Leather Jeans and an Earring

Once out of Hereford we headed in the direction of Canon Pyon and Mortimer’s Cross.  First lunch was taken in a convenient pub car park.  As we set off again after lunch the “Mappa Mundi” was still on my mind.  I found great significance in the fact that the map is basically circular in shape, and this got me thinking about the symbolic importance of circular figures in art and religion. St Teresa of Avila, one of my favourite mystics, envisioned her inner world in terms of concentric circles: circular rooms through which she had to consciously pass in order to be joined with God at the centre of her being.  Modern churches are often built in the round, and round Rose windows, made up of intricate abstract patterns, are often found in churches and Cathedrals. Carl Jung noted the importance of mandala figures, i.e. round drawings with a central point from which various symbols and abstract figures emanate (Mandala means circle in Sanskrit).  The earliest forms of dance are generally circle dances.  So, it seems reasonable to conclude that there is something deeply significant for the human psyche tied up in the circular. If you take the circle dance for instance it flows from the outer ring inwards and then back outwards again. Another common movement is for the circle to move in one direction and then turn and move in the other direction. These types of movement are found in the English Folk Dance Tradition in dances like the “Circassian Circle”. It seems to me that people taking pleasure in dancing these circular movements are physically expressing, albeit quite unconsciously, the basic energy flows of the human soul. The painter of mandala or the craftsman who constructs the abstract figures of a rose window in stained glass is reflecting the same reality in visual form, inviting contemplation rather than, as with the dance, participation.

Like all archetypal expressions there is a positive and a negative aspect to all this. It seems to me that the negative is expressed in common sayings like “l just seem to be going around in circles getting nowhere!” There is a life cycle, stages we have to go through merely because we are human beings and that is the way it is, whether we like it or not. Of course, we can consciously or unconsciously resist the inevitable march of time and thereby find ourselves stuck in a kind of psychic time warp. Indeed, going around in circles, so to speak, and getting nowhere.  However, it would appear that if this happens, then our unconscious, always seeking to bring our conscious ego in line with reality, will not let us get away with it and seeks, often by inducing some kind of crisis, to balance things up. This can cause all kinds of problems and is fraught with danger, particularly the older we get. If for example some elements of adolescence get repressed and thus unexpressed, they may well emerge in midlife at a time when behaviour, which is perhaps excusable in the earlier period of development, would not be acceptable in someone whom society judges is more mature and should know better. As I rode along, I recalled, with a wry smile, being on a train journey from Mainz to Frankfurt with Julia when we bumped into a middle aged man we knew from the Church of the Resurrection in Mainz who had recently left his wife. He was dressed in tight leather jeans and was sporting an earring. Julia leaned over to me and quietly whispered in my ear, “mid-life crisis”.  I also recalled that I have on many occasions sat in my consulting room with a patient who is well dressed and to all appearances is a mature human being, only to realise, when the therapy got underway, that from an emotional point of view I am working not just with a rebellious teenager but perhaps with an enraged toddler or even, more problematic, a pre-linguistic baby.

It seemed to me as I rode along, that in order to come to a good working model for thinking about life and how it works, one has to give credence to the twin realities of circling but at the same time moving forward. In the past I had thought this developmental reality is best summed up by the image of a spiral staircase, where the climber goes around and around but in doing so also ascends purposefully towards the goal of reaching the top of the staircase.  But another image, more pertinent to our present journey struck me that afternoon.  Emotional, psychological and spiritual progress is rather like riding a bike, your legs go round and round but it is this very cyclical movement that propels me forward to attain the goal, the end of the ride.  So, I guess that the way in which God has ordered things for us human beings is to go around and around life’s experiences until we are able to move forward from one stage to another on our journey.  If we fail at one stage its rather like cycling in a circle and getting nowhere fast and that, any cyclist will tell you, is not what a bike is for.

Getting Back on Track

Fortified by a good night’s sleep and a hearty full English, we retrieved our bikes from the bike store and prepared for the next leg of the journey.  A group of retired Glaswegian policemen, whom we had briefly come across previously on the ride, were in the car park and we had a brief conversation with them.  Well I say conversation – it consisted of them talking and me hopefully grunting, in a positive manner, at the appropriate moment as I couldn’t understand very much of what they were saying due to their accents!  Other members of the team told me later that they were expressing their admiration for someone of my age doing LEJOG, which was rather gratifying.  I resolved that the next time we bumped into them on the ride (they were following the same route as us) I would smile as well as grunt.

