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Over the past few years, I have found myself traveling to some unusual places… Egypt. Peru. Joshua Tree. Mt. Shasta. Hogonji Temple on Lake Biwa in Japan. Spain and Portugal. And even Hawaii. People sometimes ask me why I go to these places. I have not always had a good answer. Sometimes I talk about sacred sites. Sometimes I talk about history, spirituality, ancient traditions, or simply curiosity. And certainly there is some tourism involved. I enjoy seeing beautiful places, eating good food, meeting people, and experiencing cultures different from my own. But I have increasingly sensed that something else is happening. The interesting thing is that I wasn't entirely sure what it was. Recently, Phil Cousineau's book The Art of Pilgrimage helped me find language for something I think I have been doing without fully understanding it. Cousineau makes a distinction between simply traveling somewhere and approaching a journey as a pilgrimage. Pilgrimage doesn't necessarily require belonging to a particular religion or traveling to an officially recognized holy place. What changes the journey is partly the intention with which we enter it. A pilgrim goes somewhere not simply to see something, but to encounter something. And often, that something is inside of us. That helped me understand my own travels differently. When I went to Egypt, of course I wanted to see the pyramids, temples, and tombs I had read about for years. But standing inside the Great Pyramid was very different from reading about it. When I went to Peru, Machu Picchu was extraordinary. Yet some of the experiences that remained with me happened in quieter places and unexpected moments along the way. The same has been true in Joshua Tree, Mt. Shasta, Japan, Spain, Portugal, and many other places I have visited. I don't always know what I am looking for. Perhaps that is part of pilgrimage. We leave the familiar environment of our lives. Our routines are disrupted. We eat differently. We sleep differently. We walk unfamiliar paths. We encounter people whose lives developed from histories and assumptions different from our own. And somewhere in that disruption, our interior world begins to move as well. The outer journey creates space for an inner journey. I have begun to realize that this may be one reason I am drawn to certain places. I don't necessarily go because I expect something dramatic to happen there. I don't need a mystical experience at the Great Pyramid, Machu Picchu, Joshua Tree, or a Buddhist temple in Japan to justify the journey. The going itself matters. The preparation matters. The anticipation matters. Walking the land matters. Standing quietly somewhere that generations of people have regarded as sacred matters. Sharing the experience with others matters. And coming home matters. Something has been added to us—not necessarily an answer or even something we can easily explain. Sometimes it is simply another layer of experience through which we understand our lives. That may be why pilgrimage is difficult to describe. We tend to describe travel by talking about what we saw. "We went to the pyramids." "We saw Machu Picchu." "We walked through a temple." "We watched the sunset in the desert." But perhaps the deeper question is not only: What did I see there? It is also: What did going there allow me to see in myself? That question changes travel. And it also helps me understand why people have made pilgrimages for thousands of years. They walked to Jerusalem, Mecca, Santiago de Compostela, the Ganges, Buddhist temples, sacred mountains, shrines, monasteries, and countless other places. Their beliefs and traditions were different, but beneath those differences, I wonder if there is a common human pattern. Sometimes we need to move our bodies through the world in order for something within us to move. We leave. We cross a threshold. We encounter something unfamiliar. We struggle. We pay attention. We are surprised. And eventually, we return. But the person who returns is never exactly the person who left. This doesn't require traveling halfway around the world. A pilgrimage might take us across an ocean. It might take us into the mountains. It might take us to the neighborhood where we grew up, the grave of someone we loved, a church or temple we haven't visited in decades, or a quiet trail we have walked a hundred times. The geography matters. But our attention may matter even more. Perhaps pilgrimage begins when we stop asking only, "Where am I going?" and begin asking, "What might this journey be asking of me?" I think that is what I have been doing on many of these trips. I just didn't have a name for it. But I have been going on pilgrimages.
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