A Tale of Two Bridges. Making the Transition

Bridges are so symbolic, all about connecting two sides of a divide, and the process of transition from one to the other. When I started this website I was still back in winter Britain, living in a small market town in County Durham. I would go twice a week into the historical city of Durham, and, having found a café to my liking, I began to develop what would be the signature website for this new stage of Pilgrimage. I wanted it to be ready to pick up the narrative themes when I was ready to write in India. 

The view from the café looked out over the medieval footbridge across the River Wear, with the castle and cathedral looming darkly over the town. When I first came here, a busker played folk music on an electric mandolin – Scarborough Fair – that very evocative poignant English folk song popularised by Simon and Garfunkle, that set the tone for the weeks that panned out from then, mostly cold and bleak as January and Febuary wore slowly by. Subsequently the bridge was more often taken over by ranting evangelists preaching God, Jesus and the Bible to the crowds of deaf uninterested passersby. It felt sad to see them, in that they clearly had no insight into how the whole numinous and associated narrative energy had long moved on, leaving them proclaiming a faith in long redundant language that no-one wanted to hear. And I sometimes thought about what it might take to catch people’s attention because I certainly think that the majority of folk are lost and seeking something in their lives, to lift them out of slavish dependency on the arid material and secular world they are embedded in, and give them some confidence in a different, more transcendent vision.

Here in the Durham café I conceived the new website and an Instagram account to complement it, for the journey itself and the temple visits that I planned to be making again, in the way I had during the first. I had no prior experience whatever of Instagram and a poor enough opinion of it, so it felt odd to be forcing myself to engage with a world that functioned so exclusively on self promotion, which is not ever a quality I would associate with the dynamics of spiritual journeying and the seeking of enlightenment, being pretty much focussed upon narrow notions of egoic identity in the secular world. And I had no idea how to go about capturing the generality of peoples’ interest in the strange dynamics that, to an outside observer, could too readily present as random wanderings and temple tourism that had marked the first Pilgrimage stage from 2019 through to 2022. 

I have now been back here three weeks, and look out over such a vastly different scene, of the famous Ram Jhula bridge over the Ganges. The cold bleak winter leading up to Christmas and early spring days of the north of England have now long evaporated, to seem as though they really were more a dream, although well do I remember my frustration at how slowly time seemed to move then, and what twelve remaining weeks to the departure date felt like.

With three difficult transitional weeks behind me now, inevitably confronting the sorts of issues that had all played an important part in my demise here the previous year (https://turbulentpriest.net/2024/02/13/was-it-all-a-dream/) I now face the yawning open space of the rest of my time here, and whatever that will prove to be. It is my plan to go shortly up into the mountains to the region I have long associated with the sublimest experiences of the first Pilgrimage: Thais Dharali, some 15 kilometres outside of Gangotri itself, where the Bhagirathi River, one of two headstreams of the Ganges, is accessible by foot,  when mostly it flows through deepcut gorges. There you find the ancient sunken temple of Kalp Kedar, same age as Kedarnath, some 700 years old, where I have carried out private pujas, including what I termed the ‘rite of termination’ to formally end the 2019-2022 Pilgrimage cycle. Inevitably it carries such special memories and seems to me to be the best place to start this new Pilgrimage stage, phoenix style, where the first ended.