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My Pilgrim's Heart: A Woman's Journey Through Marriage And Other Foreign Lands
My Pilgrim's Heart: A Woman's Journey Through Marriage And Other Foreign Lands
My Pilgrim's Heart: A Woman's Journey Through Marriage And Other Foreign Lands
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My Pilgrim's Heart: A Woman's Journey Through Marriage And Other Foreign Lands

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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About this ebook

More than a travel memoir My Pilgrim's Heart examines all the elements of marriage and the relationships between women and a masculine world. It covers all forms of the male female relationship(s) from mother- son to husband- wife and solo woman as viewed in male dominated societies of the Middle East. The book shares how some of these relationships are can grow and change once the parties involved realize there is nothing to fear.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherBookBaby
Release dateMay 1, 2012
ISBN9780982140772
My Pilgrim's Heart: A Woman's Journey Through Marriage And Other Foreign Lands

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Rating: 2.910716428571429 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I received this book as an early reviewer. Had I checked it out from the library as I do most of my books, I would have either returned it unfinished or else skipped over large portions. It was not the interesting travel journal that I expected from the advance publicity. First, it is self-published, which always throws up red flags for me. The book would benefit tremendously from the touch of a good editor who would correct such mistakes as Woodrow Wilson dividing up Europe after World War II. The Australian author's son set out on a pilgrimage from Canterbury to Jerusalem. I remained unclear as to the purpose of this pilgrimage after finishing the book since neither the author nor the son appeared to be affiliated with any particular religion. Author Dale joined her son in Rome, and her complaining begins almost immediately. When her feet and other parts of her body hurt, she hops on a bus or train and waits for her son to arrive at their point of rendezvous. This seemed like a very unusual version of a pilgrimage. The book is also billed as a pilgrimage through marriage. The author had been married for less than a year to a Dutchman, who she apparently did not bother to get to know very well before she married him. (It sounded like she married him for his money.) Whether she can stand to stay married to him forms a lengthy section of the meanderings of this book. She flits back and forth between travel and marriage throughout the work. The travel sections have their interesting moments; the marriage sections do not. To save you the bother of reading the book: she divorces her husband. Skip it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Stephanie Dale tells the story of accompanying her son on his pilgrimage from England to Jerusalem. At least her son did walk that distance; Stephanie only tried to walk from Rome to Istanbul. And she didn't even walk that whole leg as she would take a bus whenever she needed to rest. Stephanie practically describes every step of the way when she did walk including her interior dialogue about the state of her marriage. I quickly got tired of her moans about her husband's requests for sex which she thought he demanded because he was financially supporting her. Why did these two get married in the first place? That would have been the better question to ask.I also got tired of how often she described what they ate (which seemed to be mostly chocolate and mandarins). It is true that eating local food is one of the delights of travelling but I really didn't need to know every time they stopped for a snack.There were some worthwhile parts to the book. The journey through the countries that used to make up Yugoslavia was quite interesting and I very much envied her extended stay in Istanbul. But for every little nugget of delight there was a whole plateful of extraneous or annoying detail.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    [My Pilgrim's Heart] by [[Stephanie Dale]]This is a fascinating story of a woman's walk from Rome to Syria, a near perfect setting for exploring her gender socialization as well as her relationships with both men and women.   It is intensely introspective, and is truly about the journey of her marriage, as the title clearly states: A Woman's Journey through Marriage and Other Foreign Lands.  Many philosophies suggest in differing terminology, that people examine their "dark side", reclaim their "projections", etc. in regard specifically to their choice of partner.  This is exactly what Ms. Dale does in her marriage.  It is an amazing  and courageous journey she undertakes. I LOVE this book.  If you have any interest in these ideas, don't miss it! You'll never look at your partner the same way.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I received this book through LT's Early Reviewer program, and I have to confess to writing this review before finishing the book. I live in Italy and recently went to Istanbul, so this memoir of the author's walk from Rome to Istanbul with her son was very appealing to me. But I just can't seem to connect with the author. There are a few beautiful, lyrical observations set into pages of inner self exploration that are just boring and somewhat narcissistic (but I suppose that's what a memoir is). I have put the book down early on - after reading pages upon pages of the author's recent marriage and her complaints about her husband, who sounds like an old, lecherous, boring man who is a member of a religious cult, the author then describes an incident that occurs just before she and her son begin their walk. She finds a beautiful, expensive, travel backgammon set that she desperately wants to purchase, and after thinking about it, decides that she will purchase it, and she knows her husband will be pleased for her to buy something that makes her so happy. I found this moment to be the culmination of my growing confusion with the author's memoir. All of a sudden, this man who seemed so terrible, is now described as someone who sounds caring and loving. Another odd detail is that she comments on how she and her son are polite to one another, yet have no relationship. But she and her son walked the pilgrim trail, over 1000 miles, in Spain together only seven years prior to the walk of "My Pilgrim's Heart." How do you walk that long with your son and not get to know him as a person? If I can continue reading, perhaps the author's relationships will begin to make sense, but I can tell this book is going to take me months to get through. I just find the book, so far, to be too much of one woman's inner world that doesn't really make sense or keep the attention of a reader.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I received this book as an early reviewer. Had I checked it out from the library as I do most of my books, I would have either returned it unfinished or else skipped over large portions. It was not the interesting travel journal that I expected from the advance publicity. First, it is self-published, which always throws up red flags for me. The book would benefit tremendously from the touch of a good editor who would correct such mistakes as Woodrow Wilson dividing up Europe after World War II. The Australian author's son set out on a pilgrimage from Canterbury to Jerusalem. I remained unclear as to the purpose of this pilgrimage after finishing the book since neither the author nor the son appeared to be affiliated with any particular religion. Author Dale joined her son in Rome, and her complaining begins almost immediately. When her feet and other parts of her body hurt, she hops on a bus or train and waits for her son to arrive at their point of rendezvous. This seemed like a very unusual version of a pilgrimage. The book is also billed as a pilgrimage through marriage. The author had been married for less than a year to a Dutchman, who she apparently did not bother to get to know very well before she married him. (It sounded like she married him for his money.) Whether she can stand to stay married to him forms a lengthy section of the meanderings of this book. She flits back and forth between travel and marriage throughout the work. The travel sections have their interesting moments; the marriage sections do not. To save you the bother of reading the book: she divorces her husband. Skip it.