Pilgrimage @ MindSay

Just a brief note on my wonderful experiences here in the Holy Land, on my first pilgrimage to the Baha'i World Center, during my 9th year as a Baha'i -- the Baha'i Administrative buildings, Shrine of the Bab (and Abdul-Baha), the Terraces and Monument gardens, the buildings and locations suffused with Baha'i history in Akko (Akka), across the bay from Haifa, the most Holy Spot on Earth for Baha'is: at Bahji: the resting place of His Holiness, the Blessed Beauty, Baha'u'llah's mortal Remains.  The experience is amazing and hard to put into words.  While i step and repose, pray and meditate in these Holy Places, i keep Nancy on my mind-- and Rahi, and ask the Central Figures of our Faith for Their blessings.  (And also i have or will pray for all my family, friends and acquaintances, as well as anyone whose name they have asked me to mention in the Shrines).
Thankyou God for your blessings!  Ya-Baha'u'l-Abha!

I've discovered that I'm on a pilgrimage. I didn't intend to do this—it just kind of happened. Coincidentally, my final for the semester was on comparing my semester abroad to a pilgrimage—so I recognize the signs.

In my paper, I talked about pilgrimage as a rite of passage consisting of a leave-taking, a period of liminality, and a return. One takes off from all that has become familiar and safe to face mental and physical trials which act as a catalyst in our transformation from one state of being to the next. These rites of passage occur at threshold times in our lives: birth, between adolescence and adulthood, marriage, in becoming a parent, in leaving youth behind, and before death. 

A pilgrimage is also a rite of passage and during the pilgrimage you experience all three stages. But what state of being are you leaving behind—and what will you become? Perhaps it only marks a certain stepping stone—afterward everything in your life is delineated as "before" this event—or "after." Perhaps no further meaning is necessary. Perhaps this is because the journey itself makes its own meaning. To journey outward is also to journey inward. You go out into the wilderness alone, naked, and you enter into yourself and discover what you are really made of.

This is certainly true of each journey I have been on; however, in this case, south India has also been a pilgrimage in the usual sense as well. Beginning in Chennai and traveling down the coast—to Mahabalipuram, Chettinand, Ramashwarm and too many places with unpronounceable names, which I can't just now recall—I've visited temple after temple and along the way seen uncountable pilgrims on my same route. Indians from all over—from north and south and east and west—have flocked here to pray in temple after temple. To make offerings, give thanks, and placate the gods. Maybe to find a husband, a wife, wealth, or happiness—maybe to find themselves. I haven't seen may Westerners on this path, I can't say why, and there's always a great curiosity about what in the world I could be doing here. "Why?" I don't have answers. I ask myself the same, every day.

I wonder, though, if I can ever come home. There's a type of bird (swallows maybe?) that can never touch the earth. They must perch high up because if they landed on the ground they would never be able to take off again. I feel like that sometimes. Like I can never rest—though sometimes I am tired—but always, always this drive to keep on, to see what has never been seen before. Like Tennyson's Ulysses:

 Vest the dim sea: I am become a name;
 For always roaming with a hungry heart
 Much have I seen and known; cities of men
 And manners, climates, councils, governments,
 Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
 And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
 Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
 I am part of all that I have met;
 Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
 Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
 For ever and for ever when I move.
 How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
 To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
 As tho' to breath were life. Life piled on life
 Were all to little, and of one to me
 Little remains: but every hour is saved
 From that eternal silence, something more,
 A bringer of new things; and vile it were
 For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
 And this gray spirit yearning in desire
 To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
 Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

I lie about the packet of crisps.

So I’m obviously not on my way to Oldham. We were meant to go today to see Granddad and spend the weekend before Dad went on his second pilgrimage, but now we’re going next weekend and my parents didn’t see fit to tell me beforehand. It’s not as though I changed my plans to fit around this weekend, did I? Arse ¬_¬

I now miss the Wii weekend, and don’t get to see Gav for two weeks. And after that, I don’t get to see him for three weeks. Least I have my DS for company. How sad is that?

Last weekend I went to see Gav to try and sort things out further, and we ended up playing Guitar Hero, and Guitar Hero II. Needless to say, my attempts were abysmal XD though I did manage to get about 80% accuracy for two songs: Heart Shaped Box and Killing In The Name Of. I think, Ask Gav, he’ll know.

I saw him again yesterday, and hanging out with his ill pets wasn’t a lot of fun. There was poo and puke. Ew.

Moving on… I’ve got a Macroeconomics test on Monday, and a Quantitative Methods for Economics (that’s “Math” to you lot) test on Tuesday. Yay, because maths is fun. True story.

I guess I’ll stop procrastinating now before Gav comes back and yells at me for something or other.

