Soaked From the Bottom Up & the Top Down

When I finally caught up with the others, who had as normal hurtled down the descent from Corfe, I found them standing in a huddle on a grassy bank by the side of the road.  It turned out that Scott had hit a pothole at speed on the way down and had spectacularly blown out his front tyre.  This was the first puncture of the trip.  We manged to fix it and get just enough air into the innertube for him to limp to first lunch which was scheduled to happen at the visitor’s centre car park at Chew Valley Reservoir.

The sky started to look threatening as we ate lunch.  We munched on rolls with various appetising fillings, which Jo and Julia had prepared and my mind went back to the same holiday in Somerset during which Adam broke his wrist.  My interest in angling had over the years developed beyond the type of fishing uncle Jack introduced me to on that fateful day many years previously when Dad and I bumped into him (not literally) as we rode our bikes along the towpath of the Wey Navigation Canal.  Whilst I still enjoyed course fishing as it is called (so called, some argue, because of the amount of swearing involved when rod and line get tangled up or a fish is lost), I also developed an appetite for fly fishing for trout.  Chew Valley Reservoir is one of the premiere trout fishing venues in the west of England.  So, it was on a pleasant evening I, along with several other fly fishers, wadded into the water from a bank which gave access to a shallower area of the vast man-made lake where fly life is abundant and where the trout congregate to feed on hatching larvae.  It turned out to be a productive evening for me and with a couple of nice rainbow trout in the bag I headed for the shore as dusk set in.  As the water receded my waders seemed to get heavier and heavier and when I reached terra firma I noticed jets of water issuing from both legs; my waders had it turned out perished and unbeknownst to me had slowly filled up with water.  The spouting waders caused much merriment to my fellow anglers and not inconsiderable embarrassment to me.

Chucking to myself about my aquatic adventure of years ago, I topped up my water bottle in preparation for part two of the day’s ride. It looked as if I was going to get wet again, this time from the top downwards rather than the bottom upwards.  Sure enough, before we had all finished lunch it started to rain quite heavily, so on went the waterproofs.   Well on went most of the waterproofs; Sam refused to put his on which caused Jo to have a go at him.  After several attempts to get him to see reason, all of which were rebuffed, the rest of us, sensing the onset of the mother of all domestics, moved away to a safe distance.  Eventually Sam decided to mount his bike in preparation to head off out of the conflict zone.  “Sam,” said Jo quietly, she was ignored.  “Sam,” she repeated more forcefully, he eventually lost it, yelling “I’m old enough to look after myself!”  At which point Jo quietly walked up to him and handed him his cycle helmet, “helmet” she said calmly.  Whilst Jo basked in a moral victory the rest of us fell about laughing.  The rain persisted for a while but only just long enough for Sam to get thoughly soaked but even he had dried out by the time we got to the outskirts of Bristol.

On the 2013 ride Naomi, Ollie and myself ran into extreme navigational problems on the outskirts of Bristol. The trusted guide book didn’t seem to correlate with the geography on the ground and we had several stabs at getting onto a cycle path along the river Avon. This time, GPS made, what had seemed so difficult last time, relatively easy. Soon we were speeding along a cycle path which, due to the flat nature of the ride, enabled me to keep up with the others.  Eventually we moved away from the riverside and came to the end of the cycle track at which point the nature of the ride change dramatically. We found ourselves forced onto the main drag which was used by heavy duty lorries en route to the nearby docks. This did not make for comfortable riding as the lorries thundered past, we got caught in their slip streams and were left, after they past, inhaling their noxious exhaust fumes.

After what seemed like an age, we made it to a service station where we met the support team for second lunch. Along with Julia and Jo we were greeted by Sam’s uncle Paul, Paul’s wife Lois and Sam’s grandfather Arthur resplendent in his wheel chair. It started to drizzle with rain and so Arthur decided to raise our spirits with a school boy joke which had a punch line that involved sore bums (many a true word said in jest). We all laughed politely and hoped this would not encourage him to get into a full comedy routine. “Any one for cake”, enquired Lois. This timely distraction saved us from further octogenarian humour.  And so, fuelled up for the next leg of the adventure, we headed off towards the Welsh boarder, naturally as it always seems to do, it was raining as we approached the Principality.

