Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin’s Echo and the Anasazi. Reg Saner. 1998. ISBN 0874805538
EXCERPTS
Over more than a dozen summers, with an occasional autumn thrown in, I have fed my pleasure on the ruins, the canyons and mesas of this book, as other work permitted. “Points along the way” were both places and stops toward answering two deceptively simple questions: “Why do I find these things so strangely moving?” and “What are they trying to tell us?”
If biblical minds agreed on one thing, it was that desert is demonic. To efface it utterly was to praise the Lord.
Odd that in this universe where maybe nothing is divine except what’s missing, our last few desert places seem profoundly blessed by what isn’t there. We now feel that truly to bring forth the fruit of such terrain is to agree that its silence and space are unimprovable. We say so any time we answer its hush with an attentive stillness, one wide and deep as respect.
Even assuming that religious emotions are indeed illusory, is human life possible without them? Their impulses seem so universal as to be innate, as if encoded genetically. Are they evolution’s protection against what evolution itself has created, reason’s analytical habit?
Any sacred building’s layout and symbols offer alignment, orientation. They give directions without saying a word.
Christianity, especially, identifies the sacred with “good,” whereas ancient Greeks and Pueblos – to cite parallel extremes – conceived the sacred in ways making “good” irrelevant, even absurd.
By projecting a secularized sacrality onto nature as a sort of benign whiff exuded from forests, vernal woods, or whitewater streams, we may forget that sacred power is traditionally grounded in the supernatural, whereas, and by definition, nature is natural. Yet a Hope leader could say, “The Hopi land is the Hopi religion,” because to Pueblos nature is never only natural.
All the same, though “bleak” should name my mood, it doesn’t. “Emptiness,” yes, and one I’m well content to sit quietly filled with. Its slight sadness feels like wisdom, as if that’s what I, too, had come to Chaco for.
No lands feel more desolate than those of the Hopi, no religion more beautiful or complex. That very desolation must have begotten such beauty and complexity. Encircled by utter indifference in every empty direction, you could feel yourself the least of beings, the merest speck; or you could sense yourself as the focus of spirits and sacred powers – without ceasing, however, to realize that in such vastitudes everyone’s daily affairs hither and yon around your tiny pueblo count for no more than the trickles of ant people busily seething round their anthill.
… is the sacred really self-love echoed back to sound like a call? A circular transaction? For me, its “place” exists anytime we stand at a center, the center of a moment: our own widest awareness of, and agreement to be, who and where we are.
Haven’t the gods always been made of our own limitations? No god has qualities a human wouldn’t find useful.
For most of humankind, wonders merely natural aren’t quite enough – as if our species sorely needs religious emotion to restore what analytical reason makes away with.
There are places you go, simply to be there. In the old days, such going toward was called pilgrimage.
Just as we living ones need the dead to remember us and help us with our lives, the gods rely on us mortals to sustain them.
If you believe there’s such a thing as desecration, you believe in the sacred.
Lots of rock, lots of sand, lots of wind, and very little rain can make juniper stands growing there, at the far end of possibility, an outpost of marginalized eccentrics.
There amid the deranged and violent I also discovered “good” trees battening on the same rimrock; witnessed all the living optimism, all the hurt joy that can scuffle upward out of such rock and suffer openly. In wresting a living from limestone’s long famines of rain, they must sometimes have felt that enduring there was next to impossible, but endure they had.
Mountains echo whatever you tell them, but desert space is always a listener, its only voice a quiet so unbroken it hushes you, thereby making you fit to enter.
Primitive? Yes, but wouldn’t it feel good to regress, to live among townsfolk where nobody had a job? Where instead of jobs, everybody has a life, and every life a clear purpose?
… an escape from self, the “me”. From the incessantly mumbling, grumbling, scheming, blithering first-person singular. It’s a brief but soothing release.
As for a New Mexico, Arizona, or Utah evening, your mood there can invest time’s barest necessities with an allure so narcotic you feel on the verge of understanding things no one will ever understand.
Questing toward some imagined Grand Happiness, we find it rarely if ever; meanwhile, a few blessed moments find us. They’re not anything we’d know how to look for. Besides, that’s not how it works. The blessed moments aren’t targetable. They just happen. Years later, merely recollecting them can summon us back to our best selves, but only if when they come, we’re not too busy to see them for what they are.
If you live long enough, you begin having days when it seems you may actually be getting some sense. How to act, how to see, what to care about. What truly matters.
Now comes the twist that makes endless questing for knowledge problematic. We assume that to know what, where, and why we are is a good thing. Is it? When ignorance is bliss, the proverb reminds us, “tis folly to be wise.” Despite such sayings, don’t we claim to follow “truth” wherever it leads? Or is that only a flattering mirage?
Even at a standstill you can feel it inside you: the road as verge, as threshold, making “destination” a mere pretext for the real business of going to meet it.
But for many of us four-wheeled, non-Native Americans, isn’t it true that our “center” and best mode of being is motion? Whose aim is less a place than simply the horizon.
A people who’ve survived desert conditions for ages are realists. You haven’t a choice. In desert, you become either a realist or a set of bleached bones. Paradoxically, you also come into kinship with a world of realities they eye has not seen …
Showing posts with label spiritual travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spiritual travel. Show all posts
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Beyond the Wall by Edward Abbey - Excerpts
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside. Edward Abbey. 1984. ISBN 978-0805008203
EXCERPTS
If you desire to know, feel and live the desert, as opposed to only looking at it as tourists and art critics do, you’ve got to arise from your bottom end and walk upright like a human being, alone or with a friend, into the ancient blood-thrilling primeval freedom of those vast and democratic vistas. You will never understand the secret essence of the world freedom until you do.
I do not hold with those who find in geometry the essence of elegance; what Euclid and his successors fell in love with was not the world out there but the world inside – structures of the human mind. They were admiring an aspect of themselves, like Narcissus doting on his image in the pool.
Beyond the hill is the auburn-colored desolation of the desert: stony hills, lean peaks, narrow bands of olive-drab shrubbery winding along the waterless drainages and in the distance, on all horizons, from fifty to sixty miles away, the farther ranges of blue, magenta and purple mountains, where nothing human lives or ever did. I find this a cheery, even exhilarating prospect. The world of nature is faithful and never disappoints.
I have now walked seventy-five miles plus side trips. Only fifty to go. Five days so far in the open, without roof, without walls. An emotion old as the human race, essence without name, flows through my heart and mind.
… the birds will gather the fruit, eat the flesh, scatter the seeds on the barren ground. But not utterly barren, even here. A few will germinate, sprout, take root, resume the endless, pointless, beautiful cycle, again and again and again. For what purpose? Only the weary and the foolish insist on a purpose. Let being be. To make shade for a titmouse, that is the purpose.
Seated once more on my rear end, like everybody else in the modern world, I slump with relief back into the delights of the civilization I love to despise. My feet are even happier than I am. Within minutes my 115-mile walk through the desert hills becomes a thing apart, a disjunct reality on the far side of a bottomless abyss, immediately beyond physical recollection. But it’s all still there in my heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure – they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days and years to come, like a treasure found and then, voluntarily, surrendered. Returned to the mountains with my blessing. It leaves a golden glowing in the mind.
We were desert mystics, my few friends and I, the kind who read maps as others read their holy books. I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.
But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development, the churlish resistance to all popular improvements? Very well, a fair question, but it’s been asked and answered a thousand times already; enough books to drive a man stark naked mad have dealt in detail with this question. There are many answers, all good, each sufficient. Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever than means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that it; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom – commendable virtues in any many, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present – all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as “Why wilderness”? To which, nevertheless, I shall append on further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.
We topped out on a small rise and there ahead lay the red wasteland again – red dust, red sand, the dark smoldering purple reds of ancient rocks, Chinle, Shinarump and Moenkopi, the old Triassic formations full of radium, dinosaurs, petrified wood, arsenic and selenium, fatal evil monstrous things, beautiful, beautiful. Miles of it, leagues of it, glittering under the radiant light, swimming beneath waves of heat, a great vast aching vacancy of pure space, waiting. Waiting for what? Why, waiting for us.
There was a middle-aged fellow sitting outside the store, on a bench in the shade, drinking beer. He had about a month’s growth of whiskers on what passed for a face. I bought him another can of Coors and tried to draw him into conversation. He was taciturn. Would not reveal his name. When I asked him what he did around there, he looked up at the clouds and over at the river and down at the ground between his boots, thinking hard, and finally said: “Nothing.” A good and sufficient answer. Taking that hint, I went away from there, leaving him in peace. My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do nothing – and find it enough.
The river tugged at our bodies with a gentle but insistent urge: Come with me, the river said, close your eyes and quiet your limbs and float with me into the wonder and mystery of the canyons, see the unknown and the little known, look upon the stone gods face to face, see Medusa, drink my waters, hear my song, feel my power, come along and drift with me toward the distant, ultimate and legendary sea … Sweet and subtle song. Perhaps I should have surrendered. I almost did. But didn’t.
The shimmer of heat waves, hanging like a scrim across the horizon, is enough in itself to confuse the senses, puzzle the mind. The mountains float like ships on the waves of superheated air, drifting away from one another, then returning, merging, inverting themselves, assuming shapes out of fantasy. The madness of mirage.
In the Dream Time, say the wise old men of the outback, we made our beginning; from the Dream Time we come; into the Dream Time, after death, we shall return. The dream is the real; waking life is only a dream within a greater dream.
What does the desert mean? It means what it is. It is there, it will be there when we are gone. But for a while we are living things – men, women, birds, that coyote howling far off on yonder stony ridge – we were a part of it all. That should be enough.
Buzzards circled overhead – there always seem to be more buzzards in the sky on the Mexican side of the border. Why? Because both life and death are more abundant down in Mexico. It’s the kind of country buzzards love. A candid country, harsh and bare, which is no doubt why it strikes us overcivilized Americans as crude, vulgar and dangerous.
I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plentitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one.
Which is more likely? asked Mark Twain (I paraphrase): that the unicorn exists or that men tell lies?
