Every Journey Is a Pilgrimage

Whenever we travel, we encounter opportunities for growth, for transcending our limitations, and for experiencing cross-cultural union.

By Don George

One of the most rewarding trips of my life was a five-day solo odyssey I made a few summers ago around the Japanese island of Shikoku. Shikoku has been a place of pilgrimage since the ninth century, when the beloved scholar and monk Kobo Daishi established a path of 88 Buddhist temples that circle the island. Completing this circuit is supposed to give you great wisdom, purity, and peace, but I was on a pilgrimage of another kind. My wife grew up on this island, and I had first visited it with her some 20 years before. Now I had returned to see if the singular beauty, serenity, and slow pace of the place I remembered—and the country kindness of its residents—had survived.

A few hours into my journey, I stopped a wizened woman, clad in the pilgrim's traditional white garb and cone-shaped straw hat, scuffling along a leaf-paved path. She was on her second temple circuit, she told me. "The thing about the pilgrimage," she said, "is that it makes your heart lighter; it energizes you. It refreshes your sense of the meaning of life." Then her eyes locked into mine, deep and shining as a cloudless sky.

During my five days on Shikoku, I ate fresh-from-the-sea sashimi with fishermen, philosophized in steaming public baths with farmers, spun bowls with fifth-generation potters, and talked baseball and benevolence with Buddhist monks. I lay down in rice paddies, lost myself in ancient forests, stared at the sun-spangled sea, and listened—with the help of an 80-year-old "translator" I had met as she was mending a fishing net on a pier—to the whispers of ghosts in the trees. By the end of my odyssey, I too felt lighter, refreshed, and energized, but not because of the sanctified sites. The island itself had become one big temple for me.

That trip confirmed a truth I had sensed during two decades of wandering: You don't have to travel to Jerusalem, Mecca, Santiago de Compostela, or any other explicitly holy site to be a pilgrim. If you travel with reverence and wonder, with a lively sense of the potential and preciousness of every moment and every encounter, then wherever you go, you walk the pilgrim's path.

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