As we left Monmouth, I vividly remembered that on the 2013 LEJOG Ollie had led us out of the town, trusty map in hand. We missed the turning we should have taken and instead ended up on a horrendously busy dual carriageway, actually we should have been heading for Hereford on the A266, a road with much less traffic. On that occasion, I had looked at the map before we set off and was more or less sure we had missed the correct left hand turning which would have taken us onto the correct road. As we cycled along the first few miles, we didn’t seem to pass any of the landmarks mentioned in the book. But I must admit I did not argue my case against this error very strongly until it was far too late.  I normally have a good sense of direction and I should have spoken up sooner.  The upshot was that we battled on up the dual carriageway, being buffeted by heavy passing traffic, until we all came to the conclusion that we must have gone wrong.  Hurried phone calls were made to our mobile HQ in an attempt to get us back on route. We eventually managed to cut cross county and find the said main road to Hereford but it involved quite a detour and a lot of unnecessary climbing. Needless to say, we did not make the same mistake on this year’s LEJOG. I recognised the left hand turn we should have taken previous and my recollection was backed up by the trusty SATNAV. We thus saved both miles and legs this time round.

The ride to Hereford was a pleasant one, particularly after an hour or so, when the climbing stopped and the route levelled out.  We passed through a village which I voted, “My Favourite Village Name of the Trip”, “Wormelow Tump”.  According to “The Meaning of Liff”  Wormelow Tump means “Any seventeen-year-old who doesn’t know about anything at all in the world other than bicycle gears”! After eighteen miles of riding from Monmouth we passed through the city of Hereford and across the bridge over the river Wye, with its fine view of Hereford Cathedral, another place I have visited on several occasions.  The Cathedral contains many ancient treasures perhaps the most famous two being a fine Chained Library and the Medieval masterpiece, “The Hereford Mappa Mundi”, the second largest “Mappa” surviving in the world, drawn on a single piece of vellum. The thing that struck me most about the Mappa Mundi when I last saw it was the fact that it depicts four famous cities, in the medieval mind, the most important of which was Jerusalem.  This of course reflects the Medieval Christian obsession with the spiritual importance of the city, hence the horrors of the Crusades, fought to recapture the holy sites from the Islamic rulers of the Holy City.

As we passed by Cathedral I started thinking about the Holy City.  For me Jerusalem is not so much a geographical location to be captured by force, as an idea, an archetypal entity of unity, a spiritual aspiration of things coming together in harmony.  This is of course the exact opposite of the physical and historical reality that is Jerusalem.  However, perhaps the Holy City, seen as a sign, is something that can be obtained internally.  Not an outward thing made of stone, but a spiritual reality in the human soul.  However, just as the luckless Crusaders struggled to take the city all those centuries ago, the seeker has to struggle to attain the inner reality, of which the city, to my mind, speaks.  If one really wants to attain inner harmony with God then it involves facing all the risks and potential dangers that lay in the way.   There is a real battle to be engaged in, a battle not with an external foe but with oneself.  It necessitates ceasing to rely on flaky egotism and instead seeking to rely upon what God will graciously grant to those who seek the pathway wholeheartedly.  No doubt this will involve the spiritual equivalent of going wrong and struggling to get back on track.  Perhaps this will be rather like our experience two years previously on our physical journey.  However, although there are helpful signposts on the inner journey, the equivalent of our paper map, there is no internal infallible SATNAV to guide the pilgrim.

The Advantages of Enlightened Dictatorship

A lot of the Wye valley route after Tintern proved to be fairly flat, easy riding, but after crossing the river just before the hamlet of Mork the road began to climb. The gradient was not steep but, after what felt like a long day’s riding, I found it quite tiring. Seeing that I was flagging a bit Ollie commented on a couple of occasions, “not far now Mick”. I was starting to feel like the proverbial child who asks, “are we nearly there?” To be honest the last hour or so of any day’s riding, when your legs are beginning to tire, is tough and requires mental determination as much as physical strength in order to complete the day’s stage.  As I dragged my flagging body and painful legs onwards, I got to thinking that finishing has always been a problem with me.

I am one of those people who gets an idea and then pursues it with considerable determination and singlemindedness until it is almost in the bag, then something else tends to take over, making a successful completion tricky.  I begin to lose interest, my mind latches onto another idea and I am eager to get going on this new project with equal determination and singlemindedness.  Of course, undertaking a project like LEJOG does not lend itself to such thinking or action.  You have to complete each day’s ride and, what is more, do that for fourteen days before you finally come to a halt and experience the enormous, and it is enormous, sense of achievement of an epic journey completed.  So, when I am on a ride and beginning to flag, some words of encouragement are very welcome; thanks Ollie.

One thing amongst many that LEJOG has taught me is that finishing well is a vital constituent of any task and it challenges my rather manic desire to leap quickly onto the next thing without properly tying up the loose ends of the task in hand.  In short, it helped me to recognise a character weakness and gave me an opportunity to put it right and the hope that I might be able to apply what I have realised to other situations in future.