I am aware of the argument that hunting and fishing can lead a man into an intense, intimate engagement with the natural world unknown to the casual hiker. When the hunting or fishing is based on hunger, on need, I know that this is true. But sport, in the end, is only sport – divertissement. A diversion, that is, from the game of life. Which is – what? Let’s not go into that.
Yet I know that even the mosquito has a function – you might say a purpose – in the great web of life. Their larvae help feed fingerlings, for example. Certain of their women help spread the parasitic protozoa that give us dengue, breakbone fever, yellow fever and malaria, for example, keeping in control the human population of places like Borneo, Angola, Italy and Mississippi. No organism can be condemned as totally useless.
The top of the world. But of course, the giddy, dizzying truth is that the words “top” and “bottom”, from a planetary point of view, have no meaning. From out here in deep space, where I am orbiting, there is no top, there is no bottom, no floor, no ceiling, to anything. We spin through an infinite void, following our curving path around the sun, which is as bewildered as we are. True, the infinite is incomprehensible – but the finite is absurd. Einstein claimed otherwise, I know, but Einstein was only a mortal like us. No ceiling, no floor, no walls …
What can I say except confess that I have seen but little of the real North, and of that little understood less. The planet is bigger than we ever imagined. The world is colder, more ancient, more strange and more mysterious than we had dreamed. And we puny human creatures with our many tools and toys and fears and hopes make only one small leaf on the great efflorescing tree of life. Too much. No equation however organic, no prose however royally purple, can bracket our world within the boundaries of mind.
QUOTATIONS
Paul Klee
There are two mountains on which the weather is bright and clear, the mountain of the animals and the mountain of the gods. But between lies the shadowy valley of men.
EXCERPTS
If you desire to know, feel and live the desert, as opposed to only looking at it as tourists and art critics do, you’ve got to arise from your bottom end and walk upright like a human being, alone or with a friend, into the ancient blood-thrilling primeval freedom of those vast and democratic vistas. You will never understand the secret essence of the world freedom until you do.
I do not hold with those who find in geometry the essence of elegance; what Euclid and his successors fell in love with was not the world out there but the world inside – structures of the human mind. They were admiring an aspect of themselves, like Narcissus doting on his image in the pool.
Beyond the hill is the auburn-colored desolation of the desert: stony hills, lean peaks, narrow bands of olive-drab shrubbery winding along the waterless drainages and in the distance, on all horizons, from fifty to sixty miles away, the farther ranges of blue, magenta and purple mountains, where nothing human lives or ever did. I find this a cheery, even exhilarating prospect. The world of nature is faithful and never disappoints.
I have now walked seventy-five miles plus side trips. Only fifty to go. Five days so far in the open, without roof, without walls. An emotion old as the human race, essence without name, flows through my heart and mind.
… the birds will gather the fruit, eat the flesh, scatter the seeds on the barren ground. But not utterly barren, even here. A few will germinate, sprout, take root, resume the endless, pointless, beautiful cycle, again and again and again. For what purpose? Only the weary and the foolish insist on a purpose. Let being be. To make shade for a titmouse, that is the purpose.
Seated once more on my rear end, like everybody else in the modern world, I slump with relief back into the delights of the civilization I love to despise. My feet are even happier than I am. Within minutes my 115-mile walk through the desert hills becomes a thing apart, a disjunct reality on the far side of a bottomless abyss, immediately beyond physical recollection. But it’s all still there in my heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure – they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days and years to come, like a treasure found and then, voluntarily, surrendered. Returned to the mountains with my blessing. It leaves a golden glowing in the mind.
We were desert mystics, my few friends and I, the kind who read maps as others read their holy books. I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.
But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development, the churlish resistance to all popular improvements? Very well, a fair question, but it’s been asked and answered a thousand times already; enough books to drive a man stark naked mad have dealt in detail with this question. There are many answers, all good, each sufficient. Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever than means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that it; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom – commendable virtues in any many, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present – all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as “Why wilderness”? To which, nevertheless, I shall append on further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.
We topped out on a small rise and there ahead lay the red wasteland again – red dust, red sand, the dark smoldering purple reds of ancient rocks, Chinle, Shinarump and Moenkopi, the old Triassic formations full of radium, dinosaurs, petrified wood, arsenic and selenium, fatal evil monstrous things, beautiful, beautiful. Miles of it, leagues of it, glittering under the radiant light, swimming beneath waves of heat, a great vast aching vacancy of pure space, waiting. Waiting for what? Why, waiting for us.
There was a middle-aged fellow sitting outside the store, on a bench in the shade, drinking beer. He had about a month’s growth of whiskers on what passed for a face. I bought him another can of Coors and tried to draw him into conversation. He was taciturn. Would not reveal his name. When I asked him what he did around there, he looked up at the clouds and over at the river and down at the ground between his boots, thinking hard, and finally said: “Nothing.” A good and sufficient answer. Taking that hint, I went away from there, leaving him in peace. My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do nothing – and find it enough.
The river tugged at our bodies with a gentle but insistent urge: Come with me, the river said, close your eyes and quiet your limbs and float with me into the wonder and mystery of the canyons, see the unknown and the little known, look upon the stone gods face to face, see Medusa, drink my waters, hear my song, feel my power, come along and drift with me toward the distant, ultimate and legendary sea … Sweet and subtle song. Perhaps I should have surrendered. I almost did. But didn’t.
The shimmer of heat waves, hanging like a scrim across the horizon, is enough in itself to confuse the senses, puzzle the mind. The mountains float like ships on the waves of superheated air, drifting away from one another, then returning, merging, inverting themselves, assuming shapes out of fantasy. The madness of mirage.
In the Dream Time, say the wise old men of the outback, we made our beginning; from the Dream Time we come; into the Dream Time, after death, we shall return. The dream is the real; waking life is only a dream within a greater dream.
What does the desert mean? It means what it is. It is there, it will be there when we are gone. But for a while we are living things – men, women, birds, that coyote howling far off on yonder stony ridge – we were a part of it all. That should be enough.
Buzzards circled overhead – there always seem to be more buzzards in the sky on the Mexican side of the border. Why? Because both life and death are more abundant down in Mexico. It’s the kind of country buzzards love. A candid country, harsh and bare, which is no doubt why it strikes us overcivilized Americans as crude, vulgar and dangerous.
I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plentitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one.
Which is more likely? asked Mark Twain (I paraphrase): that the unicorn exists or that men tell lies?
I am aware of the argument that hunting and fishing can lead a man into an intense, intimate engagement with the natural world unknown to the casual hiker. When the hunting or fishing is based on hunger, on need, I know that this is true. But sport, in the end, is only sport – divertissement. A diversion, that is, from the game of life. Which is – what? Let’s not go into that.
Yet I know that even the mosquito has a function – you might say a purpose – in the great web of life. Their larvae help feed fingerlings, for example. Certain of their women help spread the parasitic protozoa that give us dengue, breakbone fever, yellow fever and malaria, for example, keeping in control the human population of places like Borneo, Angola, Italy and Mississippi. No organism can be condemned as totally useless.
The top of the world. But of course, the giddy, dizzying truth is that the words “top” and “bottom”, from a planetary point of view, have no meaning. From out here in deep space, where I am orbiting, there is no top, there is no bottom, no floor, no ceiling, to anything. We spin through an infinite void, following our curving path around the sun, which is as bewildered as we are. True, the infinite is incomprehensible – but the finite is absurd. Einstein claimed otherwise, I know, but Einstein was only a mortal like us. No ceiling, no floor, no walls …
What can I say except confess that I have seen but little of the real North, and of that little understood less. The planet is bigger than we ever imagined. The world is colder, more ancient, more strange and more mysterious than we had dreamed. And we puny human creatures with our many tools and toys and fears and hopes make only one small leaf on the great efflorescing tree of life. Too much. No equation however organic, no prose however royally purple, can bracket our world within the boundaries of mind.
QUOTATIONS
Paul Klee
There are two mountains on which the weather is bright and clear, the mountain of the animals and the mountain of the gods. But between lies the shadowy valley of men.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Phil Cousineau Quotation
For millennia, this cry in the heart for embarking upon a meaningful journey has been answered by pilgrimage, a transformative journey to a sacred center. It calls for a journey to a holy site associated with gods, saints, or heroes, or to a natural setting imbued with spiritual power, or to a revered temple to seek counsel. To people the world over, pilgrimage is a spiritual exercise, an act of devotion to find a source of healing, or even to perform a penance. Always, it is a journey of risk and renewal. For a journey without challenge has no meaning; one without purpose has no soul.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Vagabonding by Rolf Potts - Excerpts
Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. Rolf Potts. 2003. ISBN 0812992180
EXCERPTS
Vagabonding – n. (1) The act of leaving behind the orderly world to travel independently for an extended period of time. (2) A privately meaningful manner of travel that emphasizes creativity, adventure, awareness, simplicity, discovery, independence, realism, self-reliance, and the growth of the spirit. (3) A deliberate way of living that makes freedom to travel possible.
For some reason, [Americans] see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead – out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don’t really need – we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called “lifestyle”, travel becomes just another accessory – a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase the same way we buy clothing and furniture.
The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom.
Long-term travel doesn’t require a massive “bundle of cash”; it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way.
Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your potential options instead of your personal possessions.
… the “time-poor” [John Muir] – people who were so obsessed with tending their material wealth and social standing that they couldn’t spare the time to truly experience the splendor of California’s Sierra wilderness.
Most of us … choose to live like monks anyway, rooting ourselves to a home or a career and using the future as a kind of phony ritual that justifies the present. In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.”
Vagabonding is about gaining the courage to loosen your grip on the so-called certainties of this world. Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate.
Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.
Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts – so that your travels are not an escape from your real life but a discovery of your real life.
Other folks – teachers, doctors, bartenders, journalists – have opted to take their very careers on the road, alternating work and travel as they see fit.