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    My Pilgrim's Heart is the story of Stephanie Dale & her son Ben's trip, by foot, from Rome to Israel. I was looking forward to this book a lot, and instead I found myself disapointed. While the story itself provides a few good moments, I found the writing disjointed, rambling, and far too wordy for my liking. Dale is a complainer, her feet, her marriage, the travel, etc. I wanted to see growth and knowledge, instead I found a person who wrote a book that spends its time stuck on the negative, instead of all the beauty and positives surrounding her. Such a journey of self-actualization is not an easy one to take. I get that. There will be some negatives along the way, but I found Dale's thoughts & story centered more around the problems than the actual results. I wanted more about the people she met, the places she saw, and the things she did, and less about her personal issues.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I spent the better part of a month reading this book. I was looking forward to an adventure with a strong female lead. I like hearing about new lands and the quirky locals. I got nothing like that and was disappointed. She complained about her marriage, her sore feet and her son not understanding. How many times do I have to hear about clean white sheets, backgammon and chocolate? There was no such luck with beautiful landscapes or locals. She was just to self absorbed for it to have any substance. I will not be suggesting this or even passing it on.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a memoir of a woman's journey on foot, accompanying her son for a significant leg of his walk from the UK to Israel. The author's plan, when she sets out, is to walk from Rome to Greece. She makes it a good deal of the way but winds up taking a train to Istanbul when her son decides to continue his trek through mountains when he own self can only fathom a journey through an alternative route in the low lands.This is as much, if not more, about the author's methaphorical, internal musings as it is about the sights on her travels. Most prominent among this reflections, is her marriage and the difficulties she is having in it. The author mentions her previous life on a commune of women and as a feminist lesbian and talks about her marriage to a Dutch man, as it was before she left on her walk. Never does she explain her decision to have married this man in the first place. Unsurprisingly, given this, her journey leads her to a decision to end her marriage.There's a certain cadence to this book that kept me reading. While I was far from engrossed, I was still able to feel the rhythm of the walk and read on as Stephanie walked on.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    My Pilgrim's Heart reminded me of Eat, Pray, Love quite a bit for obvious reasons. The protagonist is certainly wrapped up in her feelings and her sensitivities which she makes no secret of. She has come on this monumental pilgrimage with her twenty-something son who has some interesting quirks to his personality along with his mother. She does fairly well physically with the exception of her feet which always seem to be blistered and hurting. Emotionally, she's trying to work out her feelings about her quite disastrous-sounding marriage of less than a year. It's pretty obvious sheshouldn't be in that marriage but it takes her a long long time to come to that realization. All told, a pretty good book although quite a bit longer than it should have been. I actually liked it better than EPL!
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I was excited to receive this book as I love travelogues, especially when written from a woman's perspective. Well, that's not really what you get with this book. The author spends an inordinate amount of time complaining about her marriage, a fairly recent marriage at that. In addition, the author is quite wordy, almost to the point where it seems she likes to hear herself talk. Sorry folks, this one was a dud, and a struggle to finish.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I normally love books about travel and pilgrimage. I normally love books that are strong on female introspection, particularly when looking at relationships. I really want to like this book, and there are parts so far that I do enjoy, and certain phrases and paragraphs really stick with me as truisms, but... I'm having a hard time getting through it. I really like the travel pieces. I might appreciate the introspective parts as well, except I generally would expect more from a women with her experiences. She seems to be well educated, struggled raising her son, and clearly seems adept at introspection. This sort of inner turmoil and marital issues, only a year into a marriage seem like they should be coming from an impulsive 20 year old. I feel like she should have sorted her self out before now, and it grates on me. Probably because I really wanted to identify with her as a mother of an adult child traveling the world. I love her sense of adventure and spirit. I hope this book ends well for her and her marriage. I will continue to struggle through it to get to the end and maybe it will pick up and I will have to rewrite my review (I hope so!). Right now, I'd only give it 3 1/2 stars. If I could have bypassed the first 35 pages and started with the traveling section I would probably be enjoying this book a lot more.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The author's journey through foreign countries is very interesting. The details about the countryside and people are what I look for in a book about travel. On the other hand, I did not like the author's reflections on marraiage. Statements about marriage coming from a person who has been in a troublesome marriage for less than a year are somewhat ridiculous. I would have enjoyed the book more if there was nothing about her marital problems.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I have seen glowing reviews about My Pilgrim's Heart A Woman's Journey Through Marriage and Other Foreign Lands by Stephanie Dale. But I was very disappointed. It may be in part that even though I love memoirs, I have trouble with travel memoirs. I am just not interested in what people do about every single day of their trip. I am not interested in what they ate, especially if it is not is local to the area. This may be the best of the travel memoirs that I have read so far. Stephanie Dale took a long journey, mostly by foot from Rome to Jerusalem with her son for two reasons. She wanted to know her son better and she wanted work out what she felt about staying in her marriage.What I liked in this book was the occasional bursts of humor that hop through the pages. I liked knowing the purpose of her long walk. I liked reading what is different from the West in the countries that she traveled.What I didn't like is the form, a lot of entries I thought could have been easily omitted and I wouldn't have missed them. I didn't like that she seemed to pass judgment on family members without explaining how she got to her conclusion. I would recommend this book if you love travel diaries but not if you love memoirs.I received this book from Library Thing as a win but that in no way influenced my review.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Incoherent musings of an uneducated woman who cannot write. Boring.

