Waking Up
“Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years…”
— C. P. Cavafy, Ithaka
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
— T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding-Four Quartets
A Modern Echo of the Mythic Path
My father had an adventurous streak in his younger days. He turned sixteen in the final years of the Second World War and couldn’t wait to run away to sea and join the merchant navy. After the war, he joined the British Palestine Police and was stationed there until 1948.
I was captivated by the tales of his travels, and by his obvious love for some of the places he’d visited. There was a family joke that every spring he’d feel the sap rising and get itchy feet—though he never acted on those impulses. I think I inherited that same restlessness. Each spring, something in me would stir: a longing to set out for distant horizons, as the energy of the season kick-started a new cycle of life.
But it wasn’t just the lure of the exotic. There was a deeper pull—to walk out of the known into something unplanned, strange, and alive.
Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, his tale of leaving his Cotswold village and trekking through Spain during the civil war, catalysed a dream in me: to just pack a bag and set off, letting the next step unfold without knowing where it might lead.
I devoured books of travel and inner journey—Ted Simon’s Jupiter’s Travels, Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard—alongside novels like Travels with My Aunt (Graham Greene), The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles), The Alexandria Quartet (Lawrence Durrell) and Hermann Hesse’s Narziss und Goldmund and Knulp. They only added fuel to the fire of a longing I didn’t yet know how to name.
There was no real context for this yearning—only a deep, insistent restlessness that refused to be satisfied by the life I was building. University, career, buying a house—there was always something more important to do first.
And although the longing remained, it was never quite enough to act upon…
Until it was.
The pressure cooker had been building for years — and finally, the lid blew off.
In 1988, I set off with my then-partner on an overland trip from London to Kathmandu, joining about twenty-five other intrepid travellers on the back of a Bedford truck. We rough-camped our way across Europe, Turkey, Syria, and Jordan. (Iran was off-limits to Brits at the time, so we detoured to Egypt and then flew to Pakistan.) From there, we continued through Pakistan, India, and finally into Nepal.
Over fourteen weeks of overland travel — and then a few weeks trekking in the Himalayas — the uptight, finely controlled, shy Englishman I had been, began to unravel. Layer by layer, a self, shaped to meet others’ expectations was shed. In its place, a new freedom emerged: the freedom to be playful, to be spontaneous, to explore dimensions of myself I hadn’t known were there.
I discovered that travel wasn’t just about encountering new places — it was about discovering new versions of me. And strangely, wherever we went, I always felt at home – the old adage of “wherever I lay my hat, that’s my home” captured the essence that carried me forward to each new day.
That trip was followed, a year or so later, by a round-the-world journey. We set off with only the vaguest sense of where we might go, and followed wherever the spirit took us next: coast to coast across America, sailing to New Zealand on a small cargo freighter, endless bus rides through the vast interior of Australia, drifting through a few of the Indonesian islands, pausing in Japan — and finally heading back to Europe via Moscow and Paris.
What I uncovered along the way was a spontaneity of being — and it was a real delight.
The problem was…
How do you fit back into the box when the journey ends?
I felt I had seen the world — and as fascinating and rewarding as it was, the longing still hadn’t gone anywhere. But it no longer took the form of wanting to travel again. Instead, I began to sense something deeper.
Certain songs started to move me in unexpected ways. They would catch me off guard, drawing gentle tears or a choke in the throat — not from sadness, but from a kind of recognition. As if they were pointing to something fundamental in me that I hadn’t yet fully met.
• Piece of Sky – Barbra Streisand (Yentl) BARBRA STREISAND - A PIECE OF SKY (with lyrics)
• Corner of the Sky – Pippin Corner Of The Sky
• Caravans – Barbara Dickson BARBARA DICKSON - CARAVAN SONG (Caravans) by Mike Batt - In Concert
Each carried a whisper of something larger — a home I hadn’t yet arrived at.
Then, in the early 1990s, my life crashed around my ears. My job ended. My relationship ended. On a mere whim, I decided to move to London with a friend. But before taking that leap of faith into the unknown, I set off for one last adventure: a Sun Kosi river rafting trip in Nepal, combined with a trek to Everest Base Camp.