A vacation, after all, merely rewards work. Vagabonding justifies it. Ultimately, then, the first step of vagabonding is simply a matter of making work serve your interests, instead of the other way around.
… quitting a job to go vagabonding should never be seen as the end of something grudging and unpleasant. Rather, it’s a vital step in beginning something new and wonderful.
This notion – that material investment is somehow more important to life than personal investment – is exactly what leads so many of us to believe we could never afford to go vagabonding.
In some ways, of course, coffee bars, convertibles, and marijuana are all part of what made travel appealing to Kerouac’s readers. That’s how marketing (intentional and otherwise) works. But these aren’t the things that made travel possible for Kerouac. What made travel possible was that he knew how neither self nor wealth can be measured in terms of what you consume or own. Even the downtrodden souls on the fringes of society, he observed, had something the rich didn’t: time.
Despite several millennia of such warnings, however, there is still an overwhelming social compulsion – an insanity of consensus, if you will – to get rich from life rather than live richly, to “do well” in the world instead of living well.
Being free from debt’s burdens simply gives you more vagabonding options. And, for that matter, more life options.
Vagabonding is, was, and always will be a private undertaking – and its goal is to improve your life not in relation to your neighbors but in relation to yourself.
In what ultimately amounted to over two years of travel in Asia, eastern Europe, and the Middle East, my lodging averaged out to just under five dollars a night, my meals cost well under a dollar a plate, and my total expenses rarely exceeded one thousand dollars a month.
And for a month’s rent in any major American city, you can spend a year in a beach hut in Indonesia.
… since most cultures treat elders with uncommon interest and respect, older travelers invariably wander into charming adventures and friendships on the road.
… you will never be able to truly appreciate the unexpected marvels of travel if you rely too heavily on your homework and ignore what is right before your eyes.
The gift of the information age, after all, is knowing your options – not your destiny – and those people who plan their travels with the idea of eliminating all uncertainty and unpredictability are missing out on the whole point of leaving home in the first place.
Since owners change and prices are in constant flux, hotel and restaurant recommendations will be the least dependable information in any guidebook you buy.
… the surest way to miss out on the genuine experience of a foreign place – the psychic equivalent of trapping yourself back home – is to obsessively check your e-mail as you travel from place to place.
Fortunately, you don’t ever need a really good reason to go anywhere; rather, go to a place for whatever happens when you get there.
… simple courage is worth far more than detailed logistics, and a confident, positive, ready-to-learn attitude will make up for any travel savvy you lack at the outset.
If there’s one key concept to remember amid the excitement of your first days on the road, it’s this: Slow down.
… the whole point of long-term travel is having the time to move deliberately through the world. Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time.
Rather, the secret to staying intrigued on the road – the secret to truly being different from the frustrated masses – is this: Don’t set limits. Don’t set limits on what you can or can’t do. Don’t set limits on what is or isn’t worthy of your time. Dare yourself to “play games” with your day: watch, wait, listen; allow things to happen.
… vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal – not a quest for answers so much as a celebration of the questions, an embrace of the ambiguous, and an openness to anything that comes your way.
Unlike a simple vacation (where you rarely have time to interact with your environment), vagabonding revolves around the people you meet on the road – and the attitude you take into these encounters can make or break your entire travel experience.
The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability. As you begin to practice this openness, you’ll quickly discover adventure in the simple reality of a world that defies your expectations.
What better recipe for adventure than to put off deciding on your destination until you arrive at a bus station and scan the schedule for unfamiliar names? What better way to discover the unknown than to follow your instincts instead of your plans?
The thing is, few of us ever “are” where we are: Instead of experiencing the reality of a moment or a day, our minds and souls are elsewhere – obsessing on the past or the future, fretting and fantasizing about other situations. At home this is one way of dealing with day-to-day doldrums; on the road, it’s a sure way to miss out on the very experiences that stand to teach you something. This is why vagabonding is not to be confused with a mere vacation, where the only goal is escape … Indeed, vagabonding is – at its best – a rediscovery of reality itself.
… “seeing” as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you.
Interestingly, one of the initial impediments to open-mindedness is not ignorance but ideology.
… vagabonding is less like a getaway caper than a patient kind of aimlessness – quite similar, in fact, to what the Australian Aborigines call “walkabout” … one merely leaves behind all possessions (except for survival essentials) and starts walking. What’s intriguing about walkabout is that there’s no physical goal: It simply continues until one becomes whole again.
… the modern travel scene in general has a notorious reputation for such half-baked spiritual foolery, as many wanderers tend to confuse simple exoticism with mystical revelation.
… heightened spiritual awareness is the natural result of your choice to put the material world in its place and hit the road for an extended time.
Travel, after all, is a form of asceticism …
Indeed, if travel is a process that helps you “find yourself”, it’s because it leaves you with nothing to hide behind – it yanks you out from the realm of rehearsed responses and dull comforts, and forces you into the present. Here, in the fleeting moment, you are left to improvise, to come to terms with your raw, true Self.
Jesus, after all, taught that it’s pointless to look to otherworldly realms for revelation, because “the kingdom of God is within you.” The Buddha expressed enlightenment not as a mystical firestorm, but as the disassembling of the conditioned personality.
At a certain level, then, spiritual expression requires the same kind of openness and realism that is required of vagabonding in general …
After all, a journey is a temporary diversion, and there would seem to be little reward in the “common miracles” it promises. That is, until you realize that life itself is a kind of journey.
QUOTATIONS
Edward Abbey
We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.
Paul Auster
People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you’re going to see just about all that you can handle.
Bill Bryson
Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. You whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
Gautama Buddha
Good people keep walking whatever happens. They do not speak vain words and are the same in good fortune and bad.
Ed Buryn
By switching to a new game, which in this case involves vagabonding, time becomes the only possession and everyone is equally rich in it by biological inheritance. Money, of course, is still needed to survive, but time is what you need to live. So, save what little money you possess to meet basic survival requirements, but spend your time lavishly in order to create the life values that make the fire worth the candle. Dig?
Tim Cahill
A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea … Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don’t go right now, we’re never going to do it. And we’ll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely.
Charles Caleb Colton
They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untraveled minds.
Michael Crichton
Often I feel I have to go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am … Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.
Eknath Easwaran
Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny, private, shell-bound realm – which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world.
John Flinn
One of the essential skills for a traveler is the ability to make a rather extravagant fool of oneself.
Pico Iyer
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
Milan Kundera
Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out is mute. Only chance can speak to us.
Bruce Lee
Research your own experiences for the truth … Absorb what is useful … Add what is specifically your own … The creating individual is more than any style or system.
Henry Miller
Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything … we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.
John Muir
Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.
Kathleen Norris
[Travel] is a way of surrendering to reduced circumstances in a manner that enhances the whole person. It is a radical way of knowing exactly who, what, and where you are, in defiance of those powerful forces in society that aim to make us forget.
Sufi Proverb
There is no God but Reality.
Linda Rose
The way I see it is that most folks simply choose their boxes. Any of us do what is fundamentally most important to us.
Lavinia Spalding
Don’t ever live vicariously. This is your life. Live.
Paul Theroux
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been; travelers don’t know where they’re going.
Henry David Thoreau
Explore your own higher latitudes. Be a Columbus to whole new continents within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
Kaushitaki Upanishad
It is not speech which we should want to know: we should want to know the speaker.
It is not things seen which we should want to know: we should know the seer.
It is not sounds which we should want to know: we should know the hearer.
It is not the mind which we should want to know: we should know the thinker.
EXCERPTS
Vagabonding – n. (1) The act of leaving behind the orderly world to travel independently for an extended period of time. (2) A privately meaningful manner of travel that emphasizes creativity, adventure, awareness, simplicity, discovery, independence, realism, self-reliance, and the growth of the spirit. (3) A deliberate way of living that makes freedom to travel possible.
For some reason, [Americans] see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead – out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don’t really need – we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called “lifestyle”, travel becomes just another accessory – a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase the same way we buy clothing and furniture.
The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom.
Long-term travel doesn’t require a massive “bundle of cash”; it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way.
Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your potential options instead of your personal possessions.
… the “time-poor” [John Muir] – people who were so obsessed with tending their material wealth and social standing that they couldn’t spare the time to truly experience the splendor of California’s Sierra wilderness.
Most of us … choose to live like monks anyway, rooting ourselves to a home or a career and using the future as a kind of phony ritual that justifies the present. In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.”
Vagabonding is about gaining the courage to loosen your grip on the so-called certainties of this world. Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate.
Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.
Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts – so that your travels are not an escape from your real life but a discovery of your real life.
Other folks – teachers, doctors, bartenders, journalists – have opted to take their very careers on the road, alternating work and travel as they see fit.
A vacation, after all, merely rewards work. Vagabonding justifies it. Ultimately, then, the first step of vagabonding is simply a matter of making work serve your interests, instead of the other way around.
… quitting a job to go vagabonding should never be seen as the end of something grudging and unpleasant. Rather, it’s a vital step in beginning something new and wonderful.
This notion – that material investment is somehow more important to life than personal investment – is exactly what leads so many of us to believe we could never afford to go vagabonding.
In some ways, of course, coffee bars, convertibles, and marijuana are all part of what made travel appealing to Kerouac’s readers. That’s how marketing (intentional and otherwise) works. But these aren’t the things that made travel possible for Kerouac. What made travel possible was that he knew how neither self nor wealth can be measured in terms of what you consume or own. Even the downtrodden souls on the fringes of society, he observed, had something the rich didn’t: time.
Despite several millennia of such warnings, however, there is still an overwhelming social compulsion – an insanity of consensus, if you will – to get rich from life rather than live richly, to “do well” in the world instead of living well.
Being free from debt’s burdens simply gives you more vagabonding options. And, for that matter, more life options.
Vagabonding is, was, and always will be a private undertaking – and its goal is to improve your life not in relation to your neighbors but in relation to yourself.
In what ultimately amounted to over two years of travel in Asia, eastern Europe, and the Middle East, my lodging averaged out to just under five dollars a night, my meals cost well under a dollar a plate, and my total expenses rarely exceeded one thousand dollars a month.