Book preview

My Pilgrim's Heart - Stephanie Dale

others.

MULLUMBIMBY

In May 2007, my son set out on pilgrimage from Canterbury, England, on foot, bound for Jerusalem. By August he had reached Rome. For some time I had felt drawn to join him. Just for a couple of weeks. Imagine, walking through Italy! I was honor-bound, however, to a marriage, a young and troubled marriage that was sapping the life from both of us.

My husband and I were planning to drive around Australia. He is Dutch, and had yet to experience the wide brown land west of the sub- tropical paradise that is Byron Bay, on Australia’s splendid east coast. I was hopeful the journey would enliven us and offer us insight, each to the other. I told myself the magnificence of the Australian landscape was a stage upon which we might play out our torments and triumphs, that through shared experience we might become friends. At the very least, I reasoned, the trip would give us a modicum of common ground.

At the time, we were living in a rambling old wooden house outside Mullumbimby, in the rolling green hills west of Byron Bay. You might know the place: verandas on three sides, bush nudging the backyard, fruit trees as high as the roof. It was the Australia of my childhood and backdrop to the tumble dryer of our marriage. My husband whiled away his days on the veranda, watching small wallabies graze in the soft midday sunshine: a book on his lap, a carpet snake wound around the grape trellis overhead, and a steady stream of oolong tea at his elbow. Talk of our journey disturbed him. He was content on the veranda. He did not want to spoil his time in Mullumbimby planning to be somewhere else. I, meanwhile, began to dream in the night of pilgrimage—of routes woven into intricate rugs, feet treading a dusty road around an ice mountain, weeping with love for pilgrims on the streets of Santiago.

