What’s in a name?
As a writer, I’ve found certain words jump off a page and conjure up alluring imagery that form the basis for all I write. But no single word has enticed me more than ‘sojourner’.
Above: The Adirondack Guide by Winslow Homer.
I often wonder when I first stumbled across the word sojourner. It somehow got into my consciousness more than 20 years ago and has since become the name of my film company, the title of a song I once wrote, the title of a book I have written; it is the title of this creative writing blog, and if I ever own a small sailboat big enough to warrant a name, then I suspect I too will name it Sojourner. The word has a deep meaning for me, but why?
Sojourner means ‘a person who resides temporarily in a place’. It’s a romantic and carefree notion to be sure: wandering from town to town, staying a while, and moving on. The Western genre is full of sojourners: cowboys riding into town, saving the day, and riding off into the sunset. And of course cruising sailors are the epitome of sojourners, gliding from island to island or from sea to sea seeking new ports and new experiences.
The word also conjures thoughts of pilgrimage and solitude, of deep thought and reflection. They are thoughts of living outside the box and seeing what lies around the next corner, and then the next, of uncommon experiences and a life full of stories.
But we are all sojourners aren’t we? We are only on this planet for a short time, we will reside temporarily in this place and then move on. Others have been before, and others will come after, so what we do during our time here—how we spend it and how we leave the planet for those to come after—matters. Along with being sojourners, we are also stewards.
That freedom to move is what appeals to me: of not being tied down but of being in control of your own decisions – of having agency. Some may consider that selfish, but freedom, true freedom, is vital to our wellbeing yet lost to our modern lives.
Whenever I have had the freedom to accept full time work, I have been both excited for the opportunity, yet terrified by the conditions. Yes, I will earn money. Yes, I will have financial security for a time. Yes, I will have prestige. And yes, it will come at an unbearable cost. My days will not be my own. My hours will be dictated to me. My life will be governed: what I do, when I arrive, when I eat, and when I leave. And, I will need to ask permission for time away. My life will be determined by the whims, competencies, and calendars of others. My days will be filled with minutiae: the unimportant will become the important. Great stress will be placed on fleeting subjectivity; fine details of inconsequential projects bearing negligible outcomes that will be forgotten soon after launch day.
Some feel great relief at the security such busywork brings. Others like me bristle at the intensity placed on its mediocrity. But while sustainable employment is a good and necessary endeavour in any society, it is how we define employment and what societal expectations we place around it that I find interesting. In many cases modern employment exists merely to perpetuate our foundational belief in consumerism and materialism. Instead of working for necessity, we work to feed an insatiable appetite for more. Like Huxley’s soma, our consumerism exists only to placate our quiet desperation, while the principles underpinning that employment lie at odds with a deeper connection to the natural world around us and the spiritual world above and within us. As Thoreau said, ‘We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.’ Our freedom and agency are expressed through a desire for more things, not more life.
Above: Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (Chief Joseph) of the Wallowa Band of the Nez Perce.
Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, the Nez Perce chief more widely known as Chief Joseph, was quoted as saying, ‘You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.’ Joseph’s land had been taken, his people killed, and his culture and way of life were disintegrating before his eyes. As one of the last Native Americans to have experienced the true freedom of a primitive life prior to the white man, his was a harrowing situation. But that cultural disintegration happened to make way for our modern Western society, for a new way of life that focussed on prosperity through enterprise and the acquisition of wealth, and not on necessity and a relationship to spiritual and emotional wellbeing. The connection to land, to people, and to place were deeply rooted in the Nez Perce culture, even Joseph’s name—Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt—means ‘thunder rolling from the mountains’, the poetic imagery and connection evident; but in this burgeoning new society, the land was merely a commodity, something to be exploited, to be torn up, sold, built upon, mined; the rivers too were dammed and diverted; the oceans emptied of life, and the air polluted – all in the name of progress and Manifest Destiny.
Above: A replica of Thoreau’s cabin near Walden Pond.
As someone who craves connection and simplicity, and who bristles at hollow enterprise, it is little wonder that the word sojourner holds such meaning. But when did the word pop into my thought space? Many years ago I read Walden, the quintessential work by Henry David Thoreau about his living alone in a cabin for two years in the woods outside of Concord, Massachusetts. My cheap Oxford University Press, World Classics edition of Walden is worn and dog-eared, sentences are underlined, and numerous Post-it notes have been torn into smaller strips and stuck to the many pages to mark something profound. The cover is adorned by The Adirondack Guide – a peaceful Winslow Homer watercolour of an old, bearded man glancing over his shoulder as he rows his skiff across a pond in a thick Appalachian wood – itself a study on solitude and simplicity that gives the reader a hint to the enchantment that lies within. I read Walden several times in my younger years, but it has been many years since I last entered the woods surrounding Walden Pond with Thoreau. Having just read another of Thoreau’s works—the essay Walking—I decided it was time to re-read Walden and seek solace in those regenerative woods once more.
In the very first paragraph I read, ‘At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again’.
I should have known.
Above: Anchored in a quiet bay, trying out my new fishing rod, and with my trusty copy of Walden to hand, I noticed a surreal coincidence between the book’s cover and my surrounds.
It’s four o’clock somewhere
Lying in the sun and living deliberately. Thinking about life and death and a life of purpose. Part 2 of the Away Again series.
Part 2 of the Away Again series
Lone swimmer. Photo: ©Matthew Smeal
It’s nearly four o’clock. The wind is easing, the swell is weakening, and I am lying naked on a beach. Oh, how I love to lie naked on a beach! To feel the sun on every pore, the salt drying on my skin, my still-damp hair from yet another swim brushing my shoulders and offering a soothing respite to the warmth now enveloping my body.
There have been many dolphins this afternoon: small pods, cruising languidly across the bay, their casualness broken by sudden outbursts as they chance upon unsuspecting fish. A rush, a swirl, and a splash and within moments the surface returns to an eerie calm, the just-gone commotion soon forgotten but for an occasional dorsal fin piercing the surface to reveal the pod’s course as it continues on its way.
A sea eagle came too: swirling, circling in unsteady arcs only twenty or so metres above the water. Its unsteadiness reminded me of two fledglings from a time before: young eagles desperate to improve, their inexperience contrasted by a larger adult that hung rocksteady in the heavy wind nearby. Is this one of those birds? Now a little older, its steadiness coming, its status growing? What a way to grow! To be left alone, to fend for yourself from an early age; to develop by instinct, by nature. Learn to fly. Learn to hunt. Learn to defend. But where is the other bird from that time? Did it not learn? Are the two birds now only one? Perhaps it is elsewhere, fishing further along the coast. It’s nicer to think that it is.
It is a stark reminder that nature is harsh. Maybe harsh is wrong, perhaps necessary is better. The only certainty to life is that it ends. ‘We must die,’ wrote Seneca. ‘Death is a law of nature; death is a contribution and an obligation required of mortals.’*
‘I did not wish to live what was not life.’
Henry David Thoreau
The sea eagle, like the dolphins, must eat fish or die; those fish must eat smaller fish or die. We too, must eat or die. Ecology, therefore, is a numbers game: an intricate balance of mathematical ratios as one population sustains another, which sustains yet another. But is it wrong to lose the emotion? To see life and death in such black and white numerical terms? I think not. If anything, I think it is healthier to accept what is finite and fickle. But I also think we should fill that stark canvas with as much love and colour as we can for the time given us.
‘I did not wish to live what was not life,’† wrote Henry David Thoreau on spending two years alone in the woods where he went to ‘live deliberately’. Our time here may be short, or it may be long, but let it not be dull! Let it be filled with purpose! Let it be deliberate!
* * *
The late afternoon warmth is reminiscent of winter’s apricity. The swell continues to drop, and the wind continues to ease, both loosening their grip on the day as the light too follows suit and begins its slow fade towards darkness. I will lie here for longer – an hour or so yet. If I’m lucky I will fall asleep to the faint sound of lapping waves, my entire body cocooned in a soft blanket of sunlight. How nice it would be to wake up naked and alone on a beach, veiled only in moonlight and a gentle sea breeze. I am reminded of Whitman, ‘To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying clouds, as one with them.’¡ That would make me smile, as I would amble back along the dark, silent bush track to the roadside where I parked my motorbike.
* Seneca, Lucius Annaeus Dialogues and Essays Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press 2008 p247
† Thoreau, Henry David Walden Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press 1997 p83
¡ Whitman, Walt ‘Song of Joys’ The Complete Poems, Penguin Classics 2004 p211