It was on the Royal Nepal Airlines flight to Kathmandu that I read an article about the Hindu god Ganesha in the inflight magazine. It described him as the god of gateways — of challenges and opportunities — and someone to invoke at the start of any new venture.
Here I was, at the end of one chapter of my life, about to step into the next with no plan and very few expectations. So, I cheekily whispered,
“OK, Ganesha — hit me with it.”
And he did.
Unbeknownst to me, I was stepping into an ancient current—one that heroes, pilgrims, and fools have followed for centuries. Joseph Campbell gave it a name—the Hero’s Journey—but for me, it was simply wide-eyed wonder at a dimension opening up before me, that I never knew existed.
Doorways began to open in my mind. Possibilities I had never imagined revealed themselves. The longing I had once mistaken for a hunger for adventure was becoming something else: a burning passion to uncover the deeper spiritual dimensions that were quietly, unmistakably, beginning to unfold before me.
It was on that rafting trip down the Sun Kosi River that I first naturally experienced meditation. Between the thrill and heightened senses of riding the rapids, there were long interludes of just gently drifting downstream in the balmy heat, going with the flow of this vast river as it meandered through chasms in the Himalayan foothills, out of contact with the 20th Century. I had no idea what was happening – I fell into periods of deep relaxation with hyper-awareness and the overriding feeling that I had come ‘home’—something I have recognised as a deep sense of presence that is me and greater than me and vividly alive. At the time, I imagined I might be remembering past lives. But in hindsight, I see now that I had stumbled upon the gateway to the Self that meditation reveals.
The unfolding journey that followed took many twists and turns.
Not long after arriving in London, I flirted with the School of Philosophy (SES) and its sister organisation, the School of Meditation in London — both offering a life rooted in Advaita Vedanta. I encountered Douglas Harding’s Headless Way, which gave me my first glimpse of my Original Face. The Friends of the Western Buddhist Order introduced me to the power of spiritual friendship.
And then… I dived headfirst into the spiritual community of Andrew Cohen — straight out of the frying pan and into the fire.
But those are stories for another time.
I came out of that encounter with a deep reverence for the sacred — and the scars of a traumatic relationship with a teacher whose view of the absolute obliterated the personal and trampled all over the human. It was wisdom without compassion — flying on one wing, missing the whole point of the endeavour: how to weave the dance of the infinite with the limited.
And when I finally discovered that truth — my life really began to fly.
There were side trips along the way. Life modelling, where I rediscovered, meditation sitting naked in front of a group of artists. (Stillness had never felt so exposed — or so real.) A few seasons as Santa Claus, where I revelled in an unexpected connection to innocence through being authentic. I learned so much at the feet of the young.
And finally — I co-founded a group where we meet in presence. In a shared field of being. And it was in that field that all the realisations began to stabilise — and take root.
And it is in that field I recognise that my entire life journey — every step, detour, and longing — has arisen within a vast and silent presence, the ground of being I now know myself to be: who I was, am, and have always been.
Eliot’s poetic image of returning to the starting point and seeing it anew was the shape of my own unfolding. I have always been home — in the deepest sense of what that might mean — glimpsing, at last, my original face before I was born.
Cavafy, more sardonic in tone, offers a parallel in The City, though with the sting of seeing only after the fact what was true all along.:
“You said: ‘I’ll go to another land, I’ll go to another sea.
Another city will turn up, better than this one’…..
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.”
The journey is the destination. You realise you never truly left—yet each step along the way has deepened and enriched the experiences that give texture to the infinite-eternal. This, perhaps, is why we are here: to frolic within our freedom, and to share our song with others in a resonant harmony that rises to the heavens and sinks to the depths—for those with ears to hear.
The mystery was never elsewhere.
As a quiet echo of this journey, I’ve shared a poem titled “Pilgrimage.” You can read it here:
Read the companion poem: Pilgrimage
