A pilgrimage will change you

#34—Humans have sought answers on long self-propelled journeys since before antiquity. But why?

Welcome to Mind Flexing, your weekly thought expedition to everywhere and anywhere. Strap on your boots (or put your feet up), take a deep breath, and let’s get flexing.

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I once mountain biked 6,000km through parts of Canada and down the trails of the US Continental Divide to the Mexican border—just me and my husband on our bicycles with a tent, our sleeping bags, a pot, and a change of clothes. We liked it so much we then rode 10,000km around much of Australia, once again living on the few belongings we could fit in our pannier bags. We cycled north through the Red Centre of Australia then flew to the Torres Straight Islands and, with our wheels, traced the entire length of the Great Dividing Range down to The Grampians and back to the start in Adelaide.

I’d never considered my travels—whether they be by bicycle or by foot—to be pilgrimages. I was just curious, and the best way to truly see something is to see it slowly. It’s only in recent weeks that I’ve started to see that perhaps they were, in a way, pilgrimages. Perhaps, I was drawn to that mode of travel because I was searching for something.

Because I did find something, on those journeys.

It seems I’m not the only one who’s gone searching. Last year, a record 446,035 pilgrims walked El Camino de Santiago, which travels between Portugal and France to the relics of the apostle James in Spain. And that’s just one of the world’s many pilgrimage routes, albeit a very popular one. Like Cheryl Strayed in Wild who trekked 1,800km along the Pacific Crest of the United States, or Robyn Davidson in Tracks who travelled 2,700km through Australia’s western desert with four camels, the routes taken needn’t be officially called pilgrimages in order to go searching.

What exactly are we searching for? And what is it about a pilgrimage that makes it such a powerful portal to discovery?

It’s impossible to think of pilgrimage without its spiritual connotations; so much of the word is intertwined with religious belief and the movement between sacred sites, such as The Haj to Mecca or the Via Francigena that travels from Canterbury, England through France and Switzerland to the Holy See in Rome. Indeed, there is something intrinsically spiritual about a pilgrimage, but spirituality needn’t be contained to structured religion—nature, too, is a temple. And at its core, regardless of spiritual beliefs, a pilgrimage is a journey of thought discovery. Here, I deliberately avoid the term self-discovery, because though a part of it, such journeys have a way of pulling you out of yourself, removing you from the centre of your universe, and opening your eyes to all else that is. To do that, you need to be outside and propelling yourself through the world, not sitting inside a vehicle or masking the sounds of life with the roar of an engine.

Flinders Ranges, South Australia. Photo by Alia Parker.

So much is observed when you travel this way—by foot or bicycle, horse or maybe even by camel—every movement of the grass, every birdsong, the push or pull of the wind, the feel of the landscape moving beneath you, the slightest incline or decline, the change in temperature in a gully or in the rise and fall between altitudes. And in moving slowly, you meet many more people, and these people will always be the nicest people you’ve ever met, the types of strangers that hand you their house keys and say, “Oh wow, you’ve come all that way? Here, we’re headed out, but when you get to town, let yourself in and make yourself at home.”

It's this spirit of a pilgrimage encapsulated by Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō in his famous travel writings, of which his most lauded work, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, records his walk along a challenging route to what was considered a remote part of Japan in 1689. It was May and the 2,400km journey took him six months. Many didn’t expect him to survive, and Bashō himself expected to be tested. But what his writings reveal is far from struggle or hardship—although as with any journey in life, there are moments to overcome—but rather the joy of the discoveries along the way, an acute awareness of the natural world, of the people and creatures in it, and our ephemeral state of being. The poet’s travel-inspired words are uplifting in a way that starkly contrasts with the darker thoughts he cultivated in his hermetic years.

One of the delightful joys of Bashō’s travel diaries is how poetry reveals itself to be a communal meditation, a creation of thoughts discussed and shaped with other poets on his journey, an artform where words on a page are passed back and forth between collaborators, or left hanging above a doorway for the next passerby to observe. And through these meditations on the world, we see the pilgrimage unfold.

