A Haven of Peace, a Piece of Heaven
The Bield at Blackruthven
Retreat and Conference Centre
The Journey is also a place
A Pathway of Poems comissioned by the Bield at Blackruthven for the old gravel pits
Written and read by Kenneth Steven
The Journey is also a place
by Kenneth Steven
Introduction
Listen to a few words of guidance from the poet Kenneth Steven before you begin
The Journey is also a place
by Kenneth Steven
One
When you enter a house in Scandinavia
you start by taking off your coat and shoes.
At once there is the scent of pine;
the warmth will welcome you.
You leave behind the world outside,
will come in to leave behind the cold.
Here is a doorway, a gate, a threshold.
Beyond are many rooms made of wood
and only you will choose how long you stay here.
But enter slowly and as you do
let go of all the things you do not need.
Your shoes are full of stones, the stones of many journeys.
Imagine emptying out your shoes as you come in
to let the soreness of your feet begin to heal.
There are no office doors inside this place;
no telephones that must be answered.
This is what will be your journey, and the journey is also a place.
The Journey is also a place
by Kenneth Steven
Two
Once upon a time this was not a place
or somehow had place taken from it.
There were diggers and they came for gravel;
they took what they had come for and then left.
However many living thingswould have fled,
hearing the machines working all day and night;
the shouting of the men working hard and long,
simply finishing the task they’d been given.
However many creatures must have gone
with the whine and growl of digging things
that clawed at trees and moss and earth
to reach the gravel they had come for.
So they found what they were after in the end
and went away and left a place dug out;
hollowed empty, stripped bare, despoiled
the torn earth hurting, but left at last in silence.
Even now it feels deep down, as though
in the beginning it was sea level, and when they dug
they found a far below, an underneath:
that’s what they left, a deep beneath.
How long it must have lain barren and unbothered
unwalked since there was nothing left to see;
the place just seen as little more
than what once had been a pit.
The Journey is also a place
by Kenneth Steven
Three
Something about a new tree
is bigger than anything else. The way a seed sleeps
the whole winter in deepest earth;
buried in darkness, forgotten.
And then one day when the world
has awakened back into sunlight,
you find it broken through into newness;
a stem growing strong as your hand.
Isn’t this little thing bigger
than anything we’ve ever done?
All our pride over rockets and weapons;
have we made anything as fine as a tree?
That’s what happened here when they planted
cherries and oaks and pines,
beech and birch in a whole new forest
that grew over the grave of a quarry.
The Journey is also a place
by Kenneth Steven
Four
How often do we think of the middle of the night and what happens then?
To us it is a strange and shoeless place;
our kitchens hum in grey stillness,
our gardens are dank chambers filled with shadows.
Sometimes the full eye of the moon comes and stares down into them.
In the very depths of the night at three and four in the morning
even our roads fall asleep and there is peace.
It is the time of owls; their hour. Yet not only the hour of the owls.
Move a little closer; move a little closer, look and listen.
This is the place where the deer come to drink:
from out of the woods they come on soft hooves
under the flickering stars they gather, creatures that might have been carved –
thirty of forty or more they circle, with no more sound than a whisper,
their heads bent deep to drink.
It is not about wishing we might see this
it is enough to imagine the scene,
for if we were here it would not be.
We make too much noise, have made too much noise
since we broke into the wood in the beginning –
that first wood, that Eden. We do not know how to walk softly;
we have not learned to tread lightly on the good earth
to listen instead of bringing our loudness.
It is enough to think of them coming here
to this pool and its good water;
drinking in the darkness of night,
gone long before dawn, back into the no man’s land of night.
The Journey is also a place
by Kenneth Steven
Five
Once when I was travelling by train in Ireland
the train squealed to a slow stop
there in the nowhere of a place.
Passengers stopped all they were doing,
looked up and wondered why
and as the moments passed silence fell.
I remember: flowers and butterflies,
tall blousy flowers that waved in the wind
and then buttery sunlight blowing through
to turn the place gold a moment.
And even then I understood, I realised
this was not nowhere and nothing
instead it was the middle of everywhere.
I wanted to get out and say I had been there.
Why does everywhere have to have a name?
Why is it we are so intent on maps and markings?
I’ve always loved unfolding the flaps of a map
to find the nowhere places in between the roads,
the places left still without a name
and wonder what it would be like to walk there
content with having left the labels behind;
knowing I’d gone beyond signs and footpaths
out into the wildscape of the world.
The Journey is also a place
by Kenneth Steven
six
There is something about an island
that matters still. Not being attached
to all the talking, all the busy-ness
of the mainland world.
An island is a place apart
beyond the noise and busy roads,
to be found just sometimes.
