This is not your Mother's America!

Or even your Grandmother's if you were born after Y2K, one year before 9/11, the day like no other that left its mark on the American psyche. Never forget became the rallying call to never allow such an atrocity to happen in the homeland again. A whole generation grew up in that shadow. Never forget belongs as much to them as to those who suffered loss of loved ones because their loss was that of innocence.

I'm thinking today about my my grandchildren and my daughter who will celebrate her birthday four days after the Fourth of July, the day all Amercans celebrate hard-won freedom fought for by other generations who refused to be oppressed by a King in another land.

Their refusal created a country of freedoms that some of us have enjoyed like none other. Birthing freedom required long and hard labor pains. Your mother or grandmother can tell you how long she labored giving birth because she will never forget. Ask her! Some things stick forever in our minds. Some things that should never be forgetten succumb over time under the weight of life events.

I, like you, have memories that I will never forget, no matter what. Still, the most significant and meaningful and needed and important and sacred truths are dangerously close right now to being forgotten in this "land of the free" in 2024.

We have forgotten so much of who and what we were becoming, and are coming so close to forgetting who we are as Americans. Waving the flag right side up or upside down is not the point. Having a flag is the point! Generations upon generations have stood up for that flag on too many battle fields around the world to let it have been for nothing. There will be others as we sadly know. Nobody should give their life in vain: To lose our freedoms on top of losing loved ones who fought for those freedoms for us is undemocratic. It is my contention that if mother's had charge of the world, all war would cease: No mother would agree to send her children to die.

Our mothers and grandmothers know a lot about hard won freedoms. The generations raised by these women have benefited greatly, until recently, from their efforts to gain rights they believed were meant for all, not just for some. By the time I was my daughter's age of 33, I had more rights than women who had led the way: I was educated, I was in the workforce, I was paid at least a minimum wage. Today's granddaughters and daughters have been on a backward slide from where I started five decades ago. Worse though, is how they started from a point of lost innocence. To be sure, when my sisters and mother and grandmother and I shared this earth together there were global threats. But, we knew, or thought we knew where those real threats were lurking far from home as they had always.

( Of course, it must be said that being in the white majority gave a sense of false security that others understood differently from threats faced here at home.) As I came of age, we knew who the "good guys and bad guys" were and where. I remember vividly the nuclear arms race with Russia and the S.A.L.T. (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) for which I slapped a bumper sticker on my car for the first and only time. That was a foreseeable real threat that opened my innocent eyes to possible dangers to my homeland. When you are young and feel threatened the loss of innocence is at stake. When older, threats against everything held dear with the benefit of hindsight can be paralyzing. An alternative to facing grave fear is flight.

Traveling again across the ocean the past two summers, I have noticed the same scenarios in Germany as in the UK that I see in the US. "We the people" are living it up! Yes, COVID was a killer in every way, and the backlash is still being sorted through from work-life to leisure. Yet, for all the whining about a bad economy, we are out in the restaurants and bars and shopping at break-neck speed for luxuries. We are living it up while the world burns up and the migrants float over (if they're lucky), and the courts defer cases against an ex-President who wants his old job back in the next few months! The highest court in our homeland, shocking even conservatives, has given him a leg up in their ruling of immunity against his own misdeeds that threatened our democracy in real time. RBG must be rolling over in her grave. The founders would be rolling over in their graves to see how perilously close to the edge we have come to losing all that they believed to be "our sacred Honor:" ". . . We hold these truths to be self evident . . .A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people". If in her wise and courageous dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Sonia Sotomayor had written the word "Tyrant" rather than "King", violations against the Constitution on January 6, 2020 would have been crystalized forevermore.

There is no other summer in my lifetime, or our country's, that has been on the verge of losing all the rights and freedoms fought for and won, over two and half centuries. Yet, we are off to the beach as if this might be our last chance for "the last perfect summer". As the poet wrote in the summer of 1914 ". . .summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division"* History shows that those who died in WWI and II had lived it up while they could as if what was ahead could be forestalled. We should know better. We do know better. When we look in our hearts we know all that will be forgotten if we cease to be a Democracy. There comes a moment when you feel the sea change, hear the tectonic plates moving under the ground you call home. This is such a moment. Never forget this day for it might not come again in our lifetime, or the lives of our daughters and granddaughters.

