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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 dont 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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Reader Comments

Alec

Nice! Thanks.

Achina

You are a beautiful writer and perfectly articulated how I felt when I traveled backpacking for many months after college. I look forward to doing more after the kids have grown wandering around the world. The peoplescape is really what its all about it. some of my best memories. Thanks for your article; I'll treasure it.

Duyen

Your story makes me happy! Thank you for sharing that there are many many wonderful people still out there ready to lend a hand. People that we may never see again this life time.

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