Some Emily Dickinson to start your day and your month:
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Today marks a full two months of deliberately wearing wool every day --- not that that wasn't what I'd been doing, for a long time, but in 2023 I wanted to make that a challenge. It's a pretty wimpy challenge, because again, it was what I was doing anyway. Still, here we are: two months in, ten to go.
The weather's been insanely warm, though cooler today than yesterday. Yesterday, dog-walking and doing a bit of gardening --- I decided to plant the three Jubilee blueberries that have been sitting in pots along the garden perimeter for some days --- I was comfortable in nearly 80-degree-Farenheit weather in my Willow dress, sleeves and all. I also wrote two of the three Sun pieces on my list for this week and otherwise kind of piddled around. February has been a month of almost non-stop work, and on a beautiful day I just suddenly . . . kind of . . . didn't want to do it anymore. Or that much of it. The essays, actually, were fun.
Lent is plodding along, as it always does, especially early on. I can't even remember what I had intended my penances to be, but it still feels pretty penitential. Basically my rule is that if I want it --- if, say, it is one of the nonalcoholic stouts in the fridge --- I tell myself to suck it up and have some water instead. This is working out all right so far as a way of being in Lent, but we'll see how long I can sustain it (actually pretty long if I drink up the nonalcoholic stout on Saturday night and Sunday, in that little Sabbath period of refreshment, and don't buy more).
Pulled up my new novel project for the first time in some weeks, to try and have a go at it. Otherwise, my plan is to look in at the Able Muse slushpile, and then to peck out a third Sun essay and be done with that for the week. AND to call my mother.
Wearing today:
Camellia, who's received the lightest wear over the last two months. I might not need the leggings, but as it's still only in the mid-50s at 9:30 in the morning, I think they'll feel good when I go out. Probably a cardigan as well, though once the temps reach the 70s, I won't want that. With my Camellia dress I'm wearing a secondhand Ibex tee in 100% merino, these old cotton-blend leggings, and thrifted Birkenstock Balis, which are fast becoming my warm-weather go-to shoe.
Another angle --- I don't often photograph side or back views of my outfits, but generally they seem okay to me. I am hoping to be fitter overall by the end of the spring: not a Lenten thing, just a resolution to walk some miles every day and lift some little weights at least once a day for arm toning. My weight seems not to budge much, regardless of what I do or don't eat. And honestly, I think that's okay. But I hope that much walking, at a current average of about three miles a day (sometimes less, but often more), will at least tone my legs and glutes more. I should probably walk the stairs at home several times a day for the glutes. I do multiple rounds of reps with a ten-pound weight for my arms, just by keeping the weight in the kitchen, where I'll see it, and remembering several times a day to pick it up. I don't want to go down a dress size, because I want the dresses I own still to fit. But I do want the body in the dress size to be stronger, tighter, more composed of muscle. I want it to have real endurance for the hiking trail, and maybe for a walking pilgrimage someday.
In fact, it might be fun to set myself a virtual-pilgrimage challenge. It might be fun to replicate something like this, for example. A walking pilgrimage to Walsingham in Holy Week is one of my bucket-list items, but I could do a virtual one that replicates the miles from London to Walsingham, via Cambridge. Our Lady and the English Martyrs was the church our windows looked out on, across Parker's Piece, for the four years that we lived there, and I've always felt that those martyrs must have been praying for us all that time. The videos from that virtual pilgrimage seem to be still available, so that one could walk the miles anywhere, anytime, then experience the Masses, Compline, etc, as one hit the right mile marker.
I wish I'd thought of this before Lent, to start right at the beginning, but why not do it starting today? In real time, I know it didn't take them all that long to walk from London to Walsingham, but I have all of Lent to do it in pieces.
Data:
A pilgrim way from London to Walsingham is about 180 miles.
The standard is to walk 10 miles a day, taking 18 days.
I have 37 days, between now and Good Friday.
This means that I could walk that distance in that amount of time, if I walked just under 5 miles a day.
That's roughly 2 miles more than I'm currently tracking --- I walk with Dora multiple times a day, but often forget my phone.
So what if, starting today, I made this my pilgrimage? A virtual walk from London to Walsingham . . . since it doesn't make sense to walk from here to Walsingham, unless I do better than St. Peter when he saw Our Lord walking on the waves. I probably would not do better than St. Peter, so let's just say I've flown to London and am starting there.
Alternately, I could walk from Ely, seat of our old C of E diocese: a distance of 103 miles. That would work out to 2.7 miles a day, easily within the bounds of what I'm currently doing.
Hmmmmm . . . I do have a particular attachment to Ely, having been there many times. My daughter was confirmed in the C of E in Ely Cathedral, which remains one of my favorite places in England (even if I think the C of E ought to give it, and all the others, back to the Catholics from whom they were wrested in 1534 . . .). And my current walking average is just over the number of steps I'd have to take per day to walk from Ely to Walsingham by Good Friday. That's . . . not particularly a challenge, over and above what I normally do.
