THE ROAD
Just the sound of the those two words together makes something inside of me leap. Sometimes it’s a recipe for disaffection. Sometimes it soothes it. But I’ve been out here much of the latter half of my life, and I confess a fondness for the road I never saw coming. I’ve been entrusted with something like noble work, and something like some fitness for that work. And the road is the place for it. And, thank the saints, I found that out.
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I suppose it has a pilgrimage quality to it, something of the Campostella, the St Dyfed, the old walled city on the hill. That’s where you’re headed when your soul’s work summons you to the road.
It’s proverbial: there’s a wide world somewhere out beyond what you’re used to. There’s a hunger sometimes, a tang to life that weeps out beneath the certainties, the prejudices, the easy satisfactions. You’re sprung from the garden of your early days.
Of course, if we all left town because we’re unhappy with the place, if we all make a beeline for the non-quarantine jungle retreat (remember that?), the medicine summit, the batik backwater governed with benign administrative neglect … well, those places would be overrun and overwhelmed, and we’d exhaust them. And they are. And we have.
There’s some kind of travel company that’ll take your money – big money, it is – to bring you to dangerous places, places ravaged by terrible locked-and-loaded conflict and pestilence and bad luck and bad decisions, to let you play at ‘war correspondent’, working out your moral adrenaline while you work out your ennui.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
That’s a crucial caveat for the road.
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I’ve had such a remarkable run of things. I’ve come to learn something of the wide, wide world by being paid to go there, and to be troubled aloud. This has required a lot of discernment: are the invitations licence to bitch and moan, to weave one-size-fits-all remedies? Being on the road defines privilege. Not the belligerent, grievance strewn back alley of bad manners and bad intent privilege. Instead, the great good fortune untraceable to whatever merit you’ve gathered round you, that all but beggars your biography.
Being on the road means remembering and remembering again that the people you meet here are mostly not on the road. They’re at home. They’re trying to make a go of it, to get out from under the headlines and the hype and the holistic heresies that may have drawn you to them and their place. They’re trying to survive.
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And then sometimes out here you meet someone whom the accidents of birth or the happenstance of some upswell in the current world order separated you from, or kept you from. You don’t know them, you don’t even know they’re out there. But some unimagined moment comes on, or something you’ve done takes on a life of its own different from your life, or the news of you precedes you. And there’s a kinship that comes to claim you, a kinship past the familiars of blood and family. And you sit quietly with new witnesses, new allies, deep into the groove of why you’re here.
I’m reminded then of what Dylan said of his early life: sometimes you’re born in the wrong place, and you’ve got to rise up to give destiny a foothold in the proceedings.
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I came to the end of a series of talks last night. The hall was full, the forlornness of endings wafting. And I closed out the gig with an off the cuff rendering of a story from Nights of Grief and Mystery we used to call The Poet. It’s a true story that really happened, in Ireland, wherein an old man sees me clearly, as awash in his sorrows as a man can be. He gave me advice for the road. He said: “Never harm a poet.” He said: “Never love a poet neither.” He said: “Never be a poet.” To the third I answered, indefensibly then: “Ah, Michael. It’s too late”. And Michael said, as a man does when in the full sway of life’s beautiful, bottomless mystery: “Aye. It’s too late for the both of us.”
If that’s true of you, well, I’ll see you somewhere out here.
Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