And for a month’s rent in any major American city, you can spend a year in a beach hut in Indonesia.
… since most cultures treat elders with uncommon interest and respect, older travelers invariably wander into charming adventures and friendships on the road.
… you will never be able to truly appreciate the unexpected marvels of travel if you rely too heavily on your homework and ignore what is right before your eyes.
The gift of the information age, after all, is knowing your options – not your destiny – and those people who plan their travels with the idea of eliminating all uncertainty and unpredictability are missing out on the whole point of leaving home in the first place.
Since owners change and prices are in constant flux, hotel and restaurant recommendations will be the least dependable information in any guidebook you buy.
… the surest way to miss out on the genuine experience of a foreign place – the psychic equivalent of trapping yourself back home – is to obsessively check your e-mail as you travel from place to place.
Fortunately, you don’t ever need a really good reason to go anywhere; rather, go to a place for whatever happens when you get there.
… simple courage is worth far more than detailed logistics, and a confident, positive, ready-to-learn attitude will make up for any travel savvy you lack at the outset.
If there’s one key concept to remember amid the excitement of your first days on the road, it’s this: Slow down.
… the whole point of long-term travel is having the time to move deliberately through the world. Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time.
Rather, the secret to staying intrigued on the road – the secret to truly being different from the frustrated masses – is this: Don’t set limits. Don’t set limits on what you can or can’t do. Don’t set limits on what is or isn’t worthy of your time. Dare yourself to “play games” with your day: watch, wait, listen; allow things to happen.
… vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal – not a quest for answers so much as a celebration of the questions, an embrace of the ambiguous, and an openness to anything that comes your way.
Unlike a simple vacation (where you rarely have time to interact with your environment), vagabonding revolves around the people you meet on the road – and the attitude you take into these encounters can make or break your entire travel experience.
The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability. As you begin to practice this openness, you’ll quickly discover adventure in the simple reality of a world that defies your expectations.
What better recipe for adventure than to put off deciding on your destination until you arrive at a bus station and scan the schedule for unfamiliar names? What better way to discover the unknown than to follow your instincts instead of your plans?
The thing is, few of us ever “are” where we are: Instead of experiencing the reality of a moment or a day, our minds and souls are elsewhere – obsessing on the past or the future, fretting and fantasizing about other situations. At home this is one way of dealing with day-to-day doldrums; on the road, it’s a sure way to miss out on the very experiences that stand to teach you something. This is why vagabonding is not to be confused with a mere vacation, where the only goal is escape … Indeed, vagabonding is – at its best – a rediscovery of reality itself.
… “seeing” as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you.
Interestingly, one of the initial impediments to open-mindedness is not ignorance but ideology.
… vagabonding is less like a getaway caper than a patient kind of aimlessness – quite similar, in fact, to what the Australian Aborigines call “walkabout” … one merely leaves behind all possessions (except for survival essentials) and starts walking. What’s intriguing about walkabout is that there’s no physical goal: It simply continues until one becomes whole again.
… the modern travel scene in general has a notorious reputation for such half-baked spiritual foolery, as many wanderers tend to confuse simple exoticism with mystical revelation.
… heightened spiritual awareness is the natural result of your choice to put the material world in its place and hit the road for an extended time.
Travel, after all, is a form of asceticism …
Indeed, if travel is a process that helps you “find yourself”, it’s because it leaves you with nothing to hide behind – it yanks you out from the realm of rehearsed responses and dull comforts, and forces you into the present. Here, in the fleeting moment, you are left to improvise, to come to terms with your raw, true Self.
Jesus, after all, taught that it’s pointless to look to otherworldly realms for revelation, because “the kingdom of God is within you.” The Buddha expressed enlightenment not as a mystical firestorm, but as the disassembling of the conditioned personality.
At a certain level, then, spiritual expression requires the same kind of openness and realism that is required of vagabonding in general …
After all, a journey is a temporary diversion, and there would seem to be little reward in the “common miracles” it promises. That is, until you realize that life itself is a kind of journey.
QUOTATIONS
Edward Abbey
We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.
Paul Auster
People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you’re going to see just about all that you can handle.
Bill Bryson
Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. You whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
Gautama Buddha
Good people keep walking whatever happens. They do not speak vain words and are the same in good fortune and bad.
Ed Buryn
By switching to a new game, which in this case involves vagabonding, time becomes the only possession and everyone is equally rich in it by biological inheritance. Money, of course, is still needed to survive, but time is what you need to live. So, save what little money you possess to meet basic survival requirements, but spend your time lavishly in order to create the life values that make the fire worth the candle. Dig?
Tim Cahill
A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea … Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don’t go right now, we’re never going to do it. And we’ll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely.
Charles Caleb Colton
They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untraveled minds.
Michael Crichton
Often I feel I have to go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am … Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.
Eknath Easwaran
Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny, private, shell-bound realm – which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world.
John Flinn
One of the essential skills for a traveler is the ability to make a rather extravagant fool of oneself.
Pico Iyer
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
Milan Kundera
Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out is mute. Only chance can speak to us.
Bruce Lee
Research your own experiences for the truth … Absorb what is useful … Add what is specifically your own … The creating individual is more than any style or system.
Henry Miller
Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything … we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.
John Muir
Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.
Kathleen Norris
[Travel] is a way of surrendering to reduced circumstances in a manner that enhances the whole person. It is a radical way of knowing exactly who, what, and where you are, in defiance of those powerful forces in society that aim to make us forget.
Sufi Proverb
There is no God but Reality.
Linda Rose
The way I see it is that most folks simply choose their boxes. Any of us do what is fundamentally most important to us.
Lavinia Spalding
Don’t ever live vicariously. This is your life. Live.
Paul Theroux
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been; travelers don’t know where they’re going.
Henry David Thoreau
Explore your own higher latitudes. Be a Columbus to whole new continents within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
Kaushitaki Upanishad
It is not speech which we should want to know: we should want to know the speaker.
It is not things seen which we should want to know: we should know the seer.
It is not sounds which we should want to know: we should know the hearer.
It is not the mind which we should want to know: we should know the thinker.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
The Art of Pilgrimage by Phil Cousineau - EXCERPTS
The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred. Phil Cousineau. 1998. ISBN 1-57324-509-7
EXCERPTS
Besides hearing a thousand complaints through the years by bored and disappointed travelers, I'm also aware of the spate of angst-ridden travel writers complaining we've gone from a world of classical ruins to sites simply ruined by too many (other) tourists.
... we may log impressive miles in hour travels but see nothing/ we may follow all the advice in the travel magazines and still feel little enthusiasm.
I don't believe the problem is in the sites as it is in the sighting, the way we see. It's not simply in the images that lured us there and let us down, as in the imagining that is required of us. Nor does the blame lie in the faiths that inspire throngs to visit religious, artistic, and cultural monuments, as much as in our own lack of faith that we can experience anything authentic anymore.
If we truly want to know the secret of soulful travel, we need to believe that there is something sacred
waiting to be discovered in virtually every journey.
There are as many forms of travel as there are proverbial roads to Rome. The tourism business offers comfort, predictability, and entertainment; business travel makes the world of commerce go 'round. There is exploration for the scholar and the scientist, still eager to encounter the unknown and add to the human legacy of knowledge. The centuries-old tradition of touring to add to social status endures, as does traveling to ancient sites for the sheer aesthetic "pleasure of ruins", as Rose Macaulay described it. In the seventeenth century emerged the custom of the Grand Tour, which recommended travel as the last stage of a gentleman's education. Most recent is the phenomenon of the "W .T.", the World Traveler, renowned for drifting for the sake of drifting, and the "F .B. T .", the Frequent Business Traveler .
What if we have finally wearied of the paladins of progress who promise worry-free travel, and long for a form of travel that responds to a genuine cri du coeur, a longing for a taste of mystery, a touch of the sacred?
For millennia, this cry in the heart for embarking upon a meaningful journey has been answered by pilgrimage, a transformative journey to a sacred center. It calls for a journey to a holy site associated with gods, saints, or heroes, or to a natural setting imbued with spiritual power or to a revered temple to seek counsel. To people the world over, pilgrimage is a spiritual exercise, an act of devotion to find a source of healing, or even to perform a penance. Always, it is a journey of risk and renewal. For a journey without challenge has no meaning; one without purpose has no soul.
What legendary travelers have taught us since Pausanius and Marco Polo is that the art of travel is the art of seeing what is sacred.
Pilgrimage is the kind of journeying that marks just this move from mindless to mindful, soulless to soulful travel. The difference may be subtle or dramatic; by definition is it life-changing. It means being alert to the times when all that's needed is a trip to a remote place to simply lose yourself, and to the times when what's needed is a journey to a sacred place, in all its glorious and fearsome masks, to find yourself.
... if the journey you have chosen is indeed a pilgrimage, a soulful journey, it will be rigorous. Ancient wisdom suggest if you aren't trembling as you approach the sacred, it isn't the real thing.
The Art of Pilgrimage is designed for those who intend to embark on any journey with a deep purpose but are unsure of how to prepare for it or endure it. As the title suggests, this book emphasizes the art of pilgrimage, which to my mind signals the skill of personally creating your own journey, and the daily practice of slowing down and lingering, savoring, and absorbing each of its stages.
What is sacred is what is worthy of our reverence, what evokes awe and wonder in the human heart, and what when contemplated transforms us utterly.
Our days stretched on. The hours seemed to contain days, the days held weeks, as in all dreamtime adventures.
In the uncanny way of spiritually magnetized centers of pilgrimage, I felt a wonderful calm exploring the derelict pavilions, abandoned libraries, and looted monasteries.
We travel as seekers after answers we cannot find at home, and soon find that a change of climate is easier than a change of heart.
Centuries of travel lore suggest that when we no longer know where to turn, our real journey has just begun. At that crossroads moment, a voice calls to our pilgrim soul. The time has come to set out for the sacred ground – the mountain, the temple, the ancestral home – that will stir our heart and restore our sense of wonder. It is down the path to the deeply real where time stops and we are seized by the mysteries. This is the journey we cannot not take.