Eventually, having climb quite a long way above the river Wye, catching glimpses of it every now and again trough gaps in the trees, we reached a T junction, turned left and the bridge over the Wye hove into view.   We hit the first significant traffic since Bristol and, having crossed the bridge, ground to a halt at a set of traffic lights.  When the lights turned green in our favour we pressed on and in a short while, cycling through the small but picturesque town of Monmouth, we came to the hotel, our destination for stage four, which was situated on the outskirts of town. Once we got ensconced in the hotel and downed the obligatory protein drink (yuk!!) we set off to find somewhere to eat.  There was, as it turned out, quite a lot of choice.  A certain amount of faffing then surfaced, arguments about where to eat and what to eat, until Sam lost patience with what was beginning to feel like terminal indecision and took matter into his own hands decreeing, like some benevolent dictator, the location of a restaurant which could accommodate us all.  Personally, I was so tired I was losing the will to live and so was more than happy to run with his insistence and back him up when voices, by now somewhat feeble through lack of sustenance, were raised in objection.  As it turned out the restaurant, though packed, provided us with an excellent meal and a good choice of beer.  What more could a knackered cyclist want?  So thus replete, fortified and all arguments forgotten we headed back to the hotel for the night.

As I climbed into my bunk that night, I thought to myself, “four days done, only ten more to go!”  But before the enormity of the task ahead could dominate my thinking I was, mercifully, asleep.  “And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day” (Genesis 1, slightly modified)

Is The Universe Really Banana-Shaped?

The next challenge as far as I was concerned was crossing the River Severn by way of the cycle path along the side of the Severn Bridge.  It was exceedingly windy with sudden gusts buffeting me and causing me to wobble in, what seemed to me, an alarming fashion. This did not seem to have the same effect on the others and unperturbed they sped off into the far distance leaving me to battle the elements on my own. Later Sam suggested that what they ought to have done was to form a protective ring around me and thus keep me from the worst excesses of the wind. A good suggestion. Hindsight is a great thing! After enduring the buffeting gale for a few minutes and feeling decidedly unsafe I got off my bike and plodded across the bridge on foot.

Once the trauma of the Severn Bridge was over the riding improved. After a false flat there was a fairly long climb up to St Arvans and then a steep descent into the glorious beauty of the Wye Valley. The road hugged the river bank virtually all the way. Apart from the natural beauty of the landscape the most significant edifice we passed on the road was the elegant ruin of Tintern Abbey founded by French Cistercian Monks in the twelfth century and destroyed during the English Reformation.

As I rode past the Abbey, I got to thinking about how ruined churches have long fascinated me, in fact it would be no exaggeration to say that I often find them more spiritually potent than modern day Churches which are totally intact.  I first became aware of this when I visited the ruins of the monastery of Disibodenburg near Mainz in Germany for the first time. In 2008 I painted the ruins surrounded by autumn leaves with a chalice in the middle of the canvas.  For me there is something very evocative about the ruined walls and the way nature has taken over: not in a destructive way but almost as a complement to the exquisite stonework.  The nearest I can get to explaining what it is about such sites that so moves me is that here is a memory of a civilisation once so potent now in decline, but there is a beauty in the process of decay which has allowed something else to emerge which is powerful in a different way. At Disibodenburg the strivings of man to know God and to express that in stone has become married with the raw and beautiful power of nature.  Somehow, they have become one.  I think that is what I feel when I climb the hill and gaze upon and walk among the ruins of Disibodenburg.

That afternoon my mind went beyond the physical aspect of this coming together of human aspiration and culture with raw nature to what was happening internally for me when I stand in these potent ruins.  I think that it could be described as a synchronistic, existential moment, when an outer reality suddenly reflects an inner experience.  If the stonework represents the strivings of human consciousness to create an understanding of God and express it architecturally, then the trees surrounding and growing out of the ruins seems to indicate primal nature.   So, what is enacted before my eyes is a reflection of the coming together of rational thought and the unconscious, the marriage of which evokes something new, creative and exciting within me.

The other aspect of both Disibodenburg and Tintern Abbey that speaks profoundly to me is the fact that the roof of both buildings has been completely obliterated leaving the standing walls open to the sky.  This I also find a powerful image of a spiritual reality.  When it comes to ruined churches with their roof spaces open to the elements it seems they speak to me of the fact that we cannot finally define, encapsulate and imprison God in manmade structures either of stone or of human intellect, no matter how beautiful.  When I look up from the vantage point of a ruined nave, I do not see an imagined view of a heavenly scene cunningly crafted by an artist, I see the vast expanse of the ever-changing sky and, beyond, the infinity of a universe which is so vast that it is beyond my comprehension.  So, it is with God, a vast personal loving reality with which I have a relationship but one which I can never fully comprehend nor contain for I lack the capacity.  To claim that I could attain to such a total comprehension would be rather like asking an ant running across the back of my hand to describe what a human being is like.

As I was approaching our destination for the day, I passed Sam, hands off the handle bars of his bike, eating a banana, and my thoughts turned from the glories of human aspiration to know and reflect God and I had to admit that Darwin was probably right concerning our origins as a species.  All perceptions have their day and like the passing miles of LEJOG we move on as part of the human story.