Category: Travelogues
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 longing…
Who are the mysterious Sheela-na-gigs?
I ran my hands along the old stones of the church. Lichen-lined and crumbling, the walls emanated a sense of deep peace. I moved in a slow circle around the perimeter of the ruins—a place of pilgrimage for thousands of years— until I found her. Perched above the curve of an open window and…
Pilgrimage Project: Wales & Scotland
I went to the UK to track the old ways, to seek the ancestors of my mother’s line, the one’s who knew how to speak to earth and work with stones. I went to place my body upon the land of my ancestors and see what knowing came thrumming up from the soil. I…
Pilgrimage Project: England
Four years ago I got a very strong message— the next step of your life will come in when you visit the places your people are from. It took me three years of figuring out how the heck to make it happen with time and finances, and then last year I began with…
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…
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…
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…
Empty Rooms Fill with Light
Fall always come in with a bit of a sigh. The letting go after a long haul. A shift that is needed in the bones, but that arrives on crow wings with a tinge of sadness all the same. There is something so beautiful about an Autumn field, that copper expanse gone to seed….