26 London, 23rd - 29th September 2019

FEATURE Follow us on Twitter@weeklytribune

theweeklytribune

To advertise in this paper call 0208 560 9726 or 07985 752738

On a Journey...By Susan Griffith-Jones, Exclusive

The guy at the end of the United Airlines customer service helpline comes back after several minutes of keeping me on hold and asks me if I’m okay with flying to Seattle on Air Canada, through Toronto. The time of arrival of this flight will be pretty much the same as the United one that just got can-celled. This is great! But still it’s a huge rush to both choose every-thing I need and then wash and re-pack those items into my smaller cabin baggage and then get out to Heathrow on the Tube. I make it to the departure gate as the flight is boarding, and have the blessing of one full free seat next to me, which I use to spread my papers across and get on with tweaking my conference report.

I know that I need to go back through my extensive notes that I will not be able to replicate in full here, but nevertheless want to ex-pand some topics, like those which talk about the meaning of ‘Time’, deepening its meaning to another layer on top of what I’ve already sketched out. I copy up a whole bunch of my notes from another batch of papers, but there are many diagrams that I’ll need to draw out too, to elucidate the information. I’ve brought my sketch book and a fine black pen along with me for this purpose, plus a geometry set box of items, minus the compass which wouldn’t have got through security! I know that this picture holds something that hasn’t been revealed to me yet, but in a way I’m comfortable with that. It’s pretty much been the same with all of my

photo collage art creations and The Circle of Immortality art piece too, whose meaning was not clear to me at all in the beginning, but opened up bit by bit. Indeed, they’re still revealing more to me now, as I in-terpret their symbolism according to my own shifting perspectives. This is a really interesting process to follow, but I am inherently im-patient and really want to under-stand my ‘Crystal of Time’ piece now, especially because I have this wonderful opportunity to go and talk about it at Dr Karim’s pres-tigious conference for his advanced Biogeometry students, taking place in Victoria, BC, Canada during the next few days. I also intuitively know that I’m not going to get to the bottom of this before the event, so I’ll have to content myself that what I am about to reveal of it now will be the correct information for this audience, and that I will have

to keep on mining away at it, layer by layer, in order to reach the sym-bolic treasure.

By the time we land in Toronto, I’ve managed to get quite a lot done and am content that I’m on route to producing what this conference talk needs to contain. I am a little surprised to find that even though I’m technically speaking in Can-ada, I must clear US customs and immigration at Toronto airport itself, before boarding the plane to the States. This is actually re-ally good, as when I land in Seattle after the next leg of the journey, I won’t have to go through the pro-cedure then. My body clock must be totally messed up by now, because I’m asleep before we take off from Toronto at around 7pm local time, and wake up very groggy headed in Seattle 5 hours later. Having taken

the shuttle into Downtown, I make a wrong turn out of the metro sta-tion and wander through mostly deserted streets at something past midnight, just not getting the right orientation. The location of the Green Tortoise Hostel had looked so easy from the airport on my GPS, but it’s a real job finding it in loco. Now I don’t have any data on my phone, I read off a street map pinned to a kind of lamppost on the corner of one road. There are some odd characters hang-ing around here and there, but I ignore them and they, me. In the end, a guy just locking up his late night store directs me to the place and having got there in just a few minutes, I settle myself in as fast as possible to try and get some more rest before my journey into Canada tomorrow, again!

This time I’ll be arriving by boat, as my plan is to catch ‘The Clip-

per’ going directly over to Victoria from Seattle Harbour tomorrow lunchtime. But, I’m up at the crack of dawn and there’s no way sleep is coming to me any more than it already has! I’ve entered the hell zone of being upside down in time, as we are literally 13.5 hours behind Delhi here. I had mostly adjusted to Bosnian time after 6 days there, but that’s still a 10 hour difference from here! There’s no doubt that I have to just be wherever I am, when I am, so I get up and have breakfast in the dining area of the hostel when it opens at 6am. There’s another route to get to Victoria, a bit long-er than the Clipper, that involves hopping between places on multi-ple ferries and buses. I’d initially thought that I wouldn’t be getting up so early, which this scenic route requires, but decide to do it since

I am! Getting over to the relevant ferry pier is simple. This hostel is a walk from the harbor and the guy in the hostel gives me very precise directions, so there’s no getting lost! By the time I’m sitting on the 30 minute ferry that crosses to the other side of the bay, which is actu-ally connected by land to Seattle in a kind of U shape, I’m feeling elated and please with my choice. On the other side, I catch the requisite bus that’s already there, and we scoot several miles over to a larger bus depot, from where I’ll be catching a longer ride over to a place called Port Angeles, from where I can get a ferry over to Victoria.

During the 3 hour wait at the bus stop, I continue my work on the presentation. The drawings are taking forever, but they are so im-portant to the expression of what I’m saying and I’m determined to make this as clear as possible. I’m also happy because this trip is cost-ing me a third of the money than the Clipper and I get to experience the most beautiful drive on this route that rolls along a neat high-way of dips and curves, flanked by seemingly endless forest, lakes and the Olympic National Park. There are clouds surrounding the peak of Mount Olympus itself, but the beauty and natural quality of the area is overwhelming. There’s a sense of community here, you can tell that people know each other and although the houses are nice, they are not as ‘done up’ as in oth-er parts of the US, and the feel is much more rural. I’m in a sociable mood and chat with different sets of people on the various buses and fer-ries; there are those who live here, some even on boats, others who are holidaying from the other side of Canada and those visiting from places in the USA.

As the ferry is pulling up to the beautiful shoreline of Victoria, I can see the Hotel Grand Pacific

where I’ll be staying and where the conference will be taking place, just nearby the pier. I book in, but the room’s not ready yet, so I go across the road to have a tea overlooking an array of boats. It’s a gorgeous day, the weather couldn’t be nicer and I feel tremendously comforta-ble here. I decide to frame the small picture of ‘Crystal of Time’ that I’ll be giving to Dr Karim, and run er-rands locally in the evening to com-plete this, then have a bite to eat in a local Chinese restaurant down the road, which is probably my first proper meal in days. I crash into bed early, but only sleep for a few hours, so I get up to work on my report and go to the hotel spa when it opens at 6am. After a few lengths in the pool, I spend most of my time in a deli-cious jacuzzi, allowing the pressure of water to iron out the aches from sitting on trains, buses and ferries for the past 48 hours, or so. I can’t even say how long I’ve been trav-elling for now, but I suppose this sense of time derangement is con-tributing something sub-conscious-ly at least to my already in depth study of time that’s emerging in my presentation. There’s so much that I won’t be able to include in it and I need to make a big decision here. Am I going to ‘squeeze’ as much as I can into it, like introduce topic by topic in brief, or am I going to focus in on one aspect of the picture, like the meaning of Time?

It’s got to be the first option, so I decide to open my intro to the con-cept of Time with a run down on the difference between Perception and Pure Conscious Awareness, which I build on to say that Time IS that difference, indeed a kind of refrac-tion of it.

To be continued...For all previous editions of

Susan’s story, ‘On a journey...’, please go to: www.pyramidkey. com/

readsusansarticleshere/”.

Continued from previous issue…

Harbour with Hotel Empress behind, the last stop on the Canadian Pacific Railway, Victoria, BC, Canada

Susan with fellow passengers, ferry from Port Angeles (USA) to Victo-ria, Canada

Susan with newfound friends and fellow travellers, arriving in Victoria, BC, Canada