And in the spaces in between, in the corridors and rattly rooms of that old wooden edifice, my husband and I struggled with storms of our own making, the unconscious energies that surface only when they slam into the rocks of someone else’s reality. I began to pace, spider in a bottle. The call to walk with my son grew louder. I am honor-bound, honor-bound, honor-bound to wait this out with my husband. With each dream I became more restless. Honor-bound, honor-bound. Until the truth broke through and there was nothing else to do but answer the call.

Honor-bound.

Honor-bound to meet the challenge of giving truth a seat at our table, as we did on our wedding day.

Honor-bound to answer the call of the soul, each to their own.

There is a feather, black and sleek, on the floor. It pulls me up short. It’s in front of my pack, my new pack, the one I bought yesterday and parked pride of place in the corner of the lounge room floor. I kneel on the dusty wooden floorboards and reach for the feather, holding its bleached quill point in one hand and running it scissor-like through the fingers of the other. Crow. I take it as a sign, a great universal affirmation for the pilgrimage that is calling me to walk, Rome to Istanbul .

It was the crow who summoned me from solitary existence on my mountain home a few years ago: crow vision snapping me to attention, piercing yellow eyes daring me to claim my life. Then crows along the fence line as I drove down the mountain, their caw caw chorus a merry salute to my surrender. For I was bored to tears with myself and the life I had created around me. Given the term of a natural life, I had half a lifetime still to live. I had been directionless since the children left home, nigh on a decade ago. I knew what I could create, left to my own devices. What if I surrender I want to the impulse of what life presents me? What if there is only yes?

That road led me here, to the backwoods of Mullumbimby, where I wake at first light to sun rays dazzling the greens and tangled browns of the bush outside the window, where I now live with the man who is my husband, this stern Dutchman with the dished-out smile.

Every evening I lie in the bath outside on the veranda watching the stars wheel across the night sky. I have become tenderly acquainted with the brightest one, which pierces the warm water and rests in the center of my chest, so it looks as if it’s shining from my heart, beaming its light back to itself. The other day, wandering along the dirt road that runs past our door, I crossed the crumbling cement cause- way that bridges the creek and looked into the trees catching the last rays of sunlight coloring the bark. In that tiny moment I experienced a stab of ecstatic awareness: I cannot be looking at anything but my- self. Everywhere I look, anywhere I look, I see only my reflection. It’s not possible to see anything but my own reflection. There I am as that tree. There I am as that kookaburra.

There I am as the road, the creek, the wind. There I am as that chair. There I am as that painting. There I am as my husband. I can see only what I am capable of seeing; beyond that requires commitment and curiosity and then, when the novelty wears off, a willingness to jour ney into the dark. The law of reflection. I am all that I see. Therefore all I see is illusion. Therefore I am illusion, beaming my light back to myself.

This changes completely the way I receive my husband. When he stands before me at his finger-pointing best, his you are accusations delivered from the surefooted high ground of certainty, I am filled with compassion for his earnestness and good intentions, for before me is his arrogant superiority masquerading as…myself !

We married quickly, my husband and I. A year has not passed since we first met, and we have been married six months. We are not friends; we have little (on a good day) or nothing in common. Everything about me is not him. We sleep alone. We have the house for another month before the owners return to claim it. We are supposed to be driving around Australia, introducing him to his new homeland. But he needs to rest, he says. When I speak of our trip, he tells me to stop projecting into the future. Good wife that I am, I do as he says. I choke on my enthusiasm. And barreling into the silence comes a siren call. It is the summons to Rome, the one I surrendered to the drive around Australia so that my husband and I might learn to be friends. These past months, I have spoken often of my longing to join my son on his pilgrimage from Canterbury to Jerusalem. It was the Rome leg that called me loudest. Just a couple of weeks. A stroll in the country- side. My husband never said a word about it. Never entered into the conversation. Not the one about my longing. Not the one about the huge photograph in the weekend paper of me and my son silhouetted against the dawn at Finis Terre, at the end of our first pilgrimage to- gether two years ago. And not the one about my pilgrim dreams.

I am startled by the sharp poke of crow-call and my attention returns to the feather between my fingers. I stand and place it on the windowsill. A shiny black crow shoots from the tree outside and alights onto the grass, eyes yellow-white piercing the glass to meet mine.

For my husband, my pilgrimage has come out of the blue. I guess, occasionally, it is in a man’s interests to listen to his wife.

