"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
We all know the truth of that journey: Paulo Coelho famously wrote it into his story, The Alchemist. But, as Eliot wisely wrote, knowing something does not keep us from ranging more and more widely, only to find ourselves yet more deeply centred within the inescapable truth of ourselves. How many times shall we take the journey? Into what far realms shall we venture? Probably for as many days and into as many ways of being as are granted to us.
And perhaps we should be glad of that, for the search, though full of pain and disappointment, is also sweet. With it comes the urgency and sparkle of living, and the possibility of discovering truths far greater and more startling than anything our imagination could deliver. But there is also joy and release in the moments when we pause and fully live the truth of "know[ing] the place for the first time".
My own quest starts at a stobie pole with a geranium at its base. A stobie pole is a tall pole designed for connecting overhead power lines. Adelaide is dotted with them, all more or less identical (in my memory). But the one I see in particular has a concrete centre with reddish-brown, rusting metal sides. The rust has leeched colour into the concrete, and it depresses the small child me, crouching before it. A geranium bush has been planted at its base to make it less of an eye-sore; all along the street are similar poles and similar bushes. I frown at them, hating the poor geraniums because they remind me of those depressing poles. In my mind, the two belong together. I gaze up and down the street. Dry, prickly grass with patches of bare earth line the footpath, and all along, neatly fenced-in, stolid brick houses, like so many prisons. Or so they appear to me. The street doesn't look like the fantasy in my head. In my own version of reality, it should look something rather more like the village of Milly Molly Mandy. Instead of straight, practical streets designed for cars, there should be meandering, hedge-lined lanes. There should be open fields, picket fences and streams. Fences would not be corrugated iron but cheerful, brightly painted wood, and cottages would be individual, beautiful and quirky. Everything would be a lovely soft, inviting green patchwork, with the cottages dotted like toys eagerly awaiting to be collected and played with, rather than neat, orderly and entirely imagination-free boxes.
I think it is in that moment, when I must be no more than six years old, that I first make a promise to myself: a promise to find somewhere better, more perfect, where the most important things in the world are not money and practicality but imagination, beauty and fairy tales. In that place, people work to create, not noisy, crowded cities, but beautiful havens with the sole purpose of becoming more beautiful and more filled with delight over time. While others might seek exotic adventure, my path would always be clear: I would seek the fairy tale. It is a dream that would unconsciously carry me far away, not only geographically, but mentally. I would have no time for the prosaic, and my quest would unconsciously expand within me so that, without ever knowing it, I would soon seek everywhere for the right place, the right words, the right learning, the right choices, the right way of being.
Would I exchange the journey? Possibly not. What would I have missed if I had not set out to find my own fantasies reflected in someone else's reality? And yet, in the moment of return I am startled by the exquisite beauty right in front of me: the individual, imaginative, quirky and wholly lovely evidence of life that has always been here. Because it did not fit my fantasy, I never saw it, never appreciated it for what it was. It had not occurred to me look more closely into other people's dreams.
My dreams are not "out there" to be found; I know that now. There can be no arrival, no end to the journey. My dreams are to be brought with me into everything I do and allowed to play and sing in clear-sighted joy with the gifts liberally scattered in every time and place. They are to be invited to stop and listen with compassion and love to the dreams and fantasies that others build and hope so urgently to find.
Will I stop searching now? It seems unlikely, because, after all, I am still a six year old girl, crouching before a stobie pole and seeing what could so easily be. But within the six year old, the eyes of an older woman also look out upon the world; they are eyes filled with many more stories and a greater ability to see into other people's dreams. And perhaps a growing ability to know that every step I take is deeper into fairy tale.