The first step in preparing for pilgrimage is making conscious the healing you need, and identifying the place on earth that might embody the fulfilment of this.
As a child you knew such places well. They might be great trees, river sources, or hilltops where our ancestors lived for thousands of years. They might be cliff-top chapels, roaring waterfalls, burial places of heroes, or mighty stone cathedrals. These are special places, magic places, holy places.
The word ‘holy’ is not de facto religious. It comes from the Old English halig, which means whole, healthy and wholesome. Its nearest living descendent is ‘hale’, as in ‘hale and hearty’
Of course, it’s not all about the destination. Far from it, pilgrimage enshrines the process, the cumulative act of every step. By spending such a long time – as long as you can afford to offer – making an unbroken journey on foot, you create a distinct life-space, set apart from normal everyday existence.
Among this special soil unexpected things grow: strange meetings, synchronicities and discoveries. Don’t expect to return home the same person. Or rather, expect to come back more you than ever before. As the path unfolds outward through nature, so mirrored doors curl inward to reveal aspects of yourself long unseen/ignored. If life is a journey from birth to death, making pilgrimage is a microcosm of this whole path, intense with all the richness and rawness that life ought to offer, but somehow often doesn’t.