The miracle of flight. Aloft on a cushion of clouds, chasing the sun, I stare into the innocence of a never ending blue, my thoughts roaming hand in hand with forever. Rome. Istanbul. Me. Rome! I squeal to myself and say it again. Rome! I think about how long it is since I have spent time with my son—real time, just me-and-him time: only once, I realize, just once in the decade since he left home—and that was the nine-hundred-mile walk across Spain to Santiago de Compostela. My son the traveler. My son the roamer, the loner, the world citizen. At twenty-nine, he is a kindly stranger to me, the sort one hopes to meet when there is trouble on the road.

I’m can’t-sleep excited about our walk. About spending time together. About a marriage on the line. About lives forever changed. I have made a point of not asking Ben which road we’ll take to Istanbul. I know already that I do not want to know, that if it were up to me I’d choose the safest trails through the known world: a Discovery Chan- nel journey down the Italian coastline, dining at day’s end in noisy restaurants strung with old fishing nets among revelers egged on by accordion players, before crossing to Greece on a blue and white ferry and then scurrying quick smart through the unknown (to me) world to Istanbul. Yet I know in my heart that my son will seek the roads less traveled, and that means the Balkans—landmines, barbarians, dark- ness. I shake my head and smile. My hair, yesterday long and blonde, is gone. So too my husband. I miss neither. My eyes pierce the window into the blue outside the plane, the steady roar of the engines lending sound bites to rambling thoughts.

I think of Mullumbimby, of me and my husband sitting at the old wooden table on the veranda in the glorious winter sunshine just be- fore we parted, my husband’s tea set perched high between us. Precious pot, it sits on a white stand, a tea light candle burning beneath the tray to keep it warm. I didn’t know, until I met my husband, that tea light candles were for warming tea. My husband and I venture a conversa- tion. And then he says one of the few truly honest things he’s ever said to me: I wanted a wife to stand behind me. I remember thinking yes and saying nothing. I remember thinking, I am behind you.

I am behind you and I am in front of you. I am above and below you, inside and outside of you. I am a woman, as well as your wife, and I am wherever you put your attention. In this way, I flit in and out of your view. I am omnipresent and multidimensional. I am beyond your control.

Meet me in Istanbul, I said. I would love you to be there at my jour- ney’s end. Or fly to Zagreb and say, ‘Hello my love, how are you going?’ Or walk with me awhile through the mountains of Greece.

Yet he received not the invitation; rather, he perceived a command, in- sulting and rude. Perhaps it is the Calvinism of his parents that shapes his world so, or the domestic and sexual subservience to which he grew accustomed as a foreigner during twenty-five years in Thailand. Or per- haps it is the obeisance of the women around the bearded prophet of gloom he calls his spiritual teacher. Through these lenses I have deeply offended his righteous sense of place in his house.

Rome. Istanbul. I am a woman on the road, and there is only me.

As is the way with pilgrimage, it began the moment I committed to going. My life became a hymn to yes. The short walk through Italy became a pilgrimage to Istanbul, the walk of a thousand incarnations. I made no decision to go; the only decision would have been not to go.

My body hummed with certainty, with the absolute clarity of nothing else to do but this. I might be risking death—but to stay is certain death.

I look out over the darkening world outside the bubble window high in the sky, and the big water dreams that filled my nights in the weeks before we left Mullumbimby flood my mind: a lake still and dark. I am walking along a path around the edge of water that is pitch-dark and breathless. It is night and I am wearing a beautiful new dress. Thick scrub blocks my path, and without thought I drop headfirst into the deep dark water. Down, down, down I go. And there in a chamber on the sandy bed I meet my children’s father.

An ocean, vast and blue. I am swept away with the running tideway, way, way out to sea until there is only water. I feel the rise of a little wave and compel myself to ride it, to risk it taking me nowhere because this little wave is all there is. I point my face to a distant shore and the wave picks up. I put my trust in the surging blue water and ride it all the way.

A harbor, gray and dirty. I am sitting on a wooden step that leads into murky water lapping at my bare feet. People unknown sit either side of me, the great ocean liners come and go, sunset flashes orange on a white smokestack across the bay. I feel an irre- sistible force pulling me into the filthy water. I surrender to the force, and well-meaning people on either side of me grab my arms to stop me slipping away.

I smile to myself as one of the few fabulously funny things my husband ever said to me pops to mind. It was another honest thing, in the days following my announcement that I was going to Rome, to walk to Is- tanbul. I am going to Rome to walk to Istanbul! We were sitting in our favorite coffee shop when I leaned across and scooped a teaspoon of froth from his cup, chocolate-sweet, coffee-sharp. Spoon poised, I leaned across again and this time looked him right in the eye.

