pilgrimage

I like the idea that when I die, I will have a long sit-down chat withGod and get answers to all my questions. For example, those apple coresthat I threw out of car windows when I was a child__id any of them becometrees? Few boys or men had ever asked me out. I told myself that itwas because I was almost 6-feet tall. Was that true or was there somethinghumbling I needed to know?

Mexico, as it was in the 1970s__nd isn__ now__as my Paris. With Mexicans, Europeans, and Americans I celebrated life and the journey, which took on qualities of a pilgrimage in which every moment was a movable feast and every place was a shrine. Among the intricately carved ruins in the jungle at Palenque, I partook of the Mayan sacrament, the sacred psilocybin mushroom, and there I learned to see.

The purpose of a pilgrimage is about setting aside a long period of time in which the only focus is to be the matters of the soul. Many believe a pilgrimage is about going away but it isn__; it is about coming home. Those who choose to go on pilgrimage have already ventured away from themselves; and now set out in a longing to journey back to who they are. Many a time we believe we must go away from all that is familiar if we are to focus on our inner well-being because we feel it is the only way to escape all that drains and distracts us, allowing us to turn inward and tend to what ails us. Yet we do not need to go to the edges of the earth to learn who we are, only the edges of ourself.

After many paths and many years, perhaps many lifetimes, we become aware of the sacredness of our suffering.

Let thy pilgrimage be a prayer.

Self education is holy mission.

What lies ahead is often unknown. But keep traveling.

Life is a pilgrimage. Each moment is to be lived in depth, because each moment contains God, hidden within it.

How could we have discovered great lands, if we dare not travel?

Believe is confident hope.Hope is faith.Faith is timeless possibility.Possibility is spiritual.Spiritual is divine

With great passion, observe every details of the sacred journey.

Praying is holy pilgrimage.

May my soul radiate light and love.

One of the open secrets of life on earth is that the answer to life__ burning question has been inscribed in one__ soul all along. The soul is a kind of ancient vessel that holds the exact knowledge we seek and need to find our way in life. Each life is a pilgrimage intended to arrive at the center of the pilgrim__ soul. From that vantage point, the issue is not whether we managed to choose the right god or the only way to live righteously; such notions fail to recognize the inborn intimacy each soul already has with the divine.

A true pilgrimage requires letting go of the very things most people try to hold onto. In seeking after what the soul desires, we become pilgrims with no home but the path the soul would have us follow.

Walking causes a repetitive, spontaneous poetry to rise naturally to the lips, words as simple as the sound of footsteps on the road. There also seems to be an echo of walking in the practice of two choruses singing a psalm in alternate verses, each on a single note, a practice that makes it possible to chant and listen by turns. Its main effect is one of repetition and alternation that St Ambrose compared to the sound of the sea: when a gentle surf is breaking quietly on the shore the regularity of the sound doesn__ break the silence, but structures it and renders it audible. Psalmody in the same way, in the to-and-fro of alternating responses, produces (Ambrose said) a happy tranquillity in the soul. The echoing chants, the ebb and flow of waves recall the alternating movement of walking legs: not to shatter but to make the world__ presence palpable and keep time with it. And just as Claudel said that sound renders silence accessible and useful, it ought to be said that walking renders presence accessible and useful.

In the history of walking, many experts considering him (Wordsworth) the authentic originator of the long expedition. He was the first _ at a time (the late eighteenth century) when walking was the lot of the poor, vagabonds and highwaymen, not to mention travelling showmen and pedlars _ to conceive of the walk as a poetic act, a communion with Nature, fulfilment of the body, contemplation of the landscape. Christopher Morley wrote of him that he was __ne of the first to use his legs in the service of philosophy_.

You lift your head, you__e on your way, but really just to be walking, to be out of doors. That__ it, that__ all, and you__e there. Outdoors is our element: the exact sensation of living there.