Imagine your first memorable journey. What images rise up in your soul? They may be of a childhood visit to the family gravesite, the lecture your uncle gave at a famous battlefield, or the hand-in-hand trip with your mother to a religious site. What feelings are evoked by your enshrined travel memories? Do they have any connection with your life today? Have you ever made avow to go someplace that is sacred to you, your family, your group? Have you ever imagined yourself in a place that stirred your soul like the song of doves at dawn? If not you, then who? If not now, when? If not here, where? Paris? Benares? Memphis? Uncover what you long for and you will discover who you are.
This pilgrim is a wayfarer who longs to endure a difficult journey to reach the sacred center of his or her world, a place made holy by a saint, hero, or god. Once there, the desire is to touch a relic, have a vision, hear an oracle, and to experience what psychologist Stephen Larsen calls the "irruption of the divine in a three-dimensional place."
This is what the risk is for, the confirmation that the mystery exists at all in a modern world seemingly determined to undermine the sacred as mere superstition.
Integral to the art of travel is the longing to break away from the stultifying habits of our lives at home, to break away for however long it takes to once again truly see the world around us.
The traveler's lamp is also an illuminating metaphor for the light that shines forth from the wisdom of travelers who have walked the path before us.
Think of the ways that questions illuminate the world around us. Questions tune the soul. The purpose behind questions is to initiate the quest.
Take your soul for a stroll. Long walks, short walks, morning walks, evening walks -whatever form or length it takes. Walking is the best way to get out of your head.
Carl Jung wrote about his midlife crisis in his memoirs, in which he asked himself which myth he was living by. He discovered to his horror that he didn't know. "So I made it the task of tasks of my life to find out."
By what sacred story are you living? What task have you set for yourself? Can you tell your life story, accomplish your task, from where you are/
... the melancholic side of the questing spirit. The blue wave that overcomes us, the knotting in the ribcage is a signal that we have reached an impasse. How to adequately respond to this? The first step is to treat the melancholy as a force to be followed into its depths.
If the treasure – the truth of our life – is so close at hand, why is it so difficult for us to wake up, rub our eyes, and reach out to find what is within arm's reach? Why risk time and money and risk our necks to venture somewhere far, far away?
All of the answers are within us, but such is our tendency toward forgetting that we sometimes need to venture to a faraway land to tap our own memory. Our intuitive self has shut down; our light into the transcendent has gone out.
The irrepressible desire to see deeply into ourselves and the world evokes what Hindus call dyana, "the long pure look."
There is another call, the one that arrives the day when what once worked no longer does … The heart grows cold; life loses its vitality. Our accomplishments seem meaningless.
The long line of myths, legends, poetry, and stories throughout the world tell us that it is at that moment of darkness that the call comes. It arrives in various forms – an itch, a fever, an offer, a ringing, an inspiration, an idea, a voice, words in a book that seem to have been written just for us – or a knock.
Not a day goes by when the world doesn't cry out for us, signal us with signs and sounds, calling us home. Listening closely is nearly a lost art, but a retrievable one. The soul thrives on it. Words heard by chance have been known to change lives.
The call to the sacred journey your secret heart longs for won't come by expectation, will not arrive in a logical way. If you imagine that something is trying to call to you, try to practice stillness for a few minutes each day. Be still and quiet and you may be surprised what you start to hear.
Ask yourself what is absurd in your life right now. Then recall that the roots of the word refer to being "deaf”. If you have stopped listening, try to begin again, first with what you love, then with what is difficult for you.
... to name something is to imbue it with a soul.
Always the call summons us to the hidden life.
First there is the personal restlessness, the feeling of being nowhere in the place they are now; then there is the need to feel something deeper than the surface glare of things, a longing to be somewhere else where that is possible.
Imagine the last time your faith failed. Faith in yourself, your family, your God, your country, love, the arts, even faith itself. Of course, faith is Janus-faced. One face is blind, unquestioning; the other sees far and deep, trusting what is unfolding in your, in life. It takes courage to trust the voices that mayor may not be genuine calls. With that in mind, what or where has called to you recently?
... the notion of transformation implicit in secular pilgrimages, such as the writer's journey to Paris or the artist's to Rome.
I am proposing a way of looking not only at but through the road, through our moments of travel to their past and future dimensions, to consider each encounter as a chapter in a long novel, each person along the way as one of the characters in our soul journey through life.
Imagine slowing down, becoming aware of the voices in your dreams, your unexpected encounters.
Practice listening – to your friends, your children, music, the wind, your dreams, the ancient wisdom of sacred texts. Listen as though your life depended on it. It does.
Timeless art is like that. It anticipates you. Without it there is no sacred journey.
Try to imagine that you are leaving for a journey from which you may never return. How would you "mark" the time? Would you hold a feast? Would you chronicle and record every moment? Rituals mark time, set space apart – two ways of defining what we mean by the sacred.
Before setting out, remind yourself of the purpose of your journey. From now on, there is no such thing as a neutral act, an empty thought, an aimless day. Travels become sacred by the depths of their contemplations. As in myth, dream, and poetry, every word is saturated with meaning. Now is the time to live your ideal life.
The venerable tradition of traveling with one satchel or bag symbolizes the fundamental philosophy of pilgrimage: Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
The pilgrim's staff is unnecessary for city travels but is indispensable for long walking tours.
Crossing over means confronting the guardian at the gate, the personification of the forces trying to keep us in the village, the ordinary world … A vacation is easy to embark upon; everything has been laid out for us to have a predictable, comfortable, and reassuring holiday. But a pilgrimage is different; we are actually beckoning to the darkness in our lives. The fear is real.
When you leave home, you are a stranger, and a stranger is always feared. That is why the wise traveler carries gifts.
The shift from the tourist emphasis on "taking photographs", "taking souvenirs home", "taking a break", to "leaving" something behind is the pilgrim move … Coins dropped into a fountain or well or poorbox, letters left behind at a national park office for the goddess of the volcano, pencils and postcards of your hometown left behind for beggar children rather than candy or cigarettes - all are simple "gratitudes", acts of gratitude that you have been blessed with on this journey. Ask yourself what your gratuities will be before you leave. Keep one pocket in your satchel just for these.
A second task once you have crossed the threshold is to listen intently to everything around you. A pilgrimage is an opportunity to reconnect with your soul. But that is difficult if the radio frequency is jammed. Solitudinous time listening to music is a remarkably effective way to get back into the habit of listening closely when traveling.
Recollection is an effective way to illuminate your true motivation. Recall past journeys, incomplete journeys.
In sacred travel, every experience is uncanny. No encounter is without meaning. There are signs everywhere, if only we learn how to read them.
Everything matters along the road, but what matters deeply is what is invisible and must be seen with the inner eye.
If there is a trick to soulful travel, it is learning to see for yourself. To do this takes practice and a belief that it matters. The difference between pilgrim and tourist is the intention of attention, the quality of the curiosity.
The traveler soon learns that it is difficult to unlearn a lifetime of habitual seeing, the ordinary perception that gets one through a day at home but is inadequate to the task of comprehending the suddenly unfamiliar, strange, even marvelous things.
The artist and pilgrim, soulful travelers in parallel realms, are by nature similar; like Siamese twins, they are connected by the tissue of desire to experience the world directly.
To allow room for surprise and improvisation is to begin the apprenticeship of learning the way that is no way.
Imagine the way you see yourself seeing. How are you seeing your way? How do you plan to record it, remember it, observe the journey as if it were a work of art? Try to see yourself as a peripatetic artist whose job it is to capture in words, art, music, or story the essential secret of the day. How would you do it? The practice you pursue will determine the quality of your pilgrimage.
Imagine that the task of the pilgrim is to deepen the mystery for himself or herself, not have it handed over. If you find yourself facing disappointment, try to ask yourself where your attention has wandered. The real work on the journey has begun; you have to meet the gods at these ancient sites halfway.
Because so much of what is encountered along the road is novel, it is important to honor it by recording our thoughts as we move along. Thinking that we'll remember the smell of the pine cones or the shimmering of the sea is as illusory as trying to convince ourselves that we'll perfectly recall a dream … Why is this so important? Because you are changing as the miles click off and the destination draws nearer, and there is nothing more fascinating than to closely observe the process of change and
deepening, and how we respond to that quicksilver phenomenon.
We can only plan so much. Then we must let go and trust in Kairos, the old god of synchronicity.
Remember, those who don't ask essential questions don't find what's most authentic. The soul of your pilgrimage, the heart of your destination, disappears, will be invisible, like the Grail Castle if you are too afraid or too proud to appear as you really are at the moment – someone far, far from home, without all the answers, without the soul map to the city.
Each day … you will have to choose – between the image that is being offered to the great run of people alongside you, or the imaginative, active encounter with the place. Do not be fooled by glamour, an old Scottish word for spell.
The secret, of course, is that there is no secret. No one way, just your way.
Everywhere has a secret room. You must find your own, in a small chapel, a tiny cafe, a quiet park, the home of a new friend, the pew where the morning light strikes the rose window just so. As a pilgrim you must find it or you will never understand the hidden reasons why you really left home.
Patience, silence, trust, and faith are venerable qualities of the pilgrim, but more important is the practice of them.
How will you answer the voice who asks you now to describe what you are enduring halfway through your pilgrimage? For every time we move toward a significant goal, the world has a tendency to through terrific obstacles in our way. [WMC: Not really the right perspective. There are obstacles when we move in ANY direction. It is the MOVING itself that causes me to encounter obstacles, NOT my goals specifically! It is the obstacles, or our perceptions of them, that kept us from moving earlier.]
At a fundamental level, all pilgrimage sites are oracular. But we must be careful how to frame the question and how to interpret the answer.
If we leave home with a fundamental question in our hearts and minds, we are moving toward an oracular encounter, the "sacred well-spring", the source where we can replenish our lives.
We learn by going where we have to go; we arrive when we find ourselves on the road walking toward us.
