“And so it is in the rawness of travel – especially travel taken as a pilgrimage; the way it laid you open to the clear blue nerves. You find yourself walking & walking & walking, until you suddenly fully embody your five senses – pouring yourself down an unknown trail, you become the slap of your shoes and the hot paper of your drying palms. Flowing past open churches with their statues of regional Madonnas. Everything is sensed completely – the indelibility of a certain wayside hostel in Tosantos, the smell of foreign decades in the lining of your single hemp-lined satchel, the loop of Fragile State’s thumpy jazz playing in the bookstore coffee shop where you have taken up temporary residence. The trees and rivers and bridges of other cities, where you would watch the sparkling waters buoy up rainbow-necked ducks and groovy loons, where you would sip espresso samples until there was a free and frightening exchange between your mind and the day. Pilgrimage makes you open, flung open from the soulside, flung open so wide that anything & anyone was allowed to rush in and be embraced without condemnation or prejudice … When you walk foreign paths, the land exerts itself and has its effect on mind as much as body. We become roughed up or soothed, exhilarated or depressed, wholly prevailed upon from outside ourselves. Serenity is expected – and sometimes even attained, and yet change is the only constant; change as the scene changes, as the sky clouds or clears, as the company proves irritating or wise. Pilgrimage has the traveler repeatedly concluding that nature is alive and that the walker is a literal part of its living; that nature calls the shots, yes, and yet that it is we who choose our calling.” ~ via Patricia Lockwood & Jill Frayne

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