I said, I feel honest. To which he replied, There is a fine line between doing the right thing and the fringe of lunacy. I laughed. He smiled.

I laughed and laughed. In this moment I was happy. My husband didn’t understand me, but he was beginning to accept me. After that, we went to the camping shop. I bought a pack, my yes to the journey ahead. I bought a travel towel. My husband, gadget man that he is, also bought a towel, dark blue to my earthy red.

The pack sits in the lounge room. My husband wanders by. I want one! he exclaims. I laugh. He walks by again and announces, I want one. I laugh again. The third, fourth, fifth and sixth times he does this, I grow tired. He is wanting what he does not have. It is a trait in my husband that exhausts me, for I have learned these past months that my husband wants only what he does not have. In this way he creates a world that is ever and always out of his reach. I move the pack to my bedroom and my husband decides he needs boots. Walking boots. Serious walking boots. And a pack. No doubt when I buy my sleeping bag he’ll need one of those too. He has a friend organizing a trek in Nepal. He thinks he might go. He has friends in Japan he hasn’t seen since 1975. He thinks he might visit them. He knows men who might walk around Mt Kailash. He thinks he might join them. I understand his need to take action in the face of his wife’s apparently sudden defection. I am saddened, more so than I have been for some time, by my husband’s need to hijack anything at all pertaining to me and turn the spotlight on himself. I am also saddened not only that my husband has no true purpose in his life, but by the knowing that I am not able, or willing for that matter, to be that purpose. Mostly, I am saddened that my husband can find the energy to get off the veranda and project into the future when I am not with him, but when I am around his need for ownership of everything—material, intellectual, spiritual and emotional—shrinks my world in inverse proportion to the enormity of his fears.

For my husband has built himself a tower, and he lives on the two- hundredth floor. The construction of additional floors is underway in response to the outrageousness of my decision to abandon him to his tiny world. I tell him he married me because he is sick to death of his own company up there. I tell him he married me because he is tired of the narcissistic company he keeps. I tell him he married me because he knows I will burn the tower down. I tell him I can’t save him when he falls. My husband tells me men fear me, especially those I count among my closest friends. He tells me I am fickle. He tells me I am too men- tal. No one, I think, can save us from ourselves. I look into his face and feel the ache in my jaw, the tension in my teeth, the agony of rigidity. I look at my husband’s un-smile, and in the face of his discontent, the lights of my life go on.

The hardest thing I have done in recent times is announce to him that I am going to Rome, that with my back against the wall of our marriage there is nothing else to do but yodel from the edge of courage and claim all of myself and all of my life and trust the freefall and fallout will lead our marriage somewhere alive and true.

My husband tells me he is glad I’m going because he will have his free- dom. He says, You never know what might happen, which I presume is code for, I plan to meet another woman who will please me.

I tell him I am not his keeper.

I am lear ning that compromise has no place in a healthy mar- riage, for compromise is death—at least for one and ultimately for both. I am lear ning to love without condition and, in so doing, free myself from imposing conditions upon others. I am lear ning about the truth of all of me and thereby allowing the truth of another. I am lear ning to take responsibility for all that I am and all that I seek.

With or without my marriage, I am living my longing and my longing is the path. And none of this is too much to ask of my husband.

I am not the first woman stung by the rubber band of reality on her honeymoon, nor the first to experience the cold light of con- jugal dawn burning the fairy dust from her eyes, nor even the first to wake to the slow dread of rising panic that this is the rest of my life! Our honeymoon was a turning point. Bangkok, actually. The sixteenth floor of the Marriott, my husband’s favorite place in the world. He’d spent twenty-five years in this city. The potential of his encyclopedic bank of tales to tell was terrifying. For six months

I had listened to his stories, litanies of miniscule irrelevancies. I could listen no more.

Darling, I said, shhhhhh. Let’s be here. Bangkok Marriott, April 2007. If we see something that prompts a memory and you’d like to share it with me, tell me then.

I risked the hurt. I risked his pain. Stoic that he is, it danced across his face until he swallowed it. In truth, I wanted to scream and strangle him. It started at first light, the moment my eyes popped open in the morn- ing. He didn’t look at me while he spoke. He roamed through time and space, one story leading to another to another, spiraling up and down, requiring only the occasional hallelujah-honey nod from me. It was exhausting. It sucked the life out of me.

One morning I looked at him in horror, tears streaming down my face as I faced a truth too terrible about my new husband. I threw the words at him in despair: You are never going to spend a year with me among the reindeer people of the north!