Imagine your return journey as the last act of an epic story. Which moments gleamed brighter, gave you pause, challenged all your previous beliefs, reconfirmed your belief in the power at the center?
This is the key to the poetry of pilgrimage: The story that we bring back from our journeys is the boon. It is the gift of grace that was passed to us in the heart of our journey ... The boon … is a presence in the soul of the world that can be sensed and honored and carried home in your heart.
Prepare yourself. It will be harder than you think to find an audience for your stories.
... the challenge now is to use the insights gathered on the road to see your everyday life as a pilgrimage. Remember again and again that the true pilgrimage is into the undiscovered land of your own imagination, which you could not have explored any other way than through these lands, with gratitude in your satchel and the compassion for all you see as your touchstone.
The challenge is to learn how to carry over the quality of the journey into your everyday life. The art of pilgrimage is the craft of taking time seriously, elegantly.
QUOTATIONS
Basho
There came a day when the clouds drifting along with the wind aroused a wanderlust in me, and I set off on a journey to roam along the seashores …
Ambrose Bierce
Pilgrim, n. A traveler that is taken seriously.
Gautama Buddha
You cannot travel the path until you have become the path.
Helder Camara
When your ship, long moored in harbor, gives you the illusion of being a house … put out to sea! ... save your boat's journeying soul, and your own pilgrim soul, cost what it may.
Joseph Campbell
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.
Joseph Campbell
The ultimate aim of the quest, if one is to return, must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.
Joseph Campbell
Unless you leave room for serendipity, how can the divine enter in? The beginning of the adventure of finding yourself is to lose your way!
Loy Ching-Yuen
The beauty of the Way is that there is no "way".
Rene Daumal
To return to the source, one must travel in the opposite direction.
Fyodor Dostoyevski
Thou shall love life more that the meaning of life.
Meister Eckhart
The Wayless Way, where the Sons of God lose themselves and, at the same time, find themselves.
Betty Edwards
Drawing isn't the problem, seeing is the problem.
Alexander Eliot
Personal answers to ultimate questions.
That is what we seek.
Theophile Gautier
The pleasure of traveling consists in the obstacles, the fatigue, and even the danger. What charm can anyone find in an excursion, when he is always sure of reaching his destination, of having horses ready waiting for him, a soft bed, an excellent supper, and all the ease and comfort which he can enjoy in his own home! One of the great misfortunes of modern life is the want of any sudden surprise, and the absence of all adventures. Everything is so well arranged, so admirably combined, so plainly labeled, that chance is an utter impossibility.
Liz Greene
I stood at a crossroads and fate came to meet me …
Michael Guillen
Bring home an aspect from every journey for your altar at home. Make it part of your altar at home. What's important to me is this is the domestic part of Latino life; our altars protect our home. So bring something home to re-create the altar – a smooth mineral, a touchstone. This is an important part of pilgrimage, the recreating of memory rituals to help remember people you lost. Another way for me is to remember others and to remember myself honestly.
Dag Hammarskjold
The longest journey
Is the journey inwards
Of him who has chosen his destiny
Zora Neale Hurston
Travel is the soul of civilization.
Alan Jones
We are impoverished in our longing and devoid of imagination when it comes to our reaching out to Others … We need to be introduced to our longings, because they guard our mystery.
Soren Kierkegaard
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts.
Antonio Machado
Traveler, there is no path
paths are made by walking.
Joan Marler
... a new outlook can lead to a realignment of intuition that awakens perception of where you need to be next in your life.
Joan Marler
Be prepared – then let go of expectations!
Henry Moore
The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring
everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is – it must be something you cannot possibly do.
Richard R. Niebuhr
Pilgrims are persons in motion – passing through territories not their own – seeking something we might call completion, or perhaps the word clarity will do as well, a goal to which only the spirit's compass points the way.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Never trust a thought that didn't come by walking.
Flannery O'Connor
No matter what form the dragon may take, it is the mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will be concerned to tell.
Martin Palmer
True pilgrimage changes lives, whether we go halfway around the world or out to our own backyards.
Walker Percy
[Inward seeking] is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair .
Peace Pilgrim
A pilgrim is a wanderer with a purpose.
Peace Pilgrim
Think of how free I am. If I want to travel, I just stand up and walk away.
Arabian Proverb
It's not the road ahead that wears you out – it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.
Eskimo Proverb
Glorious it is when wandering time is come.
Objiwa Proverb
Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind is bearing me across the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The necessary thing is great, inner solitude. What goes on inwardly is worthy of your love.
Mevlana Rumi
As you start on the Way, the Way appears.
Mevlana Rumi
Don't be satisfied with the stories that come before you; unfold your own myth.
Huston Smith
The art is to learn to master today's unavoidable situation with as much equanimity as we can muster, in preparation for facing its sequel tomorrow.
Huston Smith
The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life. Nothing matters now but this adventure.
Freya Stark
A good traveler does not, I think, much mind the uninteresting places. He is there to be inside them, as a thread is inside the necklace it strings. The world, with unknown and unexpected variety, is a part of his own Leisure; and this living participation is, I think, what separates the traveler and the tourist, who remains separate, as if he were at a theatre, and not himself a part of whatever the show may be.
Freya Stark
This a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering. The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly becomes a part of the tangible world.
Robert Louis Stevenson
For my part I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
Jules Supervielle
And it was then that in the depths of sleep
Someone breathed to me: "You alone can do it,
Come immediately."
Henry David Thoreau
A traveler. I love his title. A traveler is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from – toward; it is the history of every one of us.
Qingyuan Weixin
When I had not yet begun to study Zen thirty years ago, I thought that mountains are mountains and waters are waters. Later when I studied personally with my master, I entered realization and understood that mountains are not mountains, waters are not waters. Now that I abide in the way of no-seeking, I see as before that mountains are just mountains, waters are just waters.
EXCERPTS
Besides hearing a thousand complaints through the years by bored and disappointed travelers, I'm also aware of the spate of angst-ridden travel writers complaining we've gone from a world of classical ruins to sites simply ruined by too many (other) tourists.
... we may log impressive miles in hour travels but see nothing/ we may follow all the advice in the travel magazines and still feel little enthusiasm.
I don't believe the problem is in the sites as it is in the sighting, the way we see. It's not simply in the images that lured us there and let us down, as in the imagining that is required of us. Nor does the blame lie in the faiths that inspire throngs to visit religious, artistic, and cultural monuments, as much as in our own lack of faith that we can experience anything authentic anymore.
If we truly want to know the secret of soulful travel, we need to believe that there is something sacred
waiting to be discovered in virtually every journey.
There are as many forms of travel as there are proverbial roads to Rome. The tourism business offers comfort, predictability, and entertainment; business travel makes the world of commerce go 'round. There is exploration for the scholar and the scientist, still eager to encounter the unknown and add to the human legacy of knowledge. The centuries-old tradition of touring to add to social status endures, as does traveling to ancient sites for the sheer aesthetic "pleasure of ruins", as Rose Macaulay described it. In the seventeenth century emerged the custom of the Grand Tour, which recommended travel as the last stage of a gentleman's education. Most recent is the phenomenon of the "W .T.", the World Traveler, renowned for drifting for the sake of drifting, and the "F .B. T .", the Frequent Business Traveler .
What if we have finally wearied of the paladins of progress who promise worry-free travel, and long for a form of travel that responds to a genuine cri du coeur, a longing for a taste of mystery, a touch of the sacred?
For millennia, this cry in the heart for embarking upon a meaningful journey has been answered by pilgrimage, a transformative journey to a sacred center. It calls for a journey to a holy site associated with gods, saints, or heroes, or to a natural setting imbued with spiritual power or to a revered temple to seek counsel. To people the world over, pilgrimage is a spiritual exercise, an act of devotion to find a source of healing, or even to perform a penance. Always, it is a journey of risk and renewal. For a journey without challenge has no meaning; one without purpose has no soul.
What legendary travelers have taught us since Pausanius and Marco Polo is that the art of travel is the art of seeing what is sacred.
Pilgrimage is the kind of journeying that marks just this move from mindless to mindful, soulless to soulful travel. The difference may be subtle or dramatic; by definition is it life-changing. It means being alert to the times when all that's needed is a trip to a remote place to simply lose yourself, and to the times when what's needed is a journey to a sacred place, in all its glorious and fearsome masks, to find yourself.
... if the journey you have chosen is indeed a pilgrimage, a soulful journey, it will be rigorous. Ancient wisdom suggest if you aren't trembling as you approach the sacred, it isn't the real thing.
The Art of Pilgrimage is designed for those who intend to embark on any journey with a deep purpose but are unsure of how to prepare for it or endure it. As the title suggests, this book emphasizes the art of pilgrimage, which to my mind signals the skill of personally creating your own journey, and the daily practice of slowing down and lingering, savoring, and absorbing each of its stages.
What is sacred is what is worthy of our reverence, what evokes awe and wonder in the human heart, and what when contemplated transforms us utterly.
Our days stretched on. The hours seemed to contain days, the days held weeks, as in all dreamtime adventures.
In the uncanny way of spiritually magnetized centers of pilgrimage, I felt a wonderful calm exploring the derelict pavilions, abandoned libraries, and looted monasteries.
We travel as seekers after answers we cannot find at home, and soon find that a change of climate is easier than a change of heart.
Centuries of travel lore suggest that when we no longer know where to turn, our real journey has just begun. At that crossroads moment, a voice calls to our pilgrim soul. The time has come to set out for the sacred ground – the mountain, the temple, the ancestral home – that will stir our heart and restore our sense of wonder. It is down the path to the deeply real where time stops and we are seized by the mysteries. This is the journey we cannot not take.
Imagine your first memorable journey. What images rise up in your soul? They may be of a childhood visit to the family gravesite, the lecture your uncle gave at a famous battlefield, or the hand-in-hand trip with your mother to a religious site. What feelings are evoked by your enshrined travel memories? Do they have any connection with your life today? Have you ever made avow to go someplace that is sacred to you, your family, your group? Have you ever imagined yourself in a place that stirred your soul like the song of doves at dawn? If not you, then who? If not now, when? If not here, where? Paris? Benares? Memphis? Uncover what you long for and you will discover who you are.
