A reflection on a life dedicated to finding my way home.
Here I am, a traveller, on my way to where, I do not know. The child of two houses, with no home. There exists in me, the reins and traces of my past, holding me to nature and to a primal legacy, an unbroken line of existence that goes all the way back to the very beginning of the world. Forces which sustain me, drive me, and have sustained and driven all my ancestors, to survive. The tools, gifts given, to keep my heart beating in my chest, to keep the fire burning in my belly, to find a way for the seed of life in me to find its way, through pain and fear and adversity, to the next cycle, of each day, each moon, each season and each life. And in me also, the high window. My consciousness. The source of light, by which I might come to see how it is I got here. How the caked mud on my feet was collected on the journey winding back into the forgotten miles behind me, how I am held down, by the great pull of the earth, and how it is both a blessing but quite inescapable. And with it a feint realisation that I cannot quite decide which I love more, the wish to surrender to the safety of it, or the prodigal longing to defy it. Because, through that very window there is the other great pull. The light of a dawn waking in me, the promise of an infinite sunrise to which the lark of my soul sings. The light by which I may yet come to that vast and unmuddied ocean in me, the sublimely undulating silence. The stillness by which all is known. The stillness in which everything moves, and all movement is held. This stillness is in me. It is me. I choose to remember. I choose, to surrender. —Rocco Jarman
To the pilgrim, even the broken road leads homeward.