The Journey
Craig and me headed out of Whanganui recently, on a pilgrimmage for me, of sorts. A pilgrimmage to a place I’d promised myself to visit since I was seventeen years old after I’d read James K. Baxter’s ‘Jerusalem Sonnets’. We were travelling to Hiruharama, maori for Jerusalem. Baxter’s Hiruharama no less.
Thirty-four years after the fact! I know, it has a circle-of-life simpatico about it doesn’t it. It’s autumn, shall we dance like the leaves on the breeze? Yes we ought to, it frees the body to free the mind. In religion and spirituality, a pilgrimage is a journey or search of great moral significance. This one for me wasn’t on quite so grand a ‘moral’ scale but it was important. It was important to me.
A person who makes such a journey is called a pilgrim. I can’t speak for Craig, but my life has felt like it’s housed a pilgrim’s heart for so long now and by an insouciant stroke of good fortune had now found both the time and space in which to launch itself like the proverbial waka (canoe) up the Whanganui river at last.
Looking from the outside in, my deep-hearted friend Craig was perhaps a most unlikely travelling companion. He’s a non-practicing actor for many years now. He has about him a toughened-glass exterior, a minor foible of his current vocation. Yet housed in him, is a deeply untapped goodness. Like when a well is used for the first time again, it requires priming. He’s like that. His nearness reminded me that “… those experiences often turn out to be the most fruitful in the long run.” (James K Baxter, Autumn Testament, 1972). I hope so.
“The Whanganui (pronounced more softly by local Maori as a her-won-nah-nu-ee rather than the harsher sounding far-nah-nu-ee) River was once a major inland waterway for Mäori and they established many settlements along its 290 kilometre journey from the mountains at Tongariro to the Tasman Sea.
Hiruharama is at a bend in the river where the Roman Catholic Church established a Mäori Mission Station in 1883. Much later Jerusalem became known when the poet, James K. Baxter, established a commune there, which became a refuge for young people wishing to ‘opt out’ of urban society.
In earlier days, Jerusalem or Hiruharama as it’s known was one of the largest settlements on the Whanganui River. It was known as a meeting place for korero or discussion. The Catholic Maori Mission was first established in the area by Father Lampila, a priest of the Society of Mary in 1854. However, following the battle of Motua in 1864, so named for the small island down-river from Jerusalem and near Ranana (London) the Catholic Mission went into decline. Suzanne Aubert arrived, with two Sisters of St Joseph of Nazareth, with the hope of rejuvenating the mission, twenty years later in 1883.”
Journeys are funny things, we think we choose them. We don’t. We think we make our plans and to a greater or lesser extent perhaps we do. We think we choose our travelling companions but we don’t. The Journey chooses them for us. The Journey chooses me with them. Do you ask why? I don’t, all I know is, it chose us both. “Kua timata te mahi – The work has begun” (‘He Waiata o Hemi’, Baxter)