What if I backed it up to Cambridge? What if I were starting from Our Lady of the Assumption and the English Martyrs, that Catholic church across the Piece from where we lived (a church built in the Victorian era by the fortune of the man who invented go-to-sleep doll eyes, which is one of my favorite-ever factoids)?
So it's 16 miles, walking towpaths, from Cambridge to Ely. That means a total of 119 walking miles to Walsingham from Cambridge, which amounts to a distance of 3.2 miles daily to walk there by Good Friday.
That is just outside my current daily average: doable.
So that's it. I'm walking from Cambridge to Walsingham, virtually, for the rest of Lent. I'll have to figure out some kind of devotional to mark the end of each day's walk. Stay tuned . . . the good thing about doing this virtually is that I can start now and figure out details as I go.
Which is good, because it's time now to walk the dog. Buckle up, Dora, we're going to Walsingham.
UPDATE:
We've walked our first leg: 3 miles, roughly 7300 steps, in an hour. We're maybe just east of Cambridge, somewhere in the fens right now. Looks like we're maybe a mile shy of the village of Milton, where we can virtually spend our first night.
Some highlights:
We had actually walked about a mile and a half by the time we passed this marker --- we'd swung around through the neighborhood to pick up the greenway trail at one end. We walked it end to end, then halfway back up to our own street, and home.
Just before we picked up the trail.
Dora near the end, just before we turned to walk home. This was about two miles into our actual walk.
Me on the return jaunt. I had my puffer jacket tied around my waist---silly me, I had thought it was a little chilly when I first stepped out.
Some providential graffiti.
While walking, I did some calculating as well as praying. I realized that I'm going to want to take Sundays off, and that I might need some free days as well. So my new goal is to walk this pilgrimage in 30 days. If I round the distance to 120 miles, then I can walk 4 miles a day for 30 days and reach my destination. This seems doable. If I push my morning walk to an hour every day, rather than 45 minutes, then I will walk 3 miles. I can then do subsequent legs adding up to another half-hour later in the day. Dora and I generally take a short walk late in the afternoon and another after dark, so we can handily add another mile to our day's walking. We probably do that anyway. The important thing is to get in our 3 miles in the morning.
For this pilgrimage, I'm counting purposeful steps, not like the steps between the kitchen table and the fridge. This is meant to be a sacrifice, an offering, and a penance. I am offering it for a host of intentions (and will gladly pray for more).
I am also meditating on the following verse, which seems apposite:
Show, O Lord, thy ways to me, and teach me thy paths. (Ps. 24.4)
So, 3 miles down, 117 to go.
LATER STILL:
After walking another .72 miles for our afternoon jaunt, I came back and decided to watch the Mass from Cambridge that had been livestreamed on the second day of the 2020 (read: Covid) virtual pilgrimage to Walsingham. This Latin Mass Society pilgrimage, interestingly, is in August, timed to coincide with the August Bank Holiday, which puts it in or near Assumptiontide. The Mass on that particular day was for the Feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist. It's not particularly Lenten, though the church and celebrant are in red for martyrdom, and the celebrant's brief homily touches on themes of pilgrimage which would be good to meditate on at any time.
I stopped the video (which is here) after the Mass, thinking that as I'm taking far more than three days to make my virtual pilgrimage, I might save the meditations, rosary, and other parts of the "second day" for a later time. But at any rate, having heard Mass "in Cambridge," albeit not before setting out on my walk, I do have the feeling of having started somewhere, to end somewhere. There will be a Mass in Walsingham at the end of that series of videos, though I wonder if I might find a Lenten one to watch.
I did enjoy the narration by a man in a sun hat with pilgrim's badges pinned on --- he was making his pilgrimage walking through Oxfordshire, and offered some commentary on Catholic sites of interest along his particular route. I noted especially that he had made easy 10-mile days of it, which seemed like a lot until I remembered that I used to walk 8 miles, at least on a daily basis when I lived in Cambridge, and often more, without even thinking about it.
What I keep thinking now is that I've got to up my game, so that something like the 17-mile walk from Cambridge to Ely along the river wouldn't seem like such a great stretch. Even having walked just a little farther than usual today, I am feeling it in my legs, and while that's kind of pathetic, I also think: well, tomorrow I won't feel it as much.
Here's the whole Latin Mass Society 2020 virtual itinerary. They were "pilgrimaging" from London, as I think I noted earlier. At any rate, I might go back and watch some of the meditations during this Lenten pilgrimage of mine.
FINALLY:
I will not post this much every day, but as of our last walk tonight, Dora and I have gone 4.32 miles, in a total of an hour and a half. This is useful information: I could do three segments of 30 minutes if need be, and cover roughly the same distance. I know I won't always have a whole hour first thing in the morning, although I'm making it a goal to do that --- but I can easily squeeze in three 30-minute walks, even on a fairly busy day.
So I'm somewhere between Cambridge and Ely, past Milton . . . maybe spending the night on a narrowboat. It'll take me five days of wandering in the fens, at this rate, just to get to Ely, so let's say I have a support narrowboat that's following me, where I can eat and sleep between villages. I shall go to sleep tonight dreaming of a boat on the Cam in the fenlands . . .