WALKING IN A STORY: EVERYDAY PILGRIMAGES AND REEXAMINING BUSY
Medieval depiction of pilgrims. Courtesy of Canterbury Cathedral.
The rays of the sun slanted across the grass and wildflowers and beat down on my head and shoulders. Despite the coolness of the late hour and the setting sun, sweat ran into my eyes and dripped off my nose. We were high on a ridge and climbing still higher, and the chest-high meadow pushed in on both sides of the trail until we could barely make out the six-inch wide strip of bare earth we’d been following. I wondered if we were supposed to have taken the alternate route outlined in blue on the increasingly tattered paper map I had in my hand. I’d been following the GPS map on my phone, checking periodically to make sure that the little arrow that represented my location was still pointing to the fat purple line highlighting the trail, but the alternate route wasn’t on the GPS map, and if there was a sign at the fork, we had missed it.
The concept of life as a pilgrimage has been discussed before, but what does that really look like in the day-to-day? What, or where, is our pilgrimage when the dishes are piled high in the sink, and the kids are squabbling, the meetings and to-do lists seem endless, and our overstimulated brains beg us for some binge-watching just so they can get a break? Then it’s time to go to bed so we can try to sleep so we can get up and do it all again. Our lives can feel as though they are on fast-forward if we don’t intentionally step out of them from time to time and examine them. A pilgrimage is about intention. As Debra Dean Murphy said in a recent article for the Christian Century, “Then and now, to make a pilgrimage is to walk not only in time and space but in a story.” (1)
We are walking in a story whether we are aware of it or not. The question is, what kind of story are we telling with the medium of our lives? As a story is made up of individual words, so our lives are made from moments, and if we are to fully inhabit our stories then we must seek moments that allow us to stop and realize: “I’m here, right now.” By finding ways to purposefully slow the pace of our lives, we make a space for spiritual insight, awareness, and growth to occur. Everyday pilgrimage is a pilgrimage in time that allows us to move at a stride where we can be fully present and awake.
When I’m backpacking, one of the things I love is that my “to-do” list is pared down to only three things: walk, eat, and sleep. I returned recently from a multi-day trip and it took me a week to find my footing again in the rest of the world. I had a gut-level reaction to all of the things pressing in around me that demanded my attention. Everything from social media to deadlines to dishes seemed oppressive and overwhelming after the simplicity of three days in the woods.
In her book Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit postulates that perhaps the brain works best at three miles-per-hour, which roughly translates to the average walking speed for humans. I have found this to be true, especially on longer hikes where I can actually get out of the top-level swirl of to-do lists and anxieties swirling around and get down to the deeper thoughts, the ones that don’t always get to surface - much less come to any sort of completion or resolution.
When choosing to travel on foot, one makes space for tiny revelations from the world as well. You have little choice but to be in the moment, very in the moment, as inattention to your steps can result in tripping, falling, and possible injury. Your world shrinks to the next step, the next foot-hold on the trail, and your vision focuses just on the ground before you. Small wonders slide into view along the edges of the trail: little creatures, intriguing mushrooms, colorful leaves, soft and pillowy mosses. You become aware that each square foot of the forest is itself a whole world to the tiniest of living things that may spend their entire lives inside the boundaries of the area you step over in a single footstep.
Hiking suspends you between the macro and the micro. You are a giant, spanning worlds with each step. You are an ant, slowly crawling over the face of the globe, dwarfed by enormous old trees. In that way, it resets the scale of your own importance and shows you your exact size in the world. I could crush a world with a stray footprint, or be obliterated by a falling tree. I am both powerful and vulnerable in the same moment. So it is with our journey through this world. It’s often easier to think that one person is of no significance in that the world will continue its relentless path through the cosmos with or without me. But any one of us can have huge ripple effects on the world, especially within the context of our own day-to-day spheres. We are both insignificant and irreplaceable in the same moment.
In some ways, it’s the exact opposite to the pull of our everyday lives, the rush and immediacy of everything from the instant messages and notifications on our phone screens demanding our attention to the crush of rush hour traffic that has infected every city I know of. Our minds are pulled in many directions at once and we’ve become so used to the constant distractions that we don’t notice how they can prevent us from seeing the overarching story of our lives.
In God in the Wilderness, Rabbi Jamie S. Korngold examines the story of Moses and the burning bush. Moses turns aside when he sees the bush on fire and then notices that it’s not being consumed. Moses “...takes the time to notice that the bush is burning and not being consumed. It takes patience to notice that something is on fire and not burning up, because you have to actually sit with it for a while to observe the changes, or lack thereof.” (2) Rabbi Korngold then concludes that “One message of the burning bush story is that spiritual awareness involves slowing down and waking up to the world around us.” (3)
For me, hiking and backpacking have become the means by which I slow down time and learn to be aware. When each footstep is important, and the rhythm of my breathing tells me information I need about how my body is doing, I can’t help but fully inhabit the moment. And while I think that getting out in nature is essential to all of us, there are many different ways to inhabit each moment. The trick is finding what works for you, and then doing that with intention.
As I was finishing this article, I went to make myself a piece of peanut butter toast while musing on how to fully inhibit each moment. I slowed down just a bit and noticed the soft texture of the bread as I pulled a slice out of the bag. The click of the toaster handle seemed loud against the quiet of a house that had yet to awaken. Soon that lovely toasted wheat scent was wafting up to mix with the earthy rich smell of the coffee as the birds began their songs. Suddenly breakfast seemed like a sacrament, a moment I was able to fully inhabit, and I was filled with gratitude. I was aware of being fully in my body as I prepared breakfast and fully in the moment of that morning, feeling my story unfold as I became aware of it. Similar to my experience backpacking, it put things in perspective in that I felt my place in the world, both my importance and my insignificance. Finding our place in the story lets us balance between these things. The world will keep spinning without us, and yet each person is of vital importance to the outcome of our shared story. The act of connecting our stories to a greater story arc gives them new meaning and shows us that even the smallest actions can make a difference as long as we commit to consistency. As each step adds up to miles, so each moment adds up to the cumulative story of our lives.
Debra Dean Murphy, “Ways to Walk,” The Christian Century, September 2021, Accessed 9/15/21,
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/faith-matters/ways-walk
Rabbi Jamie S. Korngold, God in the Wilderness, (New York: Doubleday, 2008), pp. 23-24.
Ibid. p. 25
