Introduction

My sister Lucy chose my introductory picture no doubt for reasons of her own yet I couldn't have done better. It's a good example of Romanesque art, manifesting the discovery that various of the components of a religious building , in this case a Christian one, could be exploited not just for religious or didactic purposes but also to express ideas that were rooted in folk or pagan art. It expresses divisiveness, two aspects of the same organic entity, looking in opposing directions. It is appropriate to the subject I want to explore, a subject which I hope resonates with other bloggers, the need to be somewhere one knows and feels secure, and the need at times to be somewhere else; one organism, struggling to decide which direction to go in.

 It is the work of the journeyman-mason or journeyman-monk who travelled from place to place, often from one place of pilgrimage to another, yet as a mason rather than a pilgrim.

If I am guilty of too much self-examination I apologise. If I am self-centred then I am also split down the middle. My needs have turned my life into an experiment. Going to live in a foreign country with a different culture and language makes one forever a stranger, but not a traveller. Spending fifteen years rebuilding your environment, a decayed hamlet in northwest France, settles you into a space like nothing else, although cultivating the land for generations will do this too, and probably with a different and deeper certainty.

I have tried to settle into my life, but what propelled me here, the quest for differentness, surfaces constantly through the muddle of my persona. What I have written over the past decade or more mostly shows the need to find a personal solution to the dilemna, do I stay or do I go? I adopted the idea of pilgimage as a hobby, a frame upon which I could build, enabling me to travel with a purpose, not in the old-fashioned way as a redemption for my sins, not just for self-fulfilment, but hoping for more somehow. I had started by thinking that my place on earth could be established by applying myself to one patch, mending and modifying and building, hopefully creating something at least a bit beautiful. But I needed to extend myself beyond this, across the face of the planet, and following a line travelled by my ancestors I thought might help me to do this. Some of them, maybe only one, maybe more, had made a journey to Santiago in northwest Spain, so I would examine and follow the ways of St. James. It was a good excuse to get out there, to go looking, and since then I've found Europe, or at lest that part I inhabit, to be covered by lines, sometimes straight, sometimes wobbly, which have become my songlines, rooting me to the earth, and maybe offering an escape from it.

Inevitably, I have discovered these lines to have their node points. The dowser would say the lines and nodes can be ascertained by their traditional methods. Whatever, the points, once selected, have been imbued over the centuries with greater meaning, buildings have been erected, folk or religious art applied, spiritual communities formed, songs sung, prayers given.

My journeys & observations are only part of a bigger picture. I will start with a journey I made about seven years ago. If you want to read more or have your own observations to make, please do.