This was the treasure of my dream chest, nurtured for as long as I could remember—bottom-of-the-harbour deep, Everest of my spiritworld— a dream so obvious to me I might as well have been wearing antlers on my head. Who wouldn’t want to roam the Earth with the nomadic people of the reindeer? My husband blinked as he came to terms with this new insight into the gulf of longing between himself and his wife.

No, he finally said, sobered by the ridiculous.

The things we don’t speak.

Our greatest arguments were reserved for his teacher, the mesmerist who lived across the valley from our first home in the hills of Byron Bay.

Master and disciple, they were conspiracy theorists both; and like all clever conspiracists, neither stood for questioning, especially regarding such trivialities as source and contradiction. My husband truly believed that anyone who did not follow the master was an inferior being. Hence we could not converse, for my husband sought only reverence for his intelligence and mastery. We didn’t speak, but for a while there we fought like hell. Or at least I did. His conversations were a trap and I fell into those traps time and time again. There was only one response to his seminal rantings and that was agreement; anything less was trea- son, a personal assault, an offence punishable with his standard tactical response: taking his toys and the fast-track elevator home to the two- hundredth floor. And if I was out of line contradicting my husband, I was out of the ballpark questioning the master.

If anyone had been peeking through our windows these past weeks, they would have seen nothing much at all, just an old man sitting on a veranda drinking tea and a middle-aged woman rattling around in an old house. Yet those days in Mullumbimby were consumed by internal wars that ripped our fragile truces apart.

In reality, I had been living with a man who wanted sex or a fight. For months the tiresome undercurrent of our discontent had been sex. Sim- ple, really. He wanted it. And as with anyone who wants anything, what he got was never enough. It’s like ice cream. Or chocolate. Or shopping. As for me, I am so completely and utterly over sex that I don’t care if I never experience it again for the rest of my life! Don’t even talk to me about it because, for reasons that are exhaustingly inexplicable to me, we failed over and over and over to even have the conversation. I am tired, tired, tired of its static in my brain, tired of the psychic pres- sure and the unexpressed disappointments. Tired of being wanted from. Tired of being colonized. Tired of denial. And sick to bloody death of my husband’s response in lieu of the conversation: I’m just a simple farmer’s dick.

The bile rises in my belly as I remember the last of our days together, a week in which we made love two days running. It was beautiful, hon- est, each time an act of freedom and love. Day three he wants more; I need to rest, to rejuvenate. I need time to fill the well. So he steps on my toes, commanding me to dance, and soon his bitter words reduce our lovemaking to a dusty song sheet trampled beneath the dancers’ feet. A couple of days later I made love to please the general, offering him the gift of my body from the secret world of my antiquity. I do not mean to be poetic. I was exploring new ways to meet him in his need without breaking promises to myself about the sexual availability of my body and spirit.

The silent laughter of contempt whistles through my lips as I recall our discordant dance. The day I made love to please the general, my face, to him, was a celebration of sweetness and softness. He did not see me or my silent despair ; he saw only himself in the mirror. The last time we made love he scoffed at my fakeness, express- ing disgust for my softness and smile. Again, he was seeing only himself.

The day I made love to please the general, I made him lunch after- ward. Our lovemaking had been demanding and hungry, even though we’d met between the bedsheets in a spirit of fun. The general had not seen a woman for some time, at least a few days, and it took, oh, about ten minutes for him to feel not-complete. I walked around the kitchen observing my inner world, a world that a few weeks ago was a riot of dismay and distress but was now, unburdened by the overload of an overwhelmed woman, a new and welcome way of being that was so far unnamed. I had accepted that I did not have the language to speak to my husband about the myriad prisms of light and dark we had projected onto our globe of sexual expression, and I was not prepared to cause him any more pain in our efforts to understand each other.

I gaze into the never ending blue. I am so tired of feeling alone in my marriage. Tired of my husband’s contempt when I am vulnerable. Tired of commands to be and do and please. Tired of accusations that I am withholding sex. Tired of a man who lies about his feelings. Tired of sex being the answer to everything. Tired of trivialities. Tired of ignorance and inaccessibility. Tired of the appeaser seeking to be appeased. Tired of his unwillingness to admit hurt. Exhausted that after all this time we still can’t have a conversation. And, most of all, tired of the law of reflection. Because if this is all of me, then I am also tired, so very tired, of the self-loathing. I wonder that he can reflect all this, all this, but not the best of me. Why not the best of me?

It is time to fly.