The island is somewhere you choose
when the traffic and the talk has grown too much
and the heart’s grown deaf to listening.
There is no need to live here on the island;
if you did you might not hear the quiet
in the end. You would bring the noise
and its purpose would be lost.
You do not always need a boat
to find an island. It can be a place
that’s somehow been forgotten, left behind
in the world’s hurry to get somewhere else.
There is no need to bring your luggage;
all you need is what you carry,
the less you have the more that you will find.
But give the island time. Don’t rush back
to what might be called the real world
before the heart has started hearing.
Then the listening can begin.
The Journey is also a place
by Kenneth Steven
Seven
Sometimes it is all right to play.
No-one is watching
and you are free to be yourself.
We work so hard at being grown-up,
are frightened of being caught
without the mask of adulthood.
Somewhere inside the child still lives
longing for the chance to run and laugh
to fly a kite, forget
there’s washing to be done
or shopping to be bought or shoes to clean.
Let the child come out to play sometimes
when no-one’s watching, to laugh and dance
and marvel at the stars
or simply chase a rainbow.
Don’t tell the child to go
and do not despise the child;
instead let the child come out from the shadows,
bring you all the flowers you may need
or being the grown-up that you are.
The Journey is also a place
by Kenneth Steven
Eight
This is a place where I could pray;
not the formal, beautifully sculpted words
put together by priests in cathedrals,
not some kind of performance prayer.
Almost like these Japanese constructions,
shattered and broken and useless –
pieced together with a kind of gold
to make them whole and hold again.
Prayers of broken words
gathered in their dust and rubble
to be held and breathed into
so they come alive like butterflies.
The beautiful simplicity of fragments
lifted to light so fragile;
not even spoken but simply breathed
to rise into a higher place.
I could fashion prayers like that;
I could bear the fragments here,
work unseen at taking all that brokenness
finding for them, from them, healing.
The Journey is also a place
by Kenneth Steven
Nine
If only there were days you could be let off worrying
about the melting of the ice, of what will happen
in the Middle East, if democracy will survive.
If only there were days that you were told
everything was going to be all right,
and you could lay it like some heavy load
down beside the road, for just a day or two.
If only you could turn the radio on
and not be afraid of listening to the news,
safe in the knowledge there was no need
to fear the future for a while.
If only you could be a child again
and not concerned about anything more big
than if the snow was going to fall this night
and all you’d do tomorrow when it came.
If only you could be small enough
to creep into the den you’d made behind the house
and feel being five years old once more;
the joy of knowing it was the weekend, that you were free.
The Journey is also a place
by Kenneth Steven
Ten
What I remember in childhood
my parents giving me a book;
I found it one Christmas morning
at the foot of my bed by my stocking.
The Man who Planted Trees: the story of a shepherd,
his part of France as all parts
left ruined by the First World War.
He went out silent every day
brought back a fist of acorns to the place he lived;
rolled them woody out and sorted them,
each little treasure with a tree that slept inside.
Then when back among the sheep next day
he buried every acorn one by one,
pressed each deep into the ground
with the firm simplicity of his staff.
This gift for his grandchildren;
a forest he would never see –
grown oaks to resurrect the land
with birdsong, badgers and the feet of deer.
The Journey is also a place
by Kenneth Steven
Eleven
When they leave St Columba’s Bay,
down at Iona’s south end –
pilgrims are invited to pick up a stone
and throw it as far as they can.
Out deep into the waters,
a symbol of something they want rid of;
to leave behind and be free of forever,
something they need carry no longer.
There is no ocean here,
neither waves nor any kind of shore –
but imagine it just the same
and think what it is you want rid of.
Feel it heavy in your throwing hand,
weighing your days down unwanted;
close your fingers around it and fling it
as far you can into the forest.
And whatever you do don’t go out there
into the trees to retrieve it once more;
to find it and take it unwanted back home
to weigh down your heart with its worry.
Leave it behind in the woodland,
buried and no longer yours;
a burden that’s gone for good –
feel the lighter as you start the path back.
The Journey is also a place
by Kenneth Steven
Twelve
When you walk out into the world again
go slowly, there should be no hurry
to meet the traffic of an age
that’s thrown all sense of depth away.
That doesn’t care a whole lot more
than who scores what or exactly how much
a house is worth or how fast
some package is delivered by the post.
Think instead of seeing all there is
a new way, of slowing down and noticing
the way the sky is now and where the light
is making beautiful the fields and trees.
No-one’s seen the world
through just your eyes before. Take time to look
and keep the treasures of each and every day;
store them in the heart and hold them bright.
Remember you will not come back this way.
Each day we change a fraction; like the trees
we shed the old skin of the way that we have been
and grow a little always into light.