musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

A Pilgrim’s Process


What is it about a pilgrimage that is so appealing? What makes you want to go, and then, having seen it, having felt it, what makes you want to come back, again and again? Or, perhaps even more mysterious, what makes it sacred?

I ask myself this question each year at the end of my trip to New Zealand. Why do I always feel I have to visit Cape Reinga before I leave? The country itself is a pilgrimage, so what makes the Cape so special? So magical? It’s timing is the easiest part of the answer: Cape Reinga is the northernmost end of New Zealand, the final place of where my annual journey from south to north takes me. Ends are always special -just like edges, they are mysterious simply because they are boundaries between what is, and what is not: transmogrifications. And maybe ends are even more so, because they are where edges meet -not disappear exactly, but meld into something synergistic. Emergent…

Of course it doesn’t hurt if the blend is dialectic -that it is different things to different people, and yet still special. Still something that draws them here like moths to the light by which I read. Do I care if their interest is only curiosity, or because it’s lauded in each and every guide book as ‘a beautiful place’? A ‘special place’, albeit not necessarily for the visitor? The moths are attracted to my light, because it is light, and not because it allows me, an alien, to apprehend what I see.

Of course I do not own the Cape -I am not Māori, so I have no historical link to the region -no legends that explain its significance, no ancestral stories that bind me to tradition… Or do I? What is it that elevates habit to tradition? What transforms mere curiosity, appreciation –and even longing- into something sacred? Something that, by merely existing somewhere, adds value to the journey. Depth to the experience. Meaning to a life.

Even the long road here from Mangōnui, where I often stay, is memory-laden -and, I suppose, therefore part of the magic. Little things, like the names of towns I pass through, issue sudden reminders of when I stopped to buy ice cream years ago, or had to ask where the nearest gas station was. Of the woman behind some little store’s counter who kept asking if I was American, despite the Canadian flag sewn on the bulky waist pack I used to wear.

And each year, I look for the home-made signs advertising sand dune surfboards -miles from the dunes the tourists in the big buses slide down. And each year I wonder whether they do much of a business, and think that I should perhaps stop and rent one just to ask -but never do…

Then, approaching the Cape, the scenery changes to ever-rolling hills stacked with Manuka trees that from a distance, look like broccoli on a grocery store shelf, and if I allow my eyes to stray, the occasional glimpse of a blue makes me gasp. The magic began kilometers ago, of course, but suddenly it envelopes me like… like something transcendent, and beyond all power to explain.

But nothing -even memory heightened by expectation- captures the mood as well as the wind pipes in the little cave-like gateway you must walk through to enter the enchantment of the Cape. Often soft, and yet sometimes in arresting and commanding tones -like pan-pipes played in a dream in always-changing frequencies- they greet you just before your breath is literally snatched from your breast as your eyes attempt to adjust to the panorama of sand, hills, sea, and a sky so azure it’s difficult to believe.

The height from which you descend to the lighthouse or from which you ascend on a smaller hill that overlooks the scene, or teeter along on a path that promises to take you down to a movie-set beach of glistening, golden sand pummelled by crystal waves, is vertiginous. And the wind -there is always wind- makes you grab your hat, and seek shelter against the rocks or occasional trees that are all, it seems, that could arrest a premature fall. But they, of course, are only a reminder of the legendary departure of the Māori ancestors whose departing spirits climb down along the roots of a special, never flowering Pohutukawa tree close to the lighthouse but anchored to the sheer edge of a cliff to return to their faraway ancestral home…

It is not hard to understand why the Cape is special -and not only to the Māori. It is a place hallowed by geography where the Tasman Sea greets its older brother the Pacific Ocean with demonstrable hugs and a chaos of waves; it is hallowed by the blinding contrast of sea and sand; but hallowed also by being the end of a journey -or the beginning… I can never decide.

, , ,

gozzter

, , ,

Leave a comment