‘I’ll have a packet of mixed metaphors please’ . I’m glad to say you can still source these locally. Have a good look round and see what you come up with.
By day 7 of the End to End I had of course been walking for a week. And day 7 itself was one of those days on the LEJOG when you just walk. There’s no major distractions, nothing on your map or in your mind you’re particularly expecting or looking out for. It’s a case of walking, about 10 miles, from one place to the next. Although of course I was walking through a Cornish Spring Day so the whole place was alive with stuff; not quiet or subdued but exploding around me.
Which brings me back to metaphors. Earlier in the week, Bob told me about a radio programme he’d heard concerning metaphors and cancer. It seems that the much rehearsed metaphors of cancer are those of war-like struggle and challenging journey. Furthermore, most people who survive cancer say they didn’t find the war-like struggle ones very helpful and had mixed views about the challenging journey ones. I suspect this is a case of worn out metaphors and it can happen anywhere. It happened in the church sometime back when the old images of God almost universally repeated as ‘Almighty King’ began to pale a bit. As a result alternative metaphors for God, which had always been there, began spinning around more freely.
So refresh the metaphors please, and that’s particularly true for COVID19. It might not have been around long but it’s already got stuck in a metaphor jam, the WW2 version as some commentators have noticed.
At the moment Bob is seeking instructions for making a sour dough starter after his earlier bread making experiments didn’t make much headway. The action of yeast in flour can be a good metaphor for growth. The sight of the gradually emptying reservoir could be a metaphor for …… [fill this in if you like]. On the Isle of Eigg in the Hebrides I came up with the image of the calling cuckoo for the calling Christ. Not everyone liked it because they were overloaded with negative cuckoo images. But the sound of a real cuckoo, as I heard on my walk last year, on a spring day is an alerting magical sound.
This Holy Week, maybe you have preparations to make, some of which may differ from previous celebrations. Perhaps you’re eating kippers rather than roast lamb or making sough dough starters instead of hot cross buns. Look around and smell the season as you remix your metaphors.
From the remembered gospel
Jesus said: ‘A woman took a large amount of flour and mixed it with a small amount of yeast and when it was all leavened…’
I am the mixing woman, introducing the yeast to the flour:
The unseen action of the yeast goes on out of sight.
I am the calling cuckoo, hidden from sight but persistent:
summoning the new life of the season.
I am the cross-wise one, travel with me.
JAL: 08.04.2020 in Longdendale.