Not really, I can kick his arse XD

Mena

Whew!!!

 

Even so, I'll update you by copying here an email I sent to Isabel (from my UBC education class), when she asked what I was doing now...

 

Hey Isa,

Jane Austen hated Bath, but it’s hard to see why. She lived there for six years, and during that whole time she never wrote a word, which is too bad. She only lived to the age of forty one, so to loose six years of productivity was a tragedy (though of course, she would have had no way of knowing that then). To be fair, her father did die while the family was staying in Bath, and she was forced to live on a greatly reduced income, moving into smaller and smaller houses, and snubbed by most of her former acquaintances. So I guess she may have had a reason to hate the people of Bath, but I can’t imagine anybody hating the city. It’s ironic, in the middle school English class sense of the word, that Austen hated Bath so much because it’s the place that I think is most associated with her legacy. And it was for that reason that I decided to take a day trip there last Thursday—I was on a Jane Austen pilgrimage.

As a reward for having (barely) completed our end of term papers, my friend and I decided to spend a day in Bath, which is a convenient hour and a half train ride away from London. I could barely sleep the night before because I was so excited, but because the train left at eight I managed to get to bed early so that I could wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed for the day ahead. When I arrived at the station to meet my friend I was practically jumping up and down with excitement, but I noticed Allison, my friend was looking decidedly lack luster. She’s almost as big an Austen admirer as I am, so I was perplexed by her lack of enthusiasm. I asked her what was wrong, and she explained that somebody in her dorm had decided that it would be cute to spray the fire alarm with gasoline and light it on fire at two in the morning. Consequently, the building had to be evacuated, and she was not allowed back into her dorm until four something. Under the circumstances I suppose I could grudgingly allow for her lack of enthusiasm, but as she convinced me it was nothing a nap on the train and a double mocha couldn’t cure I wasn’t going to let her exhaustion dampen my excitement.

The train ride to Bath was amazing. Allison dozed and I amused myself by listening to that mornings NPR podcast and staring out the window at the passing countryside. British countryside is gorgeous by the way. All of that rain keeps everything nice and green, and as we were experiencing one of the few sunny days allotted to the British isles every month that just barely keep the natives from committing suicide, it was more than pleasant to count the sheep and let the train rock us towards Bath.

When we arrived there were signs pointing us towards the center of town. We secured a caffeine IV for Allison, and then made our way to the central square. One of the things we found about Bath is that every major attraction comes equipped with a little old lady (usually somewhere in between fifty five and eighty) with an upper class accent who is more than thrilled to share with you her knowledge about local history. This was the case at our first stop, Bath Abbey, which I recognized from the cover of my copy of Northanger Abbey. We went inside to pay our respects, and were promptly greeted by the requisite little old lady, who handed us a pamphlet about the history of the church, and then stood meaningfully by the donation box and cleared her throat. After we deposited the “suggested” two pounds fifty, we headed into to explore. I glanced at the pamphlet she had handed us, and noticed that they had printed a timeline for the history of the Church, beginning in 0 AD with the birth of Jesus Christ. I admired their thoroughness. The Abbey was a bit like a smaller version of Westminster—there were plaques all over the walls and inscriptions on the flagstones under our feet. I again got the uncomfortable feeling that comes with treading on the dead.

We wandered silently around the Abbey, and Allison saw a plaque whose inscription she found particularly amusing. She stopped for a minute to copy it, and I wandered on. Seeing me unaccompanied, the little old lady wandered over to me and started asking where I was from, and what I was doing in Bath. When she heard I was American, she took me over to a place she called the “American Corner” which housed a number of plaques for Americans that had been buried in the Abbey. There was a flag hung in the corner, and she pointed out that it only had forty-eight stars, confiding that it was from “Before the War,” which I guessed meant World War two. I asked her if she had a favorite plaque, and she lead me to a corner passed a couple truly garish designs replete with Angels and ivey, to a small marble carving hung on the wall which was decorated with music notes. This was the plaque for a Bath native who had been an opera singer, who had traveled to Europe, where he met Mozart. I’m not sure the details of the story, but he persuaded Mozart to come to Bath when Mozart toured England. I thanked the woman for showing it to me, and asked her if she had read every engraving in the church. “Not yet” she replied, and I liked the way she said “yet.”

After I thanked the guide, Allison and I met up and headed back out onto the square—there was still a whole day of Jane related tourism yet to come!           
 

Two of the six novels take place directly in Bath—her first full length novel Northanger Abbey and her last Persuasion. Though one was written before her disastrous experience there and one afterwards, and there’s a marked difference in the way the city is portrayed in the two novels. But in both novels she mentions all of the Bath attractions, many of which I saw on my trip there.