 

 

A Brave Little Boy

After the initial hard climb and descent on the third day there was time for contemplation, as the riding consisted of traversing a pleasant ridge.  My thoughts were not theological nor psychological and certainly not philosophical but rather revolved around taking in the beauty of the countryside and revelling in it.   This part of the ride was one of those sections which could comfortably roll on forever without wearing you out in the slightest.  Inevitably however it came to an end as we descended to a T junction close to a very inviting pub (unfortunately no time to stop for a quick one) and then we hit the second major challenge of the day, “Broadhembery Hill”, yelled Ollie as he attacked it with his normal vigour.  Now, this is a beast of a climb without any shadow of a doubt.  As I attempted to scale its exhausting heights, I came to the realisation that if a climb gets beyond 13%, I cannot sustain riding for any significant period of time and have to get of my bike and slowly push it up the incline.  On this particular beast I noticed that my speedometer ceased to function at all and so I was well under dad’s “you can walk up a hill at three mile an hour” target.  As soon as the gradient lessened, I got back on my bike again then, as soon as it increased, I was once again back to walking and pushing the bike.  Eventually I made it to the top where I insisted on a lengthy breather before the group set off again.

After a short stretch of B road we hit a dual carriageway which we had to cross, before turning left back onto another minor road after about a hundred yards.  I experienced a nasty incident at this crossing.  I made it over to the left-hand side of the road when suddenly an articulated lorry came thundering past me leaving very little gap between it and me; it must have been doing about fifty miles per hour.  This caused me to wobble alarmingly due to the considerable slip stream created by the lorry but fortunately I managed to stay on the bike, but it was a very frightening experience indeed and I was relieved to get back onto, what felt like, the relative safety of a country lane.

The next part of that day’s route was a flat section which went on for several miles until it ended with a very fast descent into the town of Corfe.  The others reached, what seemed to me, dangerous speeds descending. On my sedate descent through Corfe I did not catch sight of Corfe Castle, which is perhaps just as well as my son Adam, when he was a little boy, broke his arm when he fell off a rock at the castle.  It was one of those real good fractures where the bone comes through the skin.  His mother and I, with a very young Naomi (her of the 2013 ride) in tow, spent some time trying to find an A and E department in order to get him patched up.  Eventually, we did find one and as the fracture, which was quite severe, required an operation, I had to leave him at the hospital his mother, whilst I drove back to our holiday let with his sister and our dog Kerry.  Naomi promptly went down with a sickness bug which kept us both up all night; not a good end to a holiday!  The dog was fine as I remember.  Perhaps this memory also contributed to me applying the brakes as I sailed through Corfe.  Certainly, as far as I was concerned the descent required some careful bike handling and so, apart from thoughts of Adam and his broken arm, little else occupied my mind.

After Corfe the road continued to descend and so the riding was easy and relatively fast.  My thoughts turned again to the story of Peter walking on the water as an image of the tentative attempts of the ego to remain afloat and not be overwhelmed by the vast stormy unconscious.  If Peter is an image of the ego and the sea is an image of the unconscious then what does the Christ figure represent, I asked myself?  Well, in the Christian Tradition it is important to recognise that Christ is both fully human and fully divine.  Jesus must therefore represent a human potentiality for connection with the Divine, a reality much deeper and more fundamental that the poor old struggling ego.  The challenge of Jesus to Peter, to walk to Him on the water, seems to me to be a challenge to find and embrace the divine reality within each of us, a reality which is beyond mere consciousness and ego centricity but which is constantly calling for recognition.  To engage on this inner journey requires courage and a willingness to take the risk of stepping beyond the relative safety of the familiar and journey the precarious way of faith.  This journeying requires courage and skill rather like that fast descent into Corfe.  The chances are, if we take the risk, we will come a cropper somewhere along the way.

