Lindsay Call- Lindisfarne

 

How interesting that I should visit an island called Lindisfarne on the anniversary of my birth.

We share so much—aside from first four letters of our names being the same, we also carry the air of being distinctly associated with the Irish (I am distantly descended from Irish farmers uprooted to America, while Lindisfarne was first cultivated by Irish monks in the Middle Ages). The holy men lived peacefully upon this stark and beautiful place until Viking raids destroyed their priory and everything they had worked so hard to achieve—everything, that is, except their faith.

Standing on the rocky shore with my hands in the North Sea, I somehow find it easier to imagine
myself as an invader than an Irish monk. The green hills of this island rising up out of the sea through the mist, the last bastion between these conquerors and the shores of England itself, its rough beauty which asks for no attention- I can understand why the Vikings wanted Lindisfarne for their own. Maybe it’s the number of times I listened to Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” on the way here, or the small piles of rocks that visitors have piled like cairns on the shores of the North Sea, but this island has made me begin to examine the relationship between travel, pilgrimage, and conquering.


Why do we go to places like Lindisfarne? Is it to honor those whose faith came before and to try to gain some of their holiness? Is it to stand in beauty and realize how small we really are? Or is it to say we’ve been there, for a picture we can put on Instagram to make the collage of pictures that has come to stand for making our lives a bit more interesting?

In the stories we’ll tell of Lindisfarne, or Durham or London or anywhere, there is some part of us that, by simply being a foreigner in another land, has attempted to take a piece of a new culture and turn it into a part of our own. Whether we are showing off our new knowledge of Tube routes, pretending to laugh at something we really don’t understand, or even uploading a picture of a cathedral where our main focus is on what our witty hashtag will be, we’re attempting to conquer a bit of another people’s culture and fit it into our own. I’m not trying to say that we’re Vikings or anything—we’re just trying to find a way of fitting another culture into our own big story. None of these are bad things, but the focus of our travels needs to be not the attempt to collect experiences, but let an experience collect you.


We need to realize that when we travel, our own personal experience of another culture or a certain place is never the absolute truth. And there is a kind of beauty in realizing that your story is part of a collection of stories. Together, those stories somehow make up a reflection of the places you go.