The Ganges at Gangotri
In my final post of this travel blog ‘Works Still to Do’, I was preparing myself to return to the UK to resume university project work, the work I had been engaged upon for much of the latter period of my life until leaving to commence my Pilgrimage in November 2019. It had never been my expectation to return, so it took me by surprise that all the cues in my life were coalescing towards this, but I nevertheless believed I should be open to whatever course was given.
As I write I have been back in India a full month, having spent some eight months back in the UK. Whatever works were still left to do that had called me back, appear to have been done during that time and therefore here I am again, once again contemplating an open space in my life and being open to whatever the calling might be in how to proceed.
But, if I am honest, it seems clear to me that at least part of the underlying purpose in being called to return to the UK was to show me how the intervening Pilgrimage had totally changed me, in a manner that meant I would never be able to return. It was as though I had been immersed in a sort of spiritual nuclear reactor which had completely changed the configuration of my nature. So many of the old academic intellectual skills, and life ‘drivers’ had been transmuted into the higher goal and were simply no longer available. I was able to recover enough to achieve a few useful results, but had to confront the truth that, in fact, I was simply no longer able to undertake the work I had done across much of my life. The capacity was no longer there. The old adage that you can never ever ‘go back’ loomed awkwardly large before me.
Of course now I have ‘come back’ here to India. Not to resume the Pilgrimage, which I formally concluded with the ‘rites of termination’ at the Ganges at Dharali, Gangotri back in May 2022, but because this place seems to be a crucible for change; or certainly my crucible for change. So here I await, once again in Rishikesh, for those deeper inner imperatives to set me upon whatever next course is awaiting in this strange exalted journey “to no country and to no end” (1).
1. Rabindranath Tagore. Gitanjali. 42. Quoted in full in “Works Still to Do” https://elizabethcurrie.info/2022/06/20/works-still-to-do/