Swinging on the Garden Gate: A Spiritual Memoir by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

Author:Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew [Andrew, Elizabeth Jarrett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Sexuality, bisexual, spiritual, Memoir, Christian, Bisexuality
Published: 2014-07-01T05:00:00+00:00

God, as Annie Dillard writes, was splintered. What I couldn’t grasp as an abstraction I came to worship in small pieces of matter: the flick of a sheep’s tail, the moment before a hill’s crest when suddenly the climb eases, the lone neolithic stones erect in some farmer’s field. It wasn’t paganism, really, but panentheism—the world as immanation, Dillard explains: “God in the thing, and eternally present here, if nowhere else.” Even when the wind blew so hard I had to pedal downhill, and uphill leaned flat across my handlebars as though they were a horse’s back; even remembering the storm on the Llyn Peninsula, I suspected God of being in the wind. God wasn’t all comfort, good fortune and easy company. There was no place and no created thing where God wasn’t.

I hoisted this suspicion onto the back of my bike. Now I was saddle-worn. The eighty-mile-day of a week ago, culminating at Ffestiniog, had put the worst not behind me but inside of me, memorized in the strained tan of my calves. My water bottles were full and warm; I casually snacked on peanuts tucked into the handlebar bag. My panniers, trailing underwear and socks washed in a sink that morning, held everything I needed. I was self-sufficient and mobile. The sea-green bike no longer begrudged me of forward movement; it held me high above the grill of the road and sometimes let me fly. The bike had fine-tuned my limbs and tempered my ambition. Seated on my bicycle, I found the center of my body’s gravity, and it was in motion.

September 19

This is a wild place, and it’s all being pumped into my bloodstream. Wales is changing my body, the hills are becoming my muscles and the wind my breath. When I come away from Wales I’ll be shaped by rain and blackberries and mornings when sunshine washes me awake. I’m surprised to find happiness even when I’m alone. Each day is a miracle of accomplishment. When I sleep I know I’ve traveled so far, just me and God, and I’ve fed myself and filled my head with thoughts, however worthy or worthless.

The pattern of a journey sinks into our bodies; change becomes our life-breath and destinations become irrelevant. In Wales my forearms grew thick from holding my torso over the bike frame, but it was the substance of transformation that fleshed out those muscles and filled my lungs. Before I could recognize a flash of God in my body, I recognized change.

At the Brecon hostel, which was filled with rambunctious Girl Guides, I teased the eleven-year-olds as we competed for slices of garlic bread at the dinner table and taught them to sing “Country Roads” beside the fireplace. At White Castle I relished having an entire Norman fortress to myself for an afternoon. I sketched an arrow window and the flowering purple weeds growing between stones. Something in me had eased; I had grown confident in my own company. In Monmouth I stayed in an old

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