryside. I worried about how well my celiac diagnosis was going to cope. This small concern nudged me ever so gently towards the second option topping my life list: England.

Why England? Yes, the reasons could be endless. Why not England!!?? However, for me my particular vested interest was England’s literary past, although I didn’t know just how vested my interest was and would be until I started to dig in to the possiblity. Here, suddenly, I found myself face to face with my childhood, being as I was a veracious reader from a very young age. These were the authors and stories that shaped me as a young kid, forming my worldview, asking the same questions I was asking, teaching me about the power of the imagination and igniting a desire for seeking truth.

Things ran deeper still. For all the attention that had been payed to my Irish roots, it turns out my mom’s side runs straight through England. Here both sides of my family line would eventually meet, largely by way of a shared connection to John Wesley. The Pentecostal roots that would branch off from Methodism and find its way to Canada were seeded in this very soil.

As i said, my vested interest loomed much larger than I initially knew. Someday, as I would come to imagine standing on those high, rocky shores of the Cornish coast, looking out over the waters directly towards Ireland, I would love to officially connect those lines myself. My connection to Ireland grew from my adult years and the stories I have encountered through my interest in history and the celctic past. But it felt fitting to begin here in England, with my childhood, a journey that would come to take on a timely resonance these last few years in my writings in this space as well, before these plans ever became a reality. I had been contemplating for quite some time what it means to understand my life story, spending time on a project in efforts to do just that. Even earlier this year, I was struck by a few voices speaking to this sort of pilgrimage, the idea of returning to your childhood stories, an act one such author called “growing up into our childhood.” And here, then, was the opportunity to put my feet on the literal “literary” ground.

To stand at their gravesides.

To traverse the grounds that shaped their childhood and gave inspiration to their stories.

Even to weave it into a story all its own based on the path I travel.

It all begins in London. As my printer spits out another page, I see the bold lettering on the bottom: Charles Dickens Museum. A route that begins with the traditional English Breakfast of course  (shout out to Bill’s), weaves past the infamous Baker Street residence of a certain prominant sleuth, and through the cobblestone streets Dicken’s once would have traversed. From Chancery Lane (Bleak House) to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese to The Old Curiousity Shop and Covent Gardens.

But I am not there yet. More pages continue to churn out. I see walking maps to the Musuem of Methodism, the route to Roald Dahl’s home town, directions to A.A. Milne’s countryside abode and the old Pooh Sticks Bridge that inspired his creation. There’s pages for Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie, the legend of King Arthur, Richard Adams and Watership Down, the Bronte sisters and the Yorkshire connections to Robin Hood. There’s Whitby and the famed steps of Bram Stoker. There’s H.G. Wells in the small town of Woking, the richly inspired Cotswolds (including Shakespeare), and of course Oxford for Susan Cooper, Tolkien, Lewis, and the Inklings.

As the voices in my numerous online travel groups would say: that’s a bit much for just over a week. Maybe, but I’m game. You only turn 50 once. Or, you know, the old adage “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Even if plans go a bit awry (and they will, and they did), this is the process. It’s what will sustain the journey, and, God willing, continue to give inspiration for a return (which will, I promise, include Wales).

Finally, the last of my many pages has printed. I pick up my handful of sheets, very much aware of the questionable looks I am getting from that thing called the digital age. This to me feels right. Phone down, the challenge of piecing together directions page in hand, likely getting lost, finding my way again (hopefully). In any case, it’s time for bed. One more sleep. My bag is packed. Or at least it will be when I make the wise decision to sneak back down and remove one more book.

Speaking of books. Knowing myself in this moment, that stack of books waiting for me beside my bedside is going to be the more likely company for the time being. 

“Why won’t God communicate in a way we can understand.”

This is the question Odysseus poses to Athena as he seeks to understand the tension of a world, his world, bound to such suffering and seeking hope for it’s restoration. For Odysseus, his journey is a physical one, but his pilgrimage is internal, and what frames this pilgrimage, wrestling as it does with the question of God’s communication or presence in the mess of things, is met by a simple call: the call to remember.

This point in the film hit me hard. I’ve written elsewhere about how, at a point in my own life when this question loomed particularly large, God broke in (via a world shaking spiritual experience) with the exact same words. Since that day all those years ago I have found myself on this precise pilgrimage. 

