Pilgrimage
I woke up this morning, thinking it was Friday (because everyday sort of feels like Friday, these days…), and reached for my phone to sort out the confusion. Through squinting eyes and blurry vision, I checked the date - It’s Wednesday. Wednesday. Just another day. I have to grade papers and final exams, and prep for meeting. Though mundane, there is a softness, a sweetness to these days at home that I’ve learned to embrace over the last 50 days or so of quarantine life.
I glanced at the phone again, slowly waking up with my to do list in mind. May 6, 2020. My eyes widened a bit at the realization. It’s already May 6th? I had nearly forgotten about what this day meant to me, two months ago, before everything was shut down, cancelled, brought to a screeching halt. If not for covid-19, I’d be packing my bags today, and reviewing my neatly organized and thoroughly reviewed checklist in order to prepare for 2 months of European travel. May 7th was my scheduled departure date. I would leave JFK on a red-eye, and land the next morning in my beloved, foggy London town to begin 7 weeks of ethnographic research of guided, American group travel in the UK, Ireland, and Italy. And it was all a solo endeavor.
Though the intention of the trip was research, and I would be working the entire time (this was certainly not a vacation; the pace I had planned was a rigorous journey from city to city, group to group), these 2 months were also an intentional pilgrimage of my own.
Growing up in a prairie town in Colorado, I spent the first 27 years of my life within the boundaries of North America. I studied French for eight years but hadn’t been to Paris. I studied Ancient religious history and literature in college, but had never been to Greece, Italy, Turkey, Israel, or any of the countries that birthed the primary sources I poured over in late-night study sessions. It’s not that the funds weren’t available to me. Not traveling was an intentional choice, a self-imposed lockdown due to crippling anxiety. I had hardly left the state I was born in, save a few spring break trips to California, Cabo, Scottsdale, or New York, and though these trips had certainly given me an appetite for travel, I was still terrified of the unknown. I wanted to speak French in Paris. I wanted to see Botticielli’s “Birth of Venus” and walk the Battlefield of Culloden - in person. But I placed all of my security and sense of personal safety in the familiar roads of my town, some vague allegiance to my country’s history and patriotism, and close proximity to my therapist’s office. What would I do if I had a panic attack in Rome, and couldn’t speak to a doctor? I couldn’t envision the solution: a quick-and-easy phone call to my therapist, an emergency bottle of Xanax, and the realization, which likely could only come through experience, that Italians are people, too, and I’m just as safe there as I am at home.
I still suffer from sometimes-severe travel anxiety. I’m not as fearful a flyer as I used to be, but it still takes me about 2 days and likely one (now mild) panic attack to adjust to any new environment - even trips home to Colorado. But ever since Spencer and I took an inaugural travel leap to London five years ago, I’ve been to Europe every year since save one (last year). Travel has been a healing tonic. Exploring new cultures, meeting kind people who don’t speak the same language, reading about and then seeing! history, visiting iconic landscapes and vestiges of trauma and glory - I found a bravery within myself I didn’t know I had, and I revitalized a natural curiosity that I desperately needed access to. Spencer and I, with our London A-to-Z in hand, would explore the city’s nooks and crannies with an unstoppable hunger. And we set out to Scotland, France, Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, over the following few years, with the same eager posture. Guide book within arms reach. Eyes open. Trust in full supply. Our hearts expanding a million miles in every direction.
My scheduled research trip was, I envisioned, the next phase of this traveling journey. I would intentionally go on my own as a way to test myself, to refine my self esteem, courage, and desire to learn. When I landed at Heathrow on May 8th, I told myself, I would be excited to say, “I’ll be living and working here for two months” to the customs agent. I set up an affiliation with an esteemed university. I secured funding and housing. I contacted my London friends, and arranged visits. I was prepared to find a home within myself. I would be studying American travelers, but I would also be on my own hodgepodge pilgrimage.
In his most recent book, A Pilgrimage to Eternity, Timothy Egan describes his own intentional pilgrimage on the Via Francigena, which starts in England and ends in Rome. In the first chapter, he says that he was driven to walk this ancient road by a yearning for resonant spirituality, and a reckoning with himself.
If there are a small number of hardened truths to be found on this trail, let the path reveal itself. I feel driven by something I read from Saint Augustine during my prep work: “Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tide of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”
“And yet they pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”
Wow.
I have been dealing with a lot of grief over the last two months as this trip that I started planning last September was taken from me. But this time of being forced to stay at home as has brought me face-to-face with the realization that pilgrimages don’t require travel. As my friend Jonathan wrote in last week’s Family Chapel newsletter, “the physical act of pilgrimage is the symbol for a much deeper interior journey.”
These stay-at-home orders have invited me to take a good, hard look at my eagerness to travel. To leave. Because, at some point along the way, the excitement of discovery during travel turned into an escape strategy from the discomforts of being with myself. Of being at home, amongst the mundane. Hawaiian beaches and shopping in the Marais are incredible experiences. But they’re also distractions - just as relics, icons, and the camino can be both transformative and a sleight of hand, a deflection that pulls our attention from the realities of home and ourselves. If you’ve ever visited the Eiffel Tower and thought, Huh. I thought I’d feel…different, with a nagging feeling of disappointment, then you know what I mean.
Pilgrimage starts with us.
And it is as much about how we relate to ourselves - including our 9-5 routines, our spouse, our roommate, the electric bill, the leaky roof, and what our anxieties look like at home - as it is the transformational experience of being on the road.
I would have scoffed eight months ago, when I started planning my trip, if you had said to me that the pilgrimage I would be taking in May would be at home, here in Connecticut. It would entail 7 weeks of researching how to grow herbs in planters on my deck, how to roast a chicken, how to slow the pace of my work life down so that I can make time for friends and family. How boring, I would have thought. But the ritual tasks of cleaning the kitchen have been more eye-opening and meaningful to me than any number of steps through London, Rome, or Dublin could have brought me at this stage in my life.
I am coming to face-to-face with why I value my suitcase more than the keys to my front door.
Why do I value a coffee shop in London more than one down the street?
Why do I value fast-paced, success-driven work than the routines of home?
And the bigger question: why am I running away from myself in search of far-off adventures, when there is real meaning in the here and now?
The hodgepodge pilgrimage that will truly transform me today - aged 32, three years into a Yale PhD program, nine years into marriage, 2,000 miles away from my hometown - can only happen here, amongst the bills and the wireless printer’s resonant hum and the laundry piles.
As Joy Harjo writes in her poem “For Keeps” — “There is nowhere else I want to be but here.”
“Sun makes the day new.
Tiny green plants emerge from earth.
Birds are singing the sky into place.
There is nowhere else I want to be but here.
I lean into the rhythm of your heart to see where it will take us.
We gallop into a warm, southern win.
I link my legs to yours and we ride together,
Toward the ancient encampment of our relatives.
Where have you been? they ask.
And what has taken you so long?
That night after eating, singing, and dancing
We lay together under the stars.
We know ourselves to be part of mystery.
It is unspeakable.
It is everlasting.
It is for keeps.”