This pilgrim is a wayfarer who longs to endure a difficult journey to reach the sacred center of his or her world, a place made holy by a saint, hero, or god. Once there, the desire is to touch a relic, have a vision, hear an oracle, and to experience what psychologist Stephen Larsen calls the "irruption of the divine in a three-dimensional place."
This is what the risk is for, the confirmation that the mystery exists at all in a modern world seemingly determined to undermine the sacred as mere superstition.
Integral to the art of travel is the longing to break away from the stultifying habits of our lives at home, to break away for however long it takes to once again truly see the world around us.
The traveler's lamp is also an illuminating metaphor for the light that shines forth from the wisdom of travelers who have walked the path before us.
Think of the ways that questions illuminate the world around us. Questions tune the soul. The purpose behind questions is to initiate the quest.
Take your soul for a stroll. Long walks, short walks, morning walks, evening walks -whatever form or length it takes. Walking is the best way to get out of your head.
Carl Jung wrote about his midlife crisis in his memoirs, in which he asked himself which myth he was living by. He discovered to his horror that he didn't know. "So I made it the task of tasks of my life to find out."
By what sacred story are you living? What task have you set for yourself? Can you tell your life story, accomplish your task, from where you are/
... the melancholic side of the questing spirit. The blue wave that overcomes us, the knotting in the ribcage is a signal that we have reached an impasse. How to adequately respond to this? The first step is to treat the melancholy as a force to be followed into its depths.
If the treasure – the truth of our life – is so close at hand, why is it so difficult for us to wake up, rub our eyes, and reach out to find what is within arm's reach? Why risk time and money and risk our necks to venture somewhere far, far away?
All of the answers are within us, but such is our tendency toward forgetting that we sometimes need to venture to a faraway land to tap our own memory. Our intuitive self has shut down; our light into the transcendent has gone out.
The irrepressible desire to see deeply into ourselves and the world evokes what Hindus call dyana, "the long pure look."
There is another call, the one that arrives the day when what once worked no longer does … The heart grows cold; life loses its vitality. Our accomplishments seem meaningless.
The long line of myths, legends, poetry, and stories throughout the world tell us that it is at that moment of darkness that the call comes. It arrives in various forms – an itch, a fever, an offer, a ringing, an inspiration, an idea, a voice, words in a book that seem to have been written just for us – or a knock.
Not a day goes by when the world doesn't cry out for us, signal us with signs and sounds, calling us home. Listening closely is nearly a lost art, but a retrievable one. The soul thrives on it. Words heard by chance have been known to change lives.
The call to the sacred journey your secret heart longs for won't come by expectation, will not arrive in a logical way. If you imagine that something is trying to call to you, try to practice stillness for a few minutes each day. Be still and quiet and you may be surprised what you start to hear.
Ask yourself what is absurd in your life right now. Then recall that the roots of the word refer to being "deaf”. If you have stopped listening, try to begin again, first with what you love, then with what is difficult for you.
... to name something is to imbue it with a soul.
Always the call summons us to the hidden life.
First there is the personal restlessness, the feeling of being nowhere in the place they are now; then there is the need to feel something deeper than the surface glare of things, a longing to be somewhere else where that is possible.
Imagine the last time your faith failed. Faith in yourself, your family, your God, your country, love, the arts, even faith itself. Of course, faith is Janus-faced. One face is blind, unquestioning; the other sees far and deep, trusting what is unfolding in your, in life. It takes courage to trust the voices that mayor may not be genuine calls. With that in mind, what or where has called to you recently?
... the notion of transformation implicit in secular pilgrimages, such as the writer's journey to Paris or the artist's to Rome.
I am proposing a way of looking not only at but through the road, through our moments of travel to their past and future dimensions, to consider each encounter as a chapter in a long novel, each person along the way as one of the characters in our soul journey through life.
Imagine slowing down, becoming aware of the voices in your dreams, your unexpected encounters.
Practice listening – to your friends, your children, music, the wind, your dreams, the ancient wisdom of sacred texts. Listen as though your life depended on it. It does.
Timeless art is like that. It anticipates you. Without it there is no sacred journey.
Try to imagine that you are leaving for a journey from which you may never return. How would you "mark" the time? Would you hold a feast? Would you chronicle and record every moment? Rituals mark time, set space apart – two ways of defining what we mean by the sacred.
Before setting out, remind yourself of the purpose of your journey. From now on, there is no such thing as a neutral act, an empty thought, an aimless day. Travels become sacred by the depths of their contemplations. As in myth, dream, and poetry, every word is saturated with meaning. Now is the time to live your ideal life.
The venerable tradition of traveling with one satchel or bag symbolizes the fundamental philosophy of pilgrimage: Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
The pilgrim's staff is unnecessary for city travels but is indispensable for long walking tours.
Crossing over means confronting the guardian at the gate, the personification of the forces trying to keep us in the village, the ordinary world … A vacation is easy to embark upon; everything has been laid out for us to have a predictable, comfortable, and reassuring holiday. But a pilgrimage is different; we are actually beckoning to the darkness in our lives. The fear is real.
When you leave home, you are a stranger, and a stranger is always feared. That is why the wise traveler carries gifts.
The shift from the tourist emphasis on "taking photographs", "taking souvenirs home", "taking a break", to "leaving" something behind is the pilgrim move … Coins dropped into a fountain or well or poorbox, letters left behind at a national park office for the goddess of the volcano, pencils and postcards of your hometown left behind for beggar children rather than candy or cigarettes - all are simple "gratitudes", acts of gratitude that you have been blessed with on this journey. Ask yourself what your gratuities will be before you leave. Keep one pocket in your satchel just for these.
A second task once you have crossed the threshold is to listen intently to everything around you. A pilgrimage is an opportunity to reconnect with your soul. But that is difficult if the radio frequency is jammed. Solitudinous time listening to music is a remarkably effective way to get back into the habit of listening closely when traveling.
Recollection is an effective way to illuminate your true motivation. Recall past journeys, incomplete journeys.
In sacred travel, every experience is uncanny. No encounter is without meaning. There are signs everywhere, if only we learn how to read them.
Everything matters along the road, but what matters deeply is what is invisible and must be seen with the inner eye.
If there is a trick to soulful travel, it is learning to see for yourself. To do this takes practice and a belief that it matters. The difference between pilgrim and tourist is the intention of attention, the quality of the curiosity.
The traveler soon learns that it is difficult to unlearn a lifetime of habitual seeing, the ordinary perception that gets one through a day at home but is inadequate to the task of comprehending the suddenly unfamiliar, strange, even marvelous things.
The artist and pilgrim, soulful travelers in parallel realms, are by nature similar; like Siamese twins, they are connected by the tissue of desire to experience the world directly.
To allow room for surprise and improvisation is to begin the apprenticeship of learning the way that is no way.
Imagine the way you see yourself seeing. How are you seeing your way? How do you plan to record it, remember it, observe the journey as if it were a work of art? Try to see yourself as a peripatetic artist whose job it is to capture in words, art, music, or story the essential secret of the day. How would you do it? The practice you pursue will determine the quality of your pilgrimage.
Imagine that the task of the pilgrim is to deepen the mystery for himself or herself, not have it handed over. If you find yourself facing disappointment, try to ask yourself where your attention has wandered. The real work on the journey has begun; you have to meet the gods at these ancient sites halfway.
Because so much of what is encountered along the road is novel, it is important to honor it by recording our thoughts as we move along. Thinking that we'll remember the smell of the pine cones or the shimmering of the sea is as illusory as trying to convince ourselves that we'll perfectly recall a dream … Why is this so important? Because you are changing as the miles click off and the destination draws nearer, and there is nothing more fascinating than to closely observe the process of change and
deepening, and how we respond to that quicksilver phenomenon.
We can only plan so much. Then we must let go and trust in Kairos, the old god of synchronicity.
Remember, those who don't ask essential questions don't find what's most authentic. The soul of your pilgrimage, the heart of your destination, disappears, will be invisible, like the Grail Castle if you are too afraid or too proud to appear as you really are at the moment – someone far, far from home, without all the answers, without the soul map to the city.
Each day … you will have to choose – between the image that is being offered to the great run of people alongside you, or the imaginative, active encounter with the place. Do not be fooled by glamour, an old Scottish word for spell.
The secret, of course, is that there is no secret. No one way, just your way.
Everywhere has a secret room. You must find your own, in a small chapel, a tiny cafe, a quiet park, the home of a new friend, the pew where the morning light strikes the rose window just so. As a pilgrim you must find it or you will never understand the hidden reasons why you really left home.
Patience, silence, trust, and faith are venerable qualities of the pilgrim, but more important is the practice of them.
How will you answer the voice who asks you now to describe what you are enduring halfway through your pilgrimage? For every time we move toward a significant goal, the world has a tendency to through terrific obstacles in our way. [WMC: Not really the right perspective. There are obstacles when we move in ANY direction. It is the MOVING itself that causes me to encounter obstacles, NOT my goals specifically! It is the obstacles, or our perceptions of them, that kept us from moving earlier.]
At a fundamental level, all pilgrimage sites are oracular. But we must be careful how to frame the question and how to interpret the answer.
If we leave home with a fundamental question in our hearts and minds, we are moving toward an oracular encounter, the "sacred well-spring", the source where we can replenish our lives.
We learn by going where we have to go; we arrive when we find ourselves on the road walking toward us.
Imagine your return journey as the last act of an epic story. Which moments gleamed brighter, gave you pause, challenged all your previous beliefs, reconfirmed your belief in the power at the center?
This is the key to the poetry of pilgrimage: The story that we bring back from our journeys is the boon. It is the gift of grace that was passed to us in the heart of our journey ... The boon … is a presence in the soul of the world that can be sensed and honored and carried home in your heart.