What the story of The Odyssey gave to me this time around, or more specifically through Nolan’s translation/interpretation of the story, is a clarifiying context about what this pilgrimage is and why it matters, both for understanding the tension that we find in the world, and for locating my life within it. For Odysseus, he finds himself standing on a three fold precipice:

1. The line between his past and his future 

2. The line between the old world and the new

3. The line between death and life 

On the first front is this movement to return to what his past represents, which is to return home. To that familiar space before the world turned and when innocence had not been stolen. The imagery here is particularly powerful, as this movement overlays over top of one of the most powerful elements of the human experience, which is the process of growing up into the world and the loss that this represents. Home here can translate just as readily to our notion of “childhood.” For me, this is what I was called to remember. A time in my life when it seemed I could still hear God speak. In this story however, in Odysseus’ internal pilgrimage to return home he recognizes something important. Not unlike, to borrow from a book I recently read called Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children (Mac Barnett), where it is argued that we don’t grow old, we grow into our childhood, to return home, to remember the past is to grow into our childhood as an adult. This means, returning home requires attending for the lived life, not erasing it. It means standing in a space once familiar looking out over everything we are now forced to reconcile from a different vantage point. It is not returning to a space where the tension is erased, it is returning to a space where that tension that we feel can be known and reckoned with, with all of the regrets and failures that come with it. 

It is also, in this story, not simply a matter of ones individual life. Any such pilgrimage, as the second point underscores, is forced to attend to the larger narrative of this world we exist within. Here this can be said to be about history, but in the framework of this story history isn’t held captive to the past, rather it is alive. It is present. It is a movement in and of itself. Here Odysseus finds himself reckoning with a world that, in view of the story,  has chosen to defy the gods and make its own way. This is a world, framed here as a biting critique on the rise of modernism and the failed promise of the enlightenment, finds itself lost on the seas of it’s own ambitions, uncertain about what it means to see the human through the eyes of God, to see God through the eyes of the human (now as our creation), and equally uncertain about what it means to see the world being made in our own image. One thing rings true here to the experience of the characters in the story: we can seek to leave the gods behind, but we cannot outrun ourselves.

Which brings me to the third line. It’s not surprising to me that we need to seek out the old stories to find this long ignored truth about the world we experience and observe. What defines the tension is this simple and intuitive truth- Death opposes Life, and Life opposes Death. What really caught me off guard here is not just the way Nolan gets this, as modern adaptations are no stranger to burying this simple intuitive notion about existence in a modern ethos bent towards the romanticization of Death (usually by reducing the modern story to morality tales or lessons or appeals to utilitarian idealism), it’s the way in which Nolan understands the necessary place of narrative approaches in making sense of this world and our lives. The battles waging within the human experience are given coherency in how we understand the cosmic story. One of the great lies of modernism is that these two things can somehow be ripped apart. More strikingly, Nolan weaves a story that connects the human journey (which is largely bent around the ways in which the act of remembering reveals who we are) to the question of who God is. So much of the wrestling in this film revolves around the question of what God desires of creation itself, and of the humans existing in relationship to the larger created order. And one of the biggest questions is this: is God a God of Life or a God of Death. Or more specifically, does God care for this creation, or are we left to fend for ourelves as God sits at a distance leaving us to do to one another what we will in the name of remaking the world in our image.

I penned a more indepth write up on this idea here, but in a very real sense much of this story exhibits an uncomfortable relationship to the modern ethos it is critiquing. Precisely because of the way the Greek myths have become a kind of ammunition for the modernist narrative of leaving the gods behind and remaking the world in our own image. This narrative loves the Greek myths, precisely because it allows us to create distance between myth and reality, fiction and truth, by collapsing the old world into a singular portrait of myth, and recasting these stories through the lens of what we now call reality. Any particular God or story about the gods can just get subsumed into this same singular conception that has come to be known as modern myth, and our institutions enable us to invent categories to ensure they cannot break out of this tightly guarded box (a category called classicism, or the classics). 

Towards this end, the startling thing about this film is that Nolan’s interpretation never allows the story to be subsumed by those tendencies. It allows the story to function as the critique that it is, which is precisely what allows the story, or the tensions within, to challenge us with it’s questions about the nature of this process of disenchantment. Does the truth that we believe about this world actually map on to what we find? And if it doesn’t, how does that unsettle our senses in a modern, enlightened world? How does, in the words of Athena, a story like this actually open us up to giving up control? This is perhaps the most challenging thing for a modernist to do (speaking as one myself).

