“O! What are you doing,
And where are you going?
……
O, Will you be staying?” (The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien)

Laughing, kindly, light-hearted, the Elves sing a question and an invitation to Bilbo. Even as he journeys towards a known destination, the Lonely Mountain, his true home (Rivendell) calls, an undercurrent which is eventually bigger and stronger than all his doings and goings.

The metaphor of the journey isn’t always helpful. In The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane considers the road atlas and its language of destination, and the ways this has erased the landscape and terrain of the British Isles from our consciousness.  Indeed, reaching a destination can be problematic in itself:  the speaker of TS Eliot’s poem The Journey of The Magi, having found what they sought, is “no longer at ease.”

Instead. the analogy of awareness of landscape or terrain may lead to a deeper knowledge of ourselves and God. So Moses, whilst shepherding, turns aside to God’s call on the mountain of Horeb and finds his feet are on holy ground. In her 2007 collection Indwelling, the poet Gillian Allnutt explores how the Holy Spirit might manifest itself in different times and places. Paying attention to the place in which we find ourselves, and abiding in it, may open our ears to God’s voice. Thus she speaks of the Botanic Gardens here in Oxford:

“Five thousand pounds to the glorification of God
Given that a physic garden may grow within
Biding, as stone bides, in sun and rain”

Wherever we are, wherever we are journeying to, the landscape we are in is where  God might ask questions of us, invite us in and dwell with us.  But we must take off our shoes and listen, for God’s voice might be gentler, more sensitive, and sitting lighter than we might expect.