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Posted on 10 April 2008
Wise Blogger John Davies said:

Travel: work worth doing

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Since I finished my walk last autumn, (two months on the road from Hull via Leeds, Huddersfield, Manchester, Warrington back home to Liverpool) I've been asked to travel to various places to talk about the journey I made and read extracts from the resultant book (Walking the M62, available online here).

I've been opening my talks with the song Travel On by Sydney Carter. In his notes to the song Carter acknowledged that travel was a key word for him in his songwriting:

"Everything is travelling; from when and where and what it is to when and where and what it will be. Everything is travelling: there is no way out of it. But there are different ways of doing it. You can travel inertly like a stone which is hurled into the air. You can travel reluctantly like a dog which drags against the lead. You can embrace the necessity of travelling: you can leap and dance along."

Carter says that Travel On is a song is about the Kingdom: "Of heaven (if you like) or God. It lies ahead of us, yet it travels in us, too."

In the kingdom of heaven
is our end and our beginning
and the road that we must follow every day
Travel on, travel on
to the kingdom that is coming
the kingdom will be with us all the way

What strikes me is that making this journey is an act of will, and is hard work. Carter was strongly influenced by the Shakers, for whom music formed a central part of their worship.

"'Travel' was a favourite Shaker word", Carter wrote. "The Shakers used it in a special sense: to labour in spirit, to 'travail', if you like, to bring to birth. You could call it 'prayer', 'worship'; it could take the form of suffering, of singing, or of dancing. Father William, an early Shaker, is reported to have 'travelled in song' for about two hours. You could travel so hard, dancing, that you wore out the floor."

Towards the end of my journey it was my feet which were worn out, not the pavement beneath them. I found myself not dancing, but virtually crawling, home. But on reflection, through the experience of all the travelling and in the act of creation involved in writing it up and communicating the experience, the work, I found, has been well worth it. The metaphor has plenty more mileage too.