I recently got back from a pilgrimage to England (from Canada) which was planned as an effort to return to and remember the stories of my childhood. To walk those spaces that gave them life. In a very real way this was an act of learning what it means to grow into my childhood, now traversing these spaces, these memories, as an adult. All the way through this film I had this trip in mind as I was watching Odysseus’ own journey unfold, beginning in London where that line gets drawn in the history of Britian between East and West, walking the streets paved with both the towers and the ruins looming large and visible. And to make my way slowly to the ocean’s edge, looking out over those waters to the fascinating connections between Homer’s Odyssey and the Irish shores, standing as I was simitaneously in the soil of the deep roots of the Arthurian legend. A world of stories that awaken the unseen world in very real ways. Where the historical context for these stories awaken the clash with Empire that is still present in the divide that East and West represents, finding in it’s own sacred lineage and history a means of making sense of the cosmic narrative amidst the world’s familiar tensions.

In a very real way, Nolan hasn’t just made one of the film’s of the year (which I would make a case for), and he hasn’t just made one of the best film’s of his career (I would also make that case), he has tapped into something larger than himself. He has given us a story that is by it’s nature immortal, precisely because it reaches towards something universal. It is a story that is rooted in those symbols and patterns that reaveal those greater Truths. This is as human as stories get. It’s also transcendent. It’s spiritual. It’s revelatory. It’s prophetic. It reaches for the Divine in very real ways. For me, I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on how the author’s of my childhood understood this in a very real way, finding a similar and shared restlessness with the world that had been handed to them, a world where those gates of Troy were stormed in efforts to bring about the new order of human conquest and ambition. Author’s who’s stories seek in the pages they produce, pages that are intimately tied to the landscape they also inhabit, a better story, a better narrative that can actually make sense of the world they inhabit. A practice that, as it is said in the film at one point, pushes out into a moment in history where, in the absence of literacy people were handed songs. These songs became their stories. These stories became their invitation to remember. This act of remembering becomes a means of engaging their relationship to God.

I am in the midst of reading N.T. Wright’s newest book, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal. There’s so much there that connects with the spirit and message of Nolan’s The Odyssey, inviting us to imagine a world in which God has taken up residence, not remained distanced from. A world we aren’t looking to escape, but a world that is being transformed in the overlapping of both Heaven and Earth. As Odysseus says, “I am not dying, I am exiled.” This is the image he has of the already-not-yet nature of this present tension, a world in which we find both the forces of Life and the forces of Death in constant battle. In evoking this word exile, a word that I am confident would thrill Wright’s own popular emphasis and favoured imagery, he is also evoking this picture of a homecoming, of being at home in the world carrying the tension forward into/towards, as Odysseus’s own hopeful expression states, the coming dawn, the image of a transformed world in which God takes residence among a battered and broken creation. It’s a moment of true transcendence in the film, and one I will be carrying with me for a while. As the opening script declares, this is a story about a world which still knew magic. In the film’s closing image, this becomes a world we are tasked with remembering.

8 days

That’s how many days I went without watching a single film. More if you include the days leading up to my departure. And technically counting.

That might not sound like a big deal, but for me it’s very much out of the ordinary.

So much so that, upon returning from my trip, I became particularly aware of the fact that this anomaly seemed to be unearthing something that ran a bit deeper. The more I thought about it, the more aware this became: I was feeling disconnected from my love of film as a whole.

And the stats seemed to bear this out. A perusing of my Letterboxd page helped solidify this simple fact, showing a 60 percent drop in the number of films watched reaching back to this same period (January-July) a year ago.

Thus I have found myself theorizing on the eve of Nolan’s latest big screen blockbuster (The Odyssey) about the reasons for this disconnect. Certainly part of this has been the larger reality of the ongoing erosion and codifying of online communities and cultures that once promised lifetime connections across different interpretations and experiences (those communities replacing the physical communities I once thought to be eternally present as well). But such a sharp drop seems to suggest something more localized to 2026.

One place to begin fleshing this out is noting the simple fact that when I left for my trip and the screens, for me, had turned mostly dark, online discourse had just transitioned from the doom and gloom of reporting on Supergirl to it’s most recent robust attack on Moana. Logging back in upon my return, the first thing that flooded my feed was the imbattled discourse leading up to the release of Nolan’s The Odyssey. And this is not even to note the plethora of smaller films that continue to be buried underneath the finely tuned rhetorical online gamemanship.

