I returned last week from a lovely hiking holiday in England which included a 5-day solo time walking 78 km of the 120 km length of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. The magnificence here was breathtaking and had such a different flavour than my play ground in the Gatineau Park. Such immensity, rawness, vulnerability, and, such history. I couldn’t help but think as I walked each day of the Roman soldiers struggling over 2000 years ago for about 10 years to build this wall in service of the security of their Roman Empire. As you can see from these photos, this is definitely frontier country and especially so in those times. Walls were important at that time as they seem to be to some today, obsolete as they become over time.
I had taken a new book of meditations with me on this holiday – Embers, One Objibway’s Meditations by Richard Wagamese, and was reminded each day as I gazed out at the expanse of this land of Richard’s words:
To be struck by the magnificence of nature
is to be returned again, in all-too-brief moments,
to the innocence in which we were born. Awe.
Wonder. Humility. We draw them into us and are
altered forever by the unquestionable presence
of Creator. All things ringing true together. If we
carry that deep sense of communion back into
our workaday lives, everyone we meet benefits.
That is what we are her for: to remind each
other of where the truth lies and the power of
simple ceremony.
These photos cannot do justice to the magnificence of this part of our world, so you might want to click on each of the photos in turn to view them in full screen to get a better sense of the magnitude.