*Thomas Hardy, After a Journey

When the Norwich pilgrimage was over and the Pilgrim Sisters, as we referred to ourselves, had returned home, I stayed on at the Guesthouse. One evening when I returned to the kitchen for tea, Astrid

appeared sipping a glass of red wine. “Are you one of the Florida group”? She already knew the answer by my accent. Earlier in the week, a fourteen-year-old girl had begged her father to talk with me because she had never met an American. As soon as I said “Hello”, she gushed:“I love your accent”! Clearly, I could not be totally incognito in this part of the world. As I browsed the tea selection, Astrid was asking  where I lived in the States. She caught my attention when she said she knew exactly where on that large peninsula of Florida the historic fifteenth century city of St. Augustine was located. “I ended my cross country bike trip there”, she said. I stopped looking at the tea selection to ask: “Where did you bike from?” “I started in Alaska''. “When”? “About ten years ago”. Astrid had silver-gray hair, like mine. I had more questions: “How long did it take”? “Altogether, I biked for two years from here in England across the world, ending in th U.S”. “Did you do this on your own''? Her crystal clear blue eyes lit up: “Yes. Yes, I did.” I didn’t ask, but wanted to know how old she was at the time. “Have you written a book”? She said she had not intended to do so, but she had met so many nice people on the way that she wanted to share those stories. “The media always tells the other side. But, I met wonderful people everywhere I went”. Her words rang true for me there in Norwich. The “Friends of Julian”, the innkeeper, the local cafe owner, had all welcomed me with open arms.  After our conversation, I noticed the bicycle parked in the laundry room. Astrid had biked from London and stopped at the Inn for a night on her way to her brother’s house somewhere in the south. The next morning, she was as fresh and excited as the teen who had oozed all that youthful energy. We wished each other safe “onward journeys”. Immediately, I downloaded Astrid’s book to my e-reader. She is indeed another person on the way whose true life story had got me thinking about life choices and decisions. Who else would be coming to the Inn? I asked Josiah, the innkeeper.

Only one large group from a few towns away who had studied Julian would come to stay briefly. Then, “You’ll have the place all to yourself”. “”Yippee”, I said. Although that was exactly how I would prefer it, I knew the chance meetings had enriched me and each in their own way mattered to my own experience.

https://www.cyclingfullcircle.com/

Returning Home . . .

The pilgrimage is complete in the return.

Completion is not closure, in the words of John O’Donohue * who lived and died prematurely in this part of the world: “Closure — the word is unfortunate, it is not faithful to the open-ended rhythm of experience. Creatures made of clay with porous skin and porous minds are quite incapable of the hermetic sealing that the strategy of “closure” seems to imply. The word “completion” is a truer word.”

In the days leading up to the pilgrimage, I copied those words from a book I received as a gift from a dear friend. The message has been tucked into my writing book that now holds the words, thoughts, feelings, moments, and memories of the past six weeks. Two days before my departure, I wrote the following: “Already, I know, this will be my first, but not the last pilgrimage that I will lead”. On my final morning in Norwich, I slipped quietly into St. Julian’s Church and left a prayer to be read in the anchorage in my absence: “Please pray for my return”. The double-entendre was intentional. Returning has had its own significance before I ever departed. One of my “Pilgrim Sisters”, an artist, gave each of us a hand -painted card with one of the five words that make up a true pilgrimage: Call; Departure; Arrival; Labyrinth; Return. She gave me the “Return” card which I also carried with me. “A bona fide pilgrimage may mean becoming more conscious about yourself and the world . . . But it needs to bring about a change of mind, a shift in the soul. No change, no pilgrimage”, said O’Donohue.

Change is inevitable and that moment of conscious change began for me on the threshold the day before the departure at my granddaughter’s college graduation. I saw in this lovely young woman in cap and gown the baby I had held in my arms. “The future is here. Now.” That thought has pervaded every step and day of the past six weeks from Norwich to Canterbury to London to Edinburgh to Oxford from where I write on the penultimate day of this pilgrimage. As the return comes closer, I know from past experience that anything can happen on the way home.

Five years ago, on my return from a solo pilgrimage to Julian of Norwich’s anchorage, the man seated beside me on the eight-hour flight told me he was returning home from his twenty-four year old grandson’s funeral: “He was climbing the Matterhorn and fell”. I can still hear those words in that unexpected and unanticipated defining moment of that return. I can imagine his loss now that my own granddaughter is that same age. Alive and well.

This time in my conscious expectation of the return, I am anticipating something is already waiting for me along the way. I’ll let you know what happens . . .

The video was taken from the train going from England to Scotland.

*www.johnodonohue.com