That’s when I started to wonder. I had effectively detoxed from these convos and was seeing it, however briefly, through somewhat sober eyes. The joy, for me, of going to the movies continues to be challenged by the nature of this perpetual discourse and the media headlines that fuel it. What makes this more complicated is that stepping out of online discourse doesn’t address the source of the problem: the communal nature of this unique artform being continually challenged.

That’s one part of a working theory. Another thing hit me however, this one perhaps more prevalent to my own particular circumstance and journey. This trip I had embarked on, more of an intentional pilgrimage towards rediscovering the literature that had formed me beginning in my earliest years as a veracious reader. Walking the grounds that gave these authors and their stories their inspiration. This was also a pilgrimage towards rediscovering the source of those stories. Of coming to understand better why story matters in the first place.

Beginning in London, walking in the footsteps of the likes of Dickens and Wilde, reaching as far West as the rugged Atlantic shoreline that holds the history of the Arthurian legend in it’s weathered soil and looming cliffs and as far north as the lore surrounding Bram Stoker and the Bronte sisters, ultimatley ending in the streets of Oxford where the enduring legacies of Lewis, Tolkien and, for me, my favorite living author Stephen Lawhead remain alive and well. The likes of Coleridge, Richard Adams, A.A. Milne, Roald Dahl, Shakespeare, Beatrice Potter, Agatha Christie and Virginia Wollfe, the Robin Hood lore, all dotting the space inbetween. My encountering of these voices and these spaces lingers in my spirit with an ever renewing sense of awe as I settle back into routine. These were the voices through which the idea of story gained it’s power over my life, the seedbed for what would become my equal and passionate embrace of storytelling’s visual form. Thus, in many ways this was returning me to my first love: books. Perhaps in ways I don’t yet understand, this is also the way into rediscovering the tradition of oral storytelling that precedes and informs this literature, along with my love of film, a form that would proceed from it, as well.

Retracing these steps in my memory as I attempt to preserve this pilgrimage within a framework of it’s own emerging narrative, I am picturing those looming cliffs stretching out over the ruins of Tintagal. Perhaps the true climatic moment of my journey, arriving as I do finally at the great expanse of the Atlantic looking out over that great divide between the old world and the new.

I am standing there looking out over the waters listening to Malcolm Guite’s Galahad and the Grail, letting his passionate play, as I heard it put, on “a theology of the Grai” open up a world long buried by my own modern, adult senses. I have thoughts of Drout’s majestic critical work on Tolkien’s works, The Tower and the Ruin, envoloping my awareness as well, with his capturing of Tolkien’s own impassioned image of the ruins of these castle walls on one side of me and the great expanse of the chaos of the waters pushiung in from the other holding the existing tension of those dualing forces, the Spirit of Life and the Spirit of Empire, together in a coherent narrative of that necessary euchatastrophy.

It all evokes this powerful sense of restlessness and wonder within me, moving me to consider where precisely the narrative of this journey pushes towards. The same feelings that I have found expressed in both Tolkien and Lewis as they describe their own wrestling with the erosion of their own once thought to be infinite community called the Inklings in the face of their own unique awareness of this growing tension that has come to be known as modernism. The necessary question for them: from what source does story gain it’s power. In a world that, even in Tolkien and Lewis’ day, is pushing forward towards a sharp disconnect between the evidenced power of these once enduring stories and the emergent elitism of the classicism and criticism which would come to dominate their world on both sides of this percieved break in history, this is precisely what comes to motivate someone like Tolkien, immersed as he was in the stories that informed his world, to capture and thus preserve the true source that gives these stories their life.

In Erica Stevenson’s The Odysssey Effect: How Homer’s Epic Poem Shaped the Woirld, she outlines, as a scholar in the field of the classics, how the enlightenment period reflects this movement towards elitism in a field (the art and study of the stories of the classical world) once accessible to the people of that world (and enlivened) by being both a product of and for the story tellers and hearers. Story, taking on the rhetoric of that invented term “classics,” now becoming a distinct product of the historian. A product that, for anyone taking a course in the classics or the classical world at a given reputable university/college even still in our time, gets molded and handed down to us by the select ones able to study them and thus control their translation and interpretation.