In the opening lines of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Bashō says:

“Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives travelling. There are a great number of ancients, too, who died on the road. I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind—filled with a strong desire to wander.”

We do spend every minute of our lives travelling, if not physically, in our heads alongside that ever-moving time. It's this strong desire to wander that I feel gnawing beneath my skin, to go wherever that cloud-moving wind takes me.

Mum often walked me on a leash as a kid. We laugh about it and all those disapproving looks from strangers, but it was really quite necessary. It wasn’t the type of leash you’d strap to a dog; it was a chest harness specifically for children with a long strap attached that mum could secure to her wrist. She really didn’t have much choice if she wanted to keep me, which thankfully she did, because I was forever running away. If we ventured anywhere in a crowd or into shops amid the mazes of shelves and racks, mum, who also had my little brother to worry about, couldn’t possibly take her eyes off me for a second to attend to anything she hoped to achieve on her outing unless I was safely tethered to her. I made some great escapes. Not that I was consciously trying to escape—the thought of what would happen to two-year-old me when I got to where I was going never crossed my mind. Lost? Oh, that inconvenience always worked itself out. The pull of the horizon, the mystery of what was around the corner, behind the tree or over the hill, was too strong. I couldn’t resist. I know this feeling, intimately, because I never outgrew it.

I can’t explain why I’ve always felt the draw of the cloud-moving wind, but I do know that once you’ve learned to move with it, you need to keep going in some way or another. To be that high on life, then stop, is like suffering a drug-induced withdrawal that cripples you inside and out.

Such journeys—pilgrimages—are life changing, and while I can try to tell you why, it feels somewhat futile, like building a structure around something that can’t be contained, because ultimately, our meditations on such a journey will be different for each of us.

But in an attempt to explain, I would say a pilgrimage has a way of disconnecting you from the entrapments of the world while simultaneously opening the doors to its freedoms and wonders. It strips away all that’s unnecessary and focuses your attention on the day ahead. Your mind wanders, and yet it is present, your very movements become meditative. It’s not something that happens instantly, not in days, but in weeks, and it intensifies the deeper into the months you go.

People used to ask me why I didn’t write a book about our journeys, and it’s because I struggle at the thought, mainly because I don’t see anything exceptional in what we did. It didn’t feel hard and in the world I move in, I see countless such travels. I’m also excruciatingly conscious of the fact that such journeys were, in a time before motorised transport, just a normal way of getting around. Humans have always moved about, walked vast distances, sailed the seas. We colonised Earth’s liveable parts without a motor in sight. It’s only in this modern age, now that long-distance travel equates to long-distance sitting, that the social consciousness has forgotten what we are capable of, rendering self-propelled travel as ‘adventure entertainment’ only achievable by the brave.

And maybe that’s part of it. Maybe we respond so well to pilgrimage because it awakens a part of us that has always been there hidden deep within our instincts. For we are creatures who are meant to be outdoors, to move with nature, not against it, to see the world around us and be comforted by it, not shut it out, and to feel that connection between everyone and everything.

On a cool autumn day,
Let us peel with our hands
Cucumbers and mad-apples
For our simple dinner.

— Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

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Things I’ve enjoyed on Substack this week

• A cold rainforest helped me escape global warming. Then the glacier melted.— by

  Summer Koester

  ‘Enjoyed reading’ aren’t really the right words to use in this instance. This is heartbreaking, and it’s real.

• The Death of the Magazine—by

  Ted Gioia

  Gosh, I suppose the same goes for this one.

• Philosophy starts with the body!—by

  Andredge

  Andredge makes an interesting connection between the body, movement and philosophy, and it fits in neatly with the act of pilgrimage.

Etymology Monday

For those who missed it on Substack Notes, this week’s word is: alcohol

Good luck guessing this one…

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