Prepare yourself. It will be harder than you think to find an audience for your stories.
... the challenge now is to use the insights gathered on the road to see your everyday life as a pilgrimage. Remember again and again that the true pilgrimage is into the undiscovered land of your own imagination, which you could not have explored any other way than through these lands, with gratitude in your satchel and the compassion for all you see as your touchstone.
The challenge is to learn how to carry over the quality of the journey into your everyday life. The art of pilgrimage is the craft of taking time seriously, elegantly.
QUOTATIONS
Basho
There came a day when the clouds drifting along with the wind aroused a wanderlust in me, and I set off on a journey to roam along the seashores …
Ambrose Bierce
Pilgrim, n. A traveler that is taken seriously.
Gautama Buddha
You cannot travel the path until you have become the path.
Helder Camara
When your ship, long moored in harbor, gives you the illusion of being a house … put out to sea! ... save your boat's journeying soul, and your own pilgrim soul, cost what it may.
Joseph Campbell
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.
Joseph Campbell
The ultimate aim of the quest, if one is to return, must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.
Joseph Campbell
Unless you leave room for serendipity, how can the divine enter in? The beginning of the adventure of finding yourself is to lose your way!
Loy Ching-Yuen
The beauty of the Way is that there is no "way".
Rene Daumal
To return to the source, one must travel in the opposite direction.
Fyodor Dostoyevski
Thou shall love life more that the meaning of life.
Meister Eckhart
The Wayless Way, where the Sons of God lose themselves and, at the same time, find themselves.
Betty Edwards
Drawing isn't the problem, seeing is the problem.
Alexander Eliot
Personal answers to ultimate questions.
That is what we seek.
Theophile Gautier
The pleasure of traveling consists in the obstacles, the fatigue, and even the danger. What charm can anyone find in an excursion, when he is always sure of reaching his destination, of having horses ready waiting for him, a soft bed, an excellent supper, and all the ease and comfort which he can enjoy in his own home! One of the great misfortunes of modern life is the want of any sudden surprise, and the absence of all adventures. Everything is so well arranged, so admirably combined, so plainly labeled, that chance is an utter impossibility.
Liz Greene
I stood at a crossroads and fate came to meet me …
Michael Guillen
Bring home an aspect from every journey for your altar at home. Make it part of your altar at home. What's important to me is this is the domestic part of Latino life; our altars protect our home. So bring something home to re-create the altar – a smooth mineral, a touchstone. This is an important part of pilgrimage, the recreating of memory rituals to help remember people you lost. Another way for me is to remember others and to remember myself honestly.
Dag Hammarskjold
The longest journey
Is the journey inwards
Of him who has chosen his destiny
Zora Neale Hurston
Travel is the soul of civilization.
Alan Jones
We are impoverished in our longing and devoid of imagination when it comes to our reaching out to Others … We need to be introduced to our longings, because they guard our mystery.
Soren Kierkegaard
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts.
Antonio Machado
Traveler, there is no path
paths are made by walking.
Joan Marler
... a new outlook can lead to a realignment of intuition that awakens perception of where you need to be next in your life.
Joan Marler
Be prepared – then let go of expectations!
Henry Moore
The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring
everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is – it must be something you cannot possibly do.
Richard R. Niebuhr
Pilgrims are persons in motion – passing through territories not their own – seeking something we might call completion, or perhaps the word clarity will do as well, a goal to which only the spirit's compass points the way.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Never trust a thought that didn't come by walking.
Flannery O'Connor
No matter what form the dragon may take, it is the mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will be concerned to tell.
Martin Palmer
True pilgrimage changes lives, whether we go halfway around the world or out to our own backyards.
Walker Percy
[Inward seeking] is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair .
Peace Pilgrim
A pilgrim is a wanderer with a purpose.
Peace Pilgrim
Think of how free I am. If I want to travel, I just stand up and walk away.
Arabian Proverb
It's not the road ahead that wears you out – it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.
Eskimo Proverb
Glorious it is when wandering time is come.
Objiwa Proverb
Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind is bearing me across the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The necessary thing is great, inner solitude. What goes on inwardly is worthy of your love.
Mevlana Rumi
As you start on the Way, the Way appears.
Mevlana Rumi
Don't be satisfied with the stories that come before you; unfold your own myth.
Huston Smith
The art is to learn to master today's unavoidable situation with as much equanimity as we can muster, in preparation for facing its sequel tomorrow.
Huston Smith
The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life. Nothing matters now but this adventure.
Freya Stark
A good traveler does not, I think, much mind the uninteresting places. He is there to be inside them, as a thread is inside the necklace it strings. The world, with unknown and unexpected variety, is a part of his own Leisure; and this living participation is, I think, what separates the traveler and the tourist, who remains separate, as if he were at a theatre, and not himself a part of whatever the show may be.
Freya Stark
This a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering. The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly becomes a part of the tangible world.
Robert Louis Stevenson
For my part I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
Jules Supervielle
And it was then that in the depths of sleep
Someone breathed to me: "You alone can do it,
Come immediately."
Henry David Thoreau
A traveler. I love his title. A traveler is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from – toward; it is the history of every one of us.
Qingyuan Weixin
When I had not yet begun to study Zen thirty years ago, I thought that mountains are mountains and waters are waters. Later when I studied personally with my master, I entered realization and understood that mountains are not mountains, waters are not waters. Now that I abide in the way of no-seeking, I see as before that mountains are just mountains, waters are just waters.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Hilaire Belloc Quotation
I have wandered all my life,
and I have also traveled;
and I have also traveled;
the difference between the two being this,
that we wander for distraction,
but we travel for fulfillment.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Ispwo Mukika Crowfoot Quotation
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is a breath of a buffalo in the winter time.
It is the little shadow that runs across the grass
and loses itself in the sunset.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Wandering/Seeing Notes
There is a remarkable draw to the open road that I have sensed just about all my life. Certainly for the whole of my adult life, and perhaps in childhood as well – as we moved from town to town. There has certainly been nothing like permanence, or even stability in my life, ever. Keep moving, don’t get overly comfortable anywhere, and above all, don’t get comfortable with people.
This is the ideal itinerant American life, I guess. Keep us moving, so that the only constants left in our lives is The System. Everywhere are McDonalds and Wal-Marts, so you can get a fair amount of your expectations addressed and mollified at any time – same uniforms, same behaviors, just different faces. But this isn’t the open road – it is just town life, every town just the same, another mile marker down the road.
The road is going somewhere – towards a big horizon. Deep forest is no help – going here is to essentially hide yourself away, which may suit some people well. No, it is the big open skies of the American Plains and West that beckons. From West Texas north and east to Minnesota, then west to Eastern Washington, down to Southern California, and back across Arizona and New Mexico. Big open spaces, some flat, some vertical, but just about everywhere, you can get out of your vehicle and look around you, and usually see for miles and miles in at least one direction.
All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance. - V.V. Rozanov
What is it about looking into the distance, at horizons, clouds, faraway mountains, from high across wide plains, out onto a featureless ocean? Is there some physiological comfort in letting the eye lenses relax into long-distance focus? Is it the transcendence of looking past your immediate surroundings off to some future location in time, represented by some distance point to be reached after simple, concentrated effort? Can we in this way escape the cares of ourselves, by looking beyond our small spheres of petty concerns? To lose focus on oneself is to forget oneself. To expand our focus to far distances is to take in all in between, and to expand ourselves out that far.
What is to be actually done out on the road? So many of us travel a distance each day to our jobs, but it is the same old route, the same old jostling for lanes and paths, the same old commanding intersections impeding our progress, the same old destination. Out on the road, the real new and, to us, unknown road, all is new. Some familiar landmarks perhaps, yet another Dairy Queen or Denny’s, but also new and unknown retail, different churches, different fronts but the same old liquor store adds for Budweiser and Bud Lite, odd shaped houses with unusual landscaping. Between towns, the same yellow and white stripes, concrete or asphalt or gravel, telephone and fence poles flashing by.
We don’t go anywhere. Going someplace is for squares. We just go. - Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones
This is the ideal itinerant American life, I guess. Keep us moving, so that the only constants left in our lives is The System. Everywhere are McDonalds and Wal-Marts, so you can get a fair amount of your expectations addressed and mollified at any time – same uniforms, same behaviors, just different faces. But this isn’t the open road – it is just town life, every town just the same, another mile marker down the road.
The road is going somewhere – towards a big horizon. Deep forest is no help – going here is to essentially hide yourself away, which may suit some people well. No, it is the big open skies of the American Plains and West that beckons. From West Texas north and east to Minnesota, then west to Eastern Washington, down to Southern California, and back across Arizona and New Mexico. Big open spaces, some flat, some vertical, but just about everywhere, you can get out of your vehicle and look around you, and usually see for miles and miles in at least one direction.
All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance. - V.V. Rozanov
What is it about looking into the distance, at horizons, clouds, faraway mountains, from high across wide plains, out onto a featureless ocean? Is there some physiological comfort in letting the eye lenses relax into long-distance focus? Is it the transcendence of looking past your immediate surroundings off to some future location in time, represented by some distance point to be reached after simple, concentrated effort? Can we in this way escape the cares of ourselves, by looking beyond our small spheres of petty concerns? To lose focus on oneself is to forget oneself. To expand our focus to far distances is to take in all in between, and to expand ourselves out that far.
What is to be actually done out on the road? So many of us travel a distance each day to our jobs, but it is the same old route, the same old jostling for lanes and paths, the same old commanding intersections impeding our progress, the same old destination. Out on the road, the real new and, to us, unknown road, all is new. Some familiar landmarks perhaps, yet another Dairy Queen or Denny’s, but also new and unknown retail, different churches, different fronts but the same old liquor store adds for Budweiser and Bud Lite, odd shaped houses with unusual landscaping. Between towns, the same yellow and white stripes, concrete or asphalt or gravel, telephone and fence poles flashing by.
We don’t go anywhere. Going someplace is for squares. We just go. - Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones
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