More importantly, not just handed but pre-molded in the spirit of that same enlightenment influenced modernsist lens. Soaked in the kind of intellectualism that serves to further entrench this distance between the hearer and the story. On one hand stating, as Stevenson points out, that the act of history is always an act of the imagination held captive to the interpreter, while similtaneously handing the scholar the hidden wisdom that now drives a wide, wielded sword between it’s redefined notions of myth and reality. Here story becomes bound to the very western foundations which have been built through that precise practice of “othering” the ancient world into being within this framework of thought, a practice used to justify our brand of intellectualism giving rise to the so called higher criticisms, branded as it becomes within the hiearchal systems of the Victorian age and codified by the continued reapppropriation of the Greek philosphers. This is, one might say, what we can call the modern, rhetorical framework. In this framework, ones access to the “classics,” or more importantly their meaning, not only operates as a sign of belonging to this higher criticism, the classicists then become the true bearer of their “meaning.” This becomes the means then of preserving the myth of progress that holds the enlightened world together.

As Guite insists in his introduction to his masterful book, along the way we’ve lost the language of story. We’ve lost the ability to actually be hearers of story, precisely because we’ve lost any sense of their actual source. That they have any source at all outside of our reconstituting of the classical world itself. This is what the distance brings about. Peer behind the veils of these intellectual systems and what you find is the same theoretical approaches for dealing with the diversity that we actually find within this world soaked as it was in Story. The only way to deal with the diversity in the modernist point of view is by reducing this to a single genre we now commonly call myth (in the modern sense of the word). Rather than the notion of a unifying narrative opening up a world full of stories across space and time, the creation of the classics becomes the silent indoctrination into a dominating modernist framework.

And that matters for this single reason: the modernist framework could arguably be said to be the only moment in history that, percievably, refuses to recognize it’s own operative myth. In fact, it sees itself as operating above such antiquated ways of being and seeing in this world. Which is precisely why, as Stevenson so aptly outlines in her book, classicism must function at such a distance from the people. What those like Guite, acting as they do as modern prophets of our present time, are proclaaiming through their life and works, is that when people learn to tell and hear these stories, it invites us into the greater Story to which all of thse patterns and symbols, contextualized as they are into our space and time, belong.and point towards. This is where history becomes a living, breathing entity that indeed can be framed as a pilgrimage.

It is also not suprising that the ones educated into this idea called classicism are often the same ones using the old world myths, which once functioned as a means of opening us up to a world hidden and unseen, as prooftext against the actual power of these old world myths. You can see this alive and well in the debate over this recent adaptation of The Odyssey, which underscores the two competing understandings of myth that has become so prevalent in the modern age. This could be what we might call a delicious irony. The way into attacking and/or dismissing religious or spiritual truth, for example, is to a devoted modernist to study and to come to love the Greek myths. Because, as claccisism will tell you, it’s all about categorizing these myths within a singular conception called the classical world, where we can safely draw lines between the old world and the new. And for western society, owing it’s own existence to the Greco-Roman world we have reconstituted as the great enlightenment project of our time, the true force of this movement from a world of Story to a world of the classics is a movement towards a percieved rationalism that allows the new to do away with the old altogether. Instead of finding a world filled with diverse stories by it’s very nature, the dichotomy that we find within claccisism sees it as a war between monotheism and polytheism, to which the proper modernist will claim a secularized version of the latter. In truth, this truncated version of the world only betrays what is actually true about it’s shape, which is that it’s diversity brings a shared monotheistic allegiance into conversation with a polytheistic world. This is how diversity exists. The modernist tendency to set these things at odds becomes grounds for creating this sharp dichotomy between myth and reality, giving the assumptions claccisism makes regarding creating and upholding the necessary and needed distance between the higher criticisms and the storytellers (which gets the label “rationalism”)  a percieved justification.

Meanwhile, the very thing that gives these stories their power is the very thing this form of institutionalism is actively stripping away. We remain seduced by the self wielding power this kind of rationalism hands us, but only in so far as we retain some sense of control over what it is allowed to reveal (in theory). As Stevenson puts it, this justification comes from our ability to single out the particular god’s of Homer’s epics and use that as our reasoned means for purging the world of the whole of religion. Of course this isn’t historical, modernism says, therefore the whole of religion occupies this same shape. In other words: it’s all Greek, as the saying goes, a phrase that brings with it all of the assumptions of a supersessionist point of view.

Which is where it needs to be said: this is, in fact, not rational. In contrast, for the ancient (or classical) world, evidence suggests that they fully understood the power of their operative stories or myths as a window into the greater Story that holds rational and reasoned history together, a word that simply evoked that once richly experienced sense of the enduring source lying underneath all the world’s stories. Something Tolkien and Lewis were accutely aware of. Something that can actually honor and make sense of the diversity of all the world’s stories. 

