Surprise! I’m back from wherever I’ve been (we can get into that later), but just a quick note for those of you who have so valiantly stuck with this newsletter. Think of it like a snow leopard sighting - rare, priceless, would be great for Ben Stiller to see. Which is why (as you may have noticed) I’ve de-monetised the subscription. None of us need that kind of pressure right now. I just need to write. And we all need more deliberate, thoughtful words and art with no agenda to sell us anything.
I think we make a great team :)
And, now that it’s wild and free, you (or a friend) might even want to
**Words and pictures are by Kimberly Brown, a person, utilising what human intelligence she can muster.
In my twenties I was enamoured with the idea of hiking The Camino. The popular pilgrimage through sun-kissed farms, glistening rivers and medieval villages of northern Spain was a dream out of an Emilio Estevez film (see: The Way) - the culmination of natural beauty, simplicity, like-minded companionship, spiritual practice and, even before the age of Insta-travel: the pinnacle of mouth-wateringly trendy backpacking.
But I never made it that far. The closest I got was a far-too-short stint in Portugal where we spent a couple days walking (sometimes running, dogs on our heels) down a picturesque trail through cork farms and stone-clad villages near the Atlantic coast. It was achingly nice, but fundamentally lacked the repetitive boredom and level of difficulty that tills the fertile soil of introspection. So - not quite a pilgrimage.
For some, the definition of pilgrimage lays in visiting a geographical location or historical site of religious or cultural significance. But disembarking an Arab bus in Bethlehem under the scrutiny of trained Israeli guns did little to ignite the spiritual flame, nor did battling crowds to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, past hawkers touting “actual” thorns from the crown placed on Jesus’ head at his crucifixion. The Sea of Galilee bore a startling resemblance to the lakes I grew up around complete with a slalom water-skier gliding effortlessly behind a Ski Nautique (the irony is not lost on all of you). So, in short - also not a pilgrimage.
I’m a sucker for some etymology (and even some entomology while we’re at it) and the modern term “pilgrim” finds it’s roots in the early Latin word “peregrinus” which might remind you of the word peregrine, as in falcon, and refers to a “tendency to wander” or to be “from a foreign place.” So a financially unsustainable addiction to travel and an inability to live in one place longer than twelve months should have met the criteria. But I have this niggling feeling that moving around for the sake of changing geographical position isn’t exactly what the early saints and spiritual foremothers and fathers were about.
My impression of a true pilgrimage involves some kind of extended travel that may lead to personal transformation, after which, the pilgrim returns to the banality of their normal 9-5 as an enlightened being exuding light beams of fulfilment and radical acceptance everywhere their holy feet touch the earth. Wikipedia (bless them) would have vetted the last two thirds of that sentence, but it’s what I WANT. Is Intrepid offering a two for one deal on that particular package? Buy one long hike and a paella, get eternal enlightenment and inner peace? Sign me up.
But, of course, a pilgrimage, much like a Campbellian hero’s journey (or the lesser know but fascinating Murdockian heroine’s journey) doesn’t start like that. Bilbo doesn’t want an adventure, never mind a house full of grotty dwarves. Peter Parker doesn’t want to be bitten by a radioactive spider. Moana doesn’t want her island to die. Such is life.
I spent a decade (or three) trying to impress people and put myself on the status map. I wanted to be taken seriously. To be noticed. Validated. Worthy of something (money, fame and attention to name a few). Then life showed up and said, “Hi.” And my husband and I were left standing in the vast plain of middle life with a disabled child, a toxic workplace and a bucket full of unmet expectations. And life says, “This is the gift you didn’t know you wanted.” Because we find ourselves wandering further and further off the well-trodden path. We become foreigners in our own lives. We change tact, accept, adapt (at least we’re trying). We start by thrusting ourselves off the edge of what many would consider normal family holiday stuff and begin the following the slow and steady allure of remote camping.
It turns out it suits us. This isolation. The lack of social interaction and stimulus gives us room to breathe. Wide-open spaces give our kids room to run - as far and as fast as they want. We spend increasingly more time surrounded by things that we don’t have to pay for if they get knocked over or dropped. There are few choices to make. Even fewer options about what to have for dinner. The water is bright and cold, the dirt is red and full of gemstones. We are hardly ever indoors. We know the stages of the moon. There is nothing to do and the sky is filled with silence and birds instead of 5G signal and road noise. When there’s no one around clothes are optional and we shower out of a bucket under the million year-old light of distant planets and suns (and Starlink satellites).
We meet saints. Not holier-than-thous who have unbroken, flawless lives (yawn). No, we meet people who have wandered so far off the path that they treasure the simplicity of nothingness, cherish not having to think about what to wear or whether they have the newest…well, anything. Their lives are shaped by the bliss of scarcity and they have spent years, decades even, peeling back the layers of what is essential and arrived, usually, in the middle of nowhere with little more than could fit in a car. It wouldn’t be a sign of healthy psychology, but I would happily name a school after them or tape their portrait on my dashboard.
To be honest, I only recently realised that what we’ve been doing is pilgrimaging. It was never the intention. There was no advertised path. No promises of self-actualisation. But we came back different. We feel it in our conversations, how we spend our time, how we do our Christmas shopping. We parrot back to each other in particularly temping moments of consumer fever, “What would Grandfather Cub do?as a way to remind ourselves to keep loosening our grip on things that take up too much space (physically, psychologically and spiritually).
Each time we venture out we undergo some kind of metamorphosis - the norms of the daily suburban grind disintegrating in the cocoon of our camper only to re-form into something more robust, more beautiful, but maybe just as ephemeral as any winged insect. Which is why we return again and again, to a meandering trail that is far less convenient, objectively more difficult and unquestionably less demanding than the cluster spin cycle of productivity and status we find ourselves in in “normal” life. We come back to the alter of fabricated simplicity to ask the same questions:
What do we really need? What is essential? What would we consider a success? What does actualisation look like? What the heck are we DOING with this one, brief, wild life?
And in return for laying down our offerings of mobile service, hot running water and clean floors, we receive the answers we came seeking, but they aren’t what we thought they would be.
None of this is to say that I wouldn’t jump at the chance to hike through Northern Spain. I would. Tomorrow. But if the gift of unexpected suffering has taught me one thing (when in actuality it’s taught me a ton of things) it’s to realise that I don’t need to and that the only real pilgrimage worth taking, I’m already on.
I leave you with some words from the enigmatic Henry David Thoreau who famously set about building and living in a rustic cabin the woods of New England which he wrote about in Walden or ‘Life in the Woods, a philosophical treatise on simplicity, nature and trying to figure out what is essential for a good life. Sounds like a friggin dream to me.
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