I walked on quite a ways that afternoon – past the Greenwood Gourmet Grocery (where a vacationing family was open-mouthed astounded while overhearing me share about my Walk) and past the abandoned St. Nicholas Orthodox Church and past the very not-abandoned Emmanuel Episcopal Church. It was then that I saw the Appalachian Mountains in the distance way off to my right and was exceedingly unimpressed (remember this hubris for later). Shortly thereafter I came across the Rockfish Gap Country Store, where I learned that Waynesboro was “3 miles straight up the mountain, and then 3 miles straight down.” I guess that was why the roadway was called Skyline Drive, a roadway that I then slowly but surely proceeded to summit. It was hard-going, no doubt, and I found myself on more than one occasion pausing by the roadside to puff and pant (while laughing at myself for scoffing at the size of any mountain, much less once I had been summoned to summit). No matter, as in due course – by persistently & ploddingly placing one foot slowly & purposefully in front of the other – I did indeed make it to the top, and proceeded to flow smoothly downward into town …

“He never reached the top of the mountain, for after the third day of climbing he gave up. He was exhausted and depressed and so he quit, and the pilgrimage train went on without him. Afterwards when asked about the failing he said he had the physical strength to finish the journey but that physical strength alone wasn’t nearly enough. He had said he had the intellectual motivation to finish as well but that wasn’t enough either. He also didn’t think he had been too haughty or arrogant about either his abilities or the trek itself. No, what it all came to down to, he had decide, was that he had been hamstrung by selfishness. He had undertaken the pilgrimage to broaden his own experience, to gain a better understanding of himself for himself. In essence he was using both the mountain & the pilgrimage up its slopes for his own purposes and ends – and neither the mountain nor his own Soul would have any of it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who actually reached the mountain’s summit, had sensed the sacredness of both the space and the journey so intensely that each of their footsteps became more an act of devotion than a mere means to personal success or closure. They were walking upwards as an act of devotion &/or were doing so solely for others, and as such had access to a bank of energy to which his own mere mind & body had no access. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything his selfishness, even with its far greater physical strength, could take or endure.” ~ via Robert Pirsig

“I must not fear, for fear is both the mind-clouder and the Soul-dampener. Indeed fear – in whatever ways it manifests (angst or terror or worry or doubt; hunger or thirst or exhaustion or rejection) – is the little-death that brings total obliteration. And so I choose to face my fear. I will allow it to smoothly pass over me and freely flow through me, and when it has gone past & retreated – as fear ever ultimately does – I will turn my inner eye to see its path of departure. And where my fear has gone there will be nothing. And only I will remain.” ~ inspired by Frank Herbert

Filed under: Peace Pilgrimage #02: Walking HOME (2019) by Scaughdt