Back to those cliffs with the castle ruins on one side and the ocean on the other. It became powerfully aware for me, recognizing the storied layers of this landscape. This castle was built over top of a legacy lost to us but aware to the builders of it’s time. To get to the reason for the castle we have to dig further and recognize this simple fact, and that digging brings us to that perpetual question that runs through the whole act of history itself: why did they build it? What motivated them to build it?

The answer is: Story. Or their stories.

When the modern approach has weaponized our attempts to answer this question by predetermining the ancients to be lesser than our own constructed academics, designed as they are to reshape the world in our own image, there can only ever be one answer to this question: they were less educated and thus lesser than us. Thefore, to engage their stories means we must actively strip them of what makes them lesser. This becomes a mark of so much of the West when it comes to adapting these stories into our time and place. We thus mire something like Homer’s works, to come back to Nolan’s The Odyssey, in this veneer of self justifying rhetoric. To imagine a people wholly versed in the art of story and storytelling apart from this higher criticism is simply foreign, and increasingly a lost art in modern academics, and therefore we become the necessary conduits of the world we believe the classics must reveal in order for them to be allowed to say anything at all.

When it comes to this Arthurian landscape, and similarly with the legacies of Robin Hood further to the northernly, eastern part of England, we cannot dare to imagine the ones building this castle did so because they were aware of something we ourselves are not. That they were rooted in the stories that formed them precisely because they revealed something very real about the world they both experienced and understood. That they preserved the Arthurian stories because these stories were part of the larger world of Story, a reality that immersed them in the very world these stories sought to then open up. To acknowledge this would leave us feeling like our own appeal to this carefuly crafted thing called higher criticism is losing its ability to uphold our sought after sense of superiority over the past, as though we have a greater window into what is true than they did when they crafted this fortress against the harrowing forces beating up against it’s back, building their stories over the it’s source. Or perhaps betraying the fact that it never had this ability in the first place.

Yet, what this space, and the likes of Guite, are attempting to retrieve from the muddied landscape that our modern senses have obscured is our ability to allow these stories to once again unsettle in the ways they did for their original hearers. To understand how, for the ancient world, these stories were not operating as empty metaphors. They awakened them to what only the imagination could, a world in which the very patterns of our stories reveal it’s source. Where, as Guite sees it, story has the power to “set us upon the numinous shores of Faierie in all its mystery and meaning.” Where he finds the unifying relationship of the source of our stories evidenced in the whole of history.

There is a reason, as the foreward to his book says, the world would cease to be without the story of Arthur. What it means by this is not an elevating of Arthur above all other stories, but rather that in this space we find a way into all the world’s stories. We find a historical moment in which this practice was alive and well, fostering the heart of storytellings and story hearers. A way of making sense of all the world’s stories. All stories draw from the same source. This is why Story, and the stories that become our windows into a true narrative, holds power.

We can debate what this source is, but what the modern world has largely forgot, and pretended not to need, is a world that can be opened up to us in precisely this way. That what drives the stories we tell is an awarness of the source that gives them life. That a source actually exists. There is an irony to the fact that we live in a time when history is, as it was famously put, no longer a thing. We have arrived at the end of history. It cannot be buried, forgotten in the way of these old stories, and it can no longer be lost or gained, because we have surpassed it. Therefore it can never be something that needs to be discovered or imagined, nor preserved. We are no longer tellers or hearers, we are the drivers of a world now brought about by an act of our own making.

And yet, it’s not just these continued adaptations like The Odyssey that remind us of the Western world’s indebtedness to the past, it’s that we remain entirely ignorant of the ways in which these same patterns and symbols are the very things running through the life giving stories of our time. Sadly, what gets lost in this ignorance is the very diversity that awakens us to this power. A world where the classics have been reconstituted and reduced to modernist interpretations is a world built on utility, not Story. it’s a world where film gets reduced to the tehcnicalities of it’s technology. Where the modern script trades life giving metphaor for idelogy and moral “lessons.” What struck me in reencountering the narratives of my childhood afresh is how harkon back to a forgotten history of storytelling that didn’t adhere to rules, but to patterns. Patterns that reflect the lives of the storytellers and the hearers. The best of the modern voices, and indeed I would include Nolan here, tell stories that are able to open us up to the rich tapesty that is the human experience defined by life and death, order and chaos, suffering and salvation, despair and wonder. An expansive rendering of the world rather than a narrowing. The reason these are the enduring sotiries is because they reflect the enduring Story that connects us to history. We become players in the human story rather than the drivers of it.