My last memory of Adam that day as I rode away from Corfe was that, despite the pain, he was a very brave little boy who seemed to have utter faith in his worried parents and who thereby probably coped with the situation better than they did.  Risk the knocks, endure the pain of self-discovery, because, at the centre of everything you experience, is a God who loves us more that even our parents and who, like Christ with a struggling Peter, will lift us up and perhaps gently reprove us for our lack of faith.

Time To Get Out Of The Boat

Later that third day I gave myself to a deeper consideration of the idea of life as a journey of discovery and development rather than following a prescribed pathway.  Even early on in my spiritual development I appreciated the idea which can be found in many of the early Christian writers and latterly in the Romantic Poets, of life as, “a vale of soul making”.  Some theologians argue that the soul is placed in the body by God at the beginning of life, though there is no consensus as to just when the beginning of life occurs; is it at conception or at birth and so on?  I came to the conclusion that, for me at least, it makes more sense to think about the soul as a spiritual reality which develops through the physical and psychological life cycle.  In other words, whilst I am in this present life, my soul is continually developing as I engage with life as it actually is and not as I wish it would be.  This is a precarious business, particularly early on in the life cycle.  It involves throwing off the definitions others would put upon you; not easy and for some never achieved.  The immediate outcome of refusing to allow others, society, the Church to totally define you is that you are likely to become rather unsure of yourself for a while because the security of these early definitions has been rejected.   One is challenged to enter into a costly attempt at trying to replace them with something more appropriate and authentic to who you actually are, and finding out who you are is often a tricky business and can be extremely painful.

I have always liked the story in the Gospels of Peter walking on water to Jesus.  Perhaps you are familiar with it – the storm is raging as the disciples make heavy weather crossing the sea of Galilee when Jesus comes to them walking on the water.  Peter says to Jesus, “If it is You then bid me to come to you on the water”, Jesus replies, “Come”.  So, Peter gets out of the boat and begins to walk towards Jesus. At first, everything is ok, but then he ceases to focus on Jesus and his attention turns to the wind and the waves and as soon as he does this he starts to sink and cries out with fear.  At this point Jesus catches hold of him and asks him, “why did you doubt, Oh, man of little faith?”  I think this story can be seen on several different levels.  The early teachers of the Church were given to doing this kind of layered interpretation.  They saw a story as a piece of history, that was one level, but for them the story contained a deeper allegorical meaning.  Now it has to be said that some of their perceived allegorical meanings seem nowadays rather fanciful, but I would suggest that the approach has something to commend it.  Some of the stories are a bit hard to swallow as chunks of pure history but if one realises that story telling is the most fundamental way in which human beings have sought to understand who they are in the universe then the story becomes a way of conveying truth beyond physical reality.  So, I would humbly suggest that stories like this one contain spiritual or psychological truths about the existential reality of our lives and this story is rich with such truths.  (See, Matthew 14: 22 – 33)

Water has long been recognised as a symbol of the unconscious depths of the psyche.  Sometimes it could be calm and unruffled, not disturbing the individual’s conscious life, but at other times it could be tempestuous and alarming rather like the storm on the lake in the Gospel story.  It seems to me that we have to fight very hard to gain a sense of who we actually are, particularly during adolescence and, if we have no guidelines to help us or against which we can rebel, we can find ourselves in a very dangerous place.  The ego (our conscious sense of who we are) arises from the unconscious and precariously tries to balance itself on the shifting surface of the element from which it has come.  But we make the mistake of imagining that the ego is king only to find it is fragile and, like Peter taking his tentative steps towards the figure of Christ who is calling him out of the boat, where there is at least some semblance of safety, the ego can easily start to sink back into the unconscious. Sinking below the surface of consciousness is the major trauma for the ego and it reaches out for help because it fears that all identity will be lost if it is engulfed by the watery depths.  It’s easy to be scornful of Peter’s so call failure but at least he got out of the boat and had a go.  I must admit that at my age I wondered whether or not I could do LEJOG for a second time, but I got on my bike and so far so good.