There is also the old phrase “Good fences make good neighbours.” Robert Frost in his poem “Mending Wall” subverts this notion: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Yet in the old phrase is the idea that a certain kind of neighbour can limit your independence and freedom and invade your privacy. Just because people dwell near you, they have no right to control your life. The ideal neigh-bourliness means a balance between caring for those near you, but also keeping space free to engage and inhabit your own life. The atmosphere of the neighbourhood should never cripple the longing of the soul to wander.
The wanderer is one who gives priority to the duties of longing over belonging. No abode is fixed. No one place is allowed finally to corner or claim the wanderer. A new horizon always calls. The wanderer is committed to the adventure of seeing new places and discovering new things. New possibilities are more attractive and intoxicating than the given situation. Freedom is prized highly. The wanderer experiences time and space in a different way than the native or the neighbour who remain faithful to a place. Time is short, and there is so much yet to be experienced. While each place has its own beauty, no particular place can claim to settle the longing in the wanderer’s soul. Space and distance are never a barrier. Travel is the adventure. The purpose is never directed towards a specific destination. The journey itself is the ever-changing destination. The wanderer travels light, carries none of the baggage of programmes or agendas, and feels an openness and hospitality to new places and new people. The call of longing is always answered, often to the detriment of achieved belonging. At its extreme, the wanderer can be like a butterfly, having an obsession to explore things with an over-lightness of touch. The journey need not be a real journey, merely a circular route around the same repetitions, each, of course, differently packaged than the last time.
The wanderer has been a great theme in literature and film. An old and innocent, but very subtle, film which explores this theme is
Wandering is a very strong tradition in Ireland. In mythic times, there were fabulous journeys to strange lands; such a journey was known as an immram. In the early centuries Irish monks went into “green exile”; many of them wandered the continent and laid down the basis for medieval civilization. Ireland has also suffered great depletion from the wandering called emigration.
The wanderer travels through a vast array of experience. The word “wander” derives originally from the verb “to wind” and is associated with the German word “wandeln,” to change. The wanderer does not find change a threat. Change is an invitation to new possibility. The wanderer is as free as the wind and will get into corners of experience that will escape the settled, fixed person. It is interesting that the word “wander” covers the movement of persons, animals, objects, thoughts, and feelings. Wandering is the natural and indeed native movement of the predominant majority of things in the world. The wind is the great elemental wanderer that roams the universe. In a fascinating passage in the Gospel of John, the nature of spirit is described in terms of the unpredictable dance of the wandering wind:
The wind blows wherever it pleases;
You hear its sound,
But you cannot tell where it
comes from or where it is going.
This is how it is with all who are born
of the Spirit.
