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“Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen, instead of filling them up by straining the jointsâ€�”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“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’t; 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.”
― L.M. Browning, Seasons of Contemplation: A Book of Midnight Meditations

“Walking: it hits you at first like an immense breathing in the ears. You feel the silence as if it were a great fresh wind blowing away clouds. There’s the silence of woodland. Clumps and groves of trees form shifting, uncertain walls around us. We walk along existing paths, narrow winding strips of beaten earth. We quickly lose our sense of direction. That silence is tremulous, uneasy. Then there’s the silence of tough summer afternoon walks across the flank of a mountain, stony paths, exposed to an uncompromising sun.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Think while walking, walk while thinking, and let writing be but the light pause, as the body on a walk rests in contemplation of wide open spaces.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Mountains have long been a geography for pilgrimage, place where people have been humbled and strengthened, they are symbols of the sacred center. Many have traveled to them in order to find the concentrated energy of Earth and to realize the strength of unimpeded space. Viewing a mountain at a distance or walking around its body we can see its shape, know its profile, survey its surrounds. The closer you come to the mountain the more it disappears, the mountain begins to lose its shape as you near it, its body begins to spread out over the landscape losing itself to itself. On climbing the mountain the mountain continues to vanish. It vanishes in the detail of each step, its crown is buried in space, its body is buried in the breath. On reaching the mountain summit we can ask, “What has been attained?â€� - The top of the mountain? Big view? But the mountain has already disappeared. Going down the mountain we can ask, “What has been attained?â€� Going down the mountain the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain disappears, the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain is realized. Mountain’s realization comes through the details of the breath, mountain appears in each step. Mountain then lives inside our bones, inside our heart-drum. It stands like a huge mother in the atmosphere of our minds. Mountain draws ancestors together in the form of clouds. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the raining of the past. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the winds of the future. Mountain mother is a birth gate that joins the above and below, she is a prayer house, she is a mountain. Mountain is a mountain.”
― Joan Halifax, The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom

“This time, there’s no question of freeing yourself from artifice to taste simple joys. Instead there is the promise of meeting a freedom head-on as an outer limit of the self and of the human, an internal overflowing of a rebellious Nature that goes beyond you. Walking can provoke these excesses: surfeits of fatigue that make the mind wander, abundances of beauty that turn the soul over, excesses of drunkenness on the peaks, the high passes (where the body explodes). Walking ends by awakening this rebellious, archaic part of us: our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired. Because walking puts us on the vertical axis of life: swept along by the torrent that rushes just beneath us. What I mean is that by walking you are not going to meet yourself. By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologistsâ€� consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake â€� for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait â€� a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Joy is not the satisfied contemplation of an accomplished result, the emotion of victory, the satisfaction of having succeeded. It is the sign of an energy that is deftly deployed, it is a free affirmation: everything comes easy. Joy is an activity: executing with ease something difficult that has taken time to master, asserