The Call to Pilgrimage

Last week the fall winds arrived. They came in a great gust on the equinox, turning the leaves upside down and silver. By nightfall the humidity of summer had dropped away, and the first truly cold evening of the season made the stars sharpen. Every year the winds of autumn usher in the same…

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The Ancestors’ Bonfire

Last month I traveled to Ireland to visit the old neolithic burial mounds and the seaside where my forebearers most likely made their home. I made a pilgrimage to the old sites— the hills shaped like breasts, springs tucked in a moss-covered hazelwood, the circles of stones. I went by myself Ireland, to put…

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Pilgrimage Project: Ireland

I began these pilgrimage trips last year, with a visit to Japan. Sometime last summer I got the nudge to begin visiting places in the world where the history of animism (the belief that all facets of the earth are conscious and alive) was still thriving. It began with Japan, place of Kami and…

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Pilgrimage Project: Japan

This trip was the first in a pilgrimage project that I’m just beginning to lean and listen into. Visiting landscapes where animism, an intimate and interactive relationship with the land, is alive and well. It is new creek in the mountains of my work and I’m so excited for what is to come. So come begin…

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