After breaking the flight at Bangkok, I settle in for the longest leg of the journey. Rome! Istanbul! I laugh. My marriage is such a night- mare that walking to Istanbul feels like a stroll in the park. I don’t even know where Istanbul is! Well, not really. Nor Rome for that matter. As for what lies between Rome and Istanbul—I have no idea. Before leaving Mullumbimby I borrowed every book in the library about the old civi- lizations of Europe. My interest coincided with the high school project that week, so there were only seven still available. Seven books that threw up the old words like a child throwing sand in the wind: Byzan- tium. Constantinople. Pompeii. Persia. Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great! Gallipoli! Backgammon! Ottoman. Istanbul. East meets West.

Heart and mind, I embraced the road ahead. My body began to hum. The walk of a thousand incarnations.

More words played in my heart: crusades, conquerors, queens, explor- ers, storytellers, empires. Grazing the pages of simple books, I sank through layers of my own being, senses slowly opening to the dust of tide and time. I received the vibration of the old stories, the resonance of ancient peoples flowing backward and forward in time, the inside- out of all that is.

My husband worried my family would think he drove me away.

They know who I am, I said.

And then I added, I was born for this. It is an extraordinary feeling, risking all there is for truth, all the while knowing that this truth is nothing more than the intangibility of my being. The longing is the path. All of me was surrendered to the road. No longer skirting the edge of my life, I was over the edge. For the first time in my life I was seeking nothing. I was—and am—beyond the boundaries of my own existence. This was the moment I had lived for since the summons of the crow called me from my mountain home. I was offering my life to freedom, for freedom’s sake. And in so doing, I was fulfilling my greatest long- ing—that I not die wondering. Consequently my world, the world I had created at Mullumbimby, was fading from reality, releasing me and, involuntarily, my husband. In walking to Istanbul I was putting all that I love and all that I am on the line. And I became excruciatingly aware that I do not choose death, death chooses me, and this gave me courage—that and the noble words of Walter Scott: One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name.

In my husband’s world, no one walks from Rome to Istanbul. In my world, my sister accompanied a handful of human beings and camels across a desert, Alice Springs to Broome. In my world, my son and I put one foot in front of the other up over the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela, traversing Spain’s northern interior through cities and villages, farms and forests. We crossed the meseta in the blazing hot sun and mountains in the wind and icy rain, and we walked all night beneath the great arcing wheel of the Milky Way.

Pilgrimage is the art of ancient travel, a subpoena from the heart that defies all common sense. It is a meeting, at once terrestrial and super- nal, between the body and the earth, the heart and God. The pilgrim is not unlike a comet, burning off all that is futile and unnecessary until all that is left is the essential, unmalleable core. The pilgrim walks the Earth, walks the wheel, walks the turning seasons, surrendering all of who she is and all she thinks she knows and all she thinks she wants to the road and the weather—the sun, rain, wind, and snow—experienc- ing humanity in our onward-ever-onward glory. As it is. As we are.

Pilgrimage is where the romance of the road meets reality, boots to the bitumen. Rome to Istanbul, the walk of a thousand incarnations, however alluring, would be an entirely different undertaking than El Camino, the mystical road to Santiago. This time we would be unsupported—no refugios (pilgrim hostels); no steady ant-stream of pilgrims sharing the journey; no yellow arrows to keep us on the path. However well-worn this route through the ages, Ben and I would be making it up as we went along, Rome to Istanbul.

Night after night as I lay in bed in Mullumbimby, staring out the win- dows into the blackness of the night forest, the irrational did its best to terrorize my confidence in the road ahead. Two words became the hooligans of my heart: Kosovo. Landmines. They were Bonnie and Clyde to my Texas backcountry. Even though I continued to entertain fanta- sies about walking through Italy, deep in my bones I knew Ben would choose the Balkans. I wanted the romance of the road. He hankered for the know-you’re-alive unknown.

The Balkans. Truth be told, I don’t even know where the Balkans are, let alone what they are. You want an opinion on Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia? As dinner party conversation, I am relatively well informed. Not because I necessarily am relatively well informed but because I can parrot infor- mation articulately and confidently, especially if I’ve read the day’s newspapers…although it’s always a bit embarrassing in the presence of someone who is genuinely well informed. Fortunately that’s not often.

Kosovo. Landmines. I wish the thought police would lock up the hooligans. Over and over in the dark I replayed a war scene from an old Austral- ian television series called The Sullivans. Tom Sullivan and his mate were making their way across open fields, bayonets ready, when

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