May 18-19. London to the Lake District

Saturday May 18 to Sunday May 19. From London to Penrith (by train) to Keswick (by bus) to High Portinscale (by taxi) Saturday. Walk around Derwentwater (9.5 miles) Sunday. 

Dear Trail Friends,

I’m not really ready to stop writing about the Freud tour. I think when a tour group bonds it’s a little like falling in love. Although I didn’t connect with every individual tour mate, I felt the warmth of the connections all around me and felt appreciation for every single person on the tour - and felt appreciated by them. That’s a rare experience. There was a culture of generosity and kindness - I picture Ben and Chris and Kevin so eagerly helping to  unload luggage from the bus - everyone really on the lookout for how they could help and support others and clearly finding joy in being of service. The same kind of culture of kindness I so fell in love with on the trail between hikers and from trail angels. This was a group full of trail angels in that sense - people who get joy from helping others along in their journey. 

So of course I am reluctant to let go. I want to recall again sitting beside Chris at the Freud museum, gazing into the eyes of Professor Freud (sitting at his desk in great pain and soon to leave Vienna) and feeling waves of love directed at Chris, but also at the group as a whole including me. Freud’s eyes looked so sad, so reconciled to death and yet so stubbornly still alive. I found myself feeling the impact he has had on my life, how he came to me as an imagined or spirit analyst and taught me slowly to attend to and accept (and even love) whatever comes into my mind. He taught me to rest at the threshold between my waking conscious mind and the unknown in myself - the place of sleep, the dream, my unconscious being. He taught me to trust myself as an unknown flowering, a stranger coming into being. As I sat looking into his eyes in the very house where he breathed his last breath and closed those eyes for the last time, I felt so moved and grateful for his friendship and support (via the mysteries of spirit and imaginatuon) and for the chance to have “known” him almost in the physical world by experiencing places so central in his life: the place where his sisters were sent to be killed, the house where he was born, the house where he lived and worked, the inn where he went to rest and heal, the hotel where he helped found psychoanalysis as an international organization, and the house where he came to die. And to have shared that “knowing” with such a special group of people, and to know that Ben and Kiki and Renee were working so passionately and strenuously the whole trip to share with a wider community the special access to the professor that Chris’s particular vantage point and affection offer. I find this all very moving. 

I asked Kiki how it felt when she was helping Stephen with makeup to play the professor (I was amazed how much his cheek seemed to have the exact form needed to the professor’s jaw, so painfully damaged by cancer and multiple surgeries.) I wondered if Kiki had felt the professor as a real presence, the way Renee said she was making the Freud puppet, the way I had during my analysis with him. When she assured me that she had felt his presence I found myself giggling. Here we were sounding like devout Buddhists or Hindus in contact with the presence of our holy guru. How Freud - the goddess Jew - would have laughed. Or was laughing with us. 

Anyway ... we woke up Saturdat morning and said our goodbyes at breakfast to those from the tour group who showed up. Then we walked the half mile to Euston station and caught our train to Penrith. Photo 1 is a collage of the train station adventure: finding the gate, finding our car, getting on, finding our seats. Except I don’t want that to be the “featured” photo for today’s blog so I am going to stick photo 0 in front of it (our cottage in High Portinscale). 

The journey involved some uncertainty and anxiety as journeys so often do. The owner of the cottage had given me a name, “The Beeches,”  but no address. I had typed “Tge Beeches” into my gps and unwittingly planned our journey to arrive at a B&B of the same name in Keswick. I frantically emailed and tried to call the owner, to no avail. Then to our good fortune we met Anna waiting for the bus at Penrith. Anna, five years a widow of a husband born in this area, visits four tunes every year, in every season. She told us it was quite common to use names and not addresses and told us that we should take a taxi from Keswick (we had planned to walk). The taxi driver was quite sure he could find our cottage and he did. We all regretted that we didn’t take a photo of Anna Saturday and then we met her again today (Monday) at the bus stop where we arrived (which happened to be in front of the supermarket where we were about to shop.). Photo 2 is “Trail Angel” Anna. Anna by the way assured us that we would have a sunny week (despite predictions of a week of rain); she said the weather is always clears up for her when she visits. 

Saturday evening we ate a pub in Keswick. We learned the system (which seems to be the norm here): Check your table number, then come to the bar to order food and drink for your table. Chris and I ordered lamb casserole and trout and shared both (they were both excellent), but Judy got a braised beef that was tough and tasteless. The walk from our cottage into town charmed us totally. It was mostly on footpaths including a footbridge over the river, and passed through a field of sheep and baby lambs. Photo 3 is a collage of the walk into town. 

Sunday we walked around the lake (almost 10 miles), dodging two organized events (a 10k run around the lake coming toward us and a 19 mile “three peaks” challenge hike heading the sand direction we were). There was a higher density of foot traffic than in London! How relieved we were when we found ourselves mostly alone in the trail. It turns out that the past week was a big festival in Keswick, so there were lots of events Sunday. 

Judy took a lovely photo of the lake during our walk around it (Photo 4) and chose it as inspiration for her drawing (photo 5) yesterday (Sunday). 

I hope that looking at her photo and drawing communicates the same restful beauty (I find myself relaxing my shoulders, exhaling with a sigh, just looking at the shape and colors of the hills and water. ) It’s easy to understand why the English love their Lake District so much. 

My Sunday drawing was inspired by a winding staircase (down from the restaurant to the toilets) in The Wolseley. Photo 6 is a collage of the photo and my drawing. As I was drawing I meditated on the attraction I feel to winding stairways. There’s a mixture of feelings - a sense of mystery, going down into a dark underworld which I associate with the world of the dead (but also the womb, lost paradise, etc.) Theres also a slight dizziness or vertigo - as I drew I could feel the intermingled desire for the unknown (Eros) and for complete rest and safety (death wish). 

Our visit to The Wolseley (on Friday, our last day in London, just before the closing gathering at the Freud Museum) was very special. Chris pointed out the table where she sat 9 years ago with her dear friend Jerry (who died this past March) and their London friends/hosts when the Maitre d’ came over to tell her that she had an admirer (who turned out to be Lucian Freud). No doubt I’ve told you this story before - Chris loving the grandson and his art almost as much as she loves the grandfather and his writing and ideas, how she flew to the East Coast once just to see a show of his work, how she and Jerry went to a show of his together in NYC, how having him send his message of admiration to her at the Wolseley made her feel seen - and blessed - by the great artist who for her saw and showed the body as dwelling place of the soul). So there we were at The Wolseley, where the magic moment had happened in Chris’s life, and Lucian Freud and Jerry both dead now but also real presences for us. I even broke my usual sugar abstinence to join Judy and Chris in celebratory desserts (I chose the dessert called the Lucian - I presume it was his favorite - scoops of hazelnut, pistachio and almond nougat ice cream with whipped cream, flaked toasted almonds, and hot caramel sauce.) So I was high from the sugar - and also high from the way the dead are present among us when we remember them and savor their pleasures (Jerry so loved that Lucian Freud sent a message of his admiration to Chris - though he really wanted Chris to go to Freud’s table and introduce herself, which she refused to do, feeling the experience was complete in itself and enough.) The waitress pointed out Lucian Freud’s table to us - he was a regular there and had his own table.  By the way, I found a photo of the dessert menu online from 2014 and noticed that the dessert was still called “Amandine” in those days, so its only recently been baptized “Lucian.” I think the presence of the loved dead, and the sense of how alive they were in our memory and return to their places, gave me the temporal equivalent of spatial vertigo - and that was part of the enchantment of the spiral staircase. It reminded me of the whorls of a spiral shell, which associates to a drawing by the artist Romaine Brooks of a woman with a spiral shell on her back. I once wrote a companion poem to go with the drawing beginning something like this: “The woman carries her history with her, leaning forward to balance its weight.” Maybe when I get home I will find the drawing and poem and post them. 

Sunday we ate a very late lunch toward the end of our hike. Chris and I had baked potatoes with chili and really enjoyed them. Judy had a gigantic tuna fish sandwich (half of which she took home and later shared with me) and a lovely sweet potato and spinach soup. 

Now I remember one more thing I wanted to share with you about the Freud tour. The closer we got to the end of the tour, the more people began to ask “Where will our next tour be?” Now part of me feels extremely protective of Chris and worries that she is overworking at Pacifica (and worried that I maybe did her a disservice by lobbying for this Freud tour and convincing her it was possible because she had worked so hard this year and had such a heavy teaching schedule); and part of me likes to pretend that Chris is superhuman, invulnerable, can do anything and also wants to go for the joy of another tour -to engage with people and places at a soul level again, as happens on these tours. I guess it’s the same old dance between Death and Eros, isn’t it? Shelley from the tour responded to an earlier post about Chris reminding us that we don’t have to choose between Jung and Freud. And we don’t have to choose between Death and Eros either - rather, we can’t choose between them because they are so mutually entangled we can’t even tell which is which. 

As people began to ask “Where next?” Quite a few mentioned Greece, which is after all Chris’s signature mythology tour. But Chris said she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back to Greece, she might rather go to Turkey again. Some people were nervous about the political situation in Turkey. I myself was nostalgic for Epidaurus and the chance to be in a place where the ancient healing god Aesclepios helped people by sending them healing dreams when they slept in his temple. At the closing dinner, Beth’s husband Mike (who describes himself as much more interested in the history particularly the military history of The places we visited than in Freud’s ideas - he described standing in the tower of St Stephen’s and imagining standing there at the time of the Ottoman invasion and seeing the Polish cavalry galloping up just in time ... I’m not sure I’ve remembered this right. I as you know an mich more interested in Freud than military history, though I think I share with Mike a delight in the way that history comes magically to life and the past becomes present for us when we visit the place where it occurred) - anyway, if you made it to close of the parenthesis I will remind you we are talking about Beth’s husband Mike. He was the last person I expected to promote another Chris tour. I assumed he came along somewhat reluctantly because he loves Beth and wants to support her and share what she loves. But Mike actually went from table to table during our final dinner polling people on whether they’d rather go to Turkey or Greece for our next tour. (Turkey was the winner). 

Chris happened to mention to me recently (now that we are relaxing in the Lake District) that there is another Aesclepios healing temple on the Greek island of Kos (where the ancient physician Hippocrates received his education), an island she has never been to but had always wanted to visit. She just happened to mention - ever so casually - that Kos is just a 45 minute ferry ride from Bodrum in Turkey. I’m not sure Sister Death is going to be able to stop the irrepressible bounce of Sister Eros, who seems bound for another adventure. 

But we don’t have to choose between them, do we? There is death wish lurking even in denial of death, even in unquenchable appetite for adventure. We will see what lies ahead ...

Meanwhile, thank you as always  for walking with me, both through this lovely countryside and throufh my post-tour reflections on the Freud tour (and perhaps pre-tour reflections on the next Turkish tour). 

See you on the trail - my next blog will be about our Monday walk up to Walla Crag and our proposed Tuesday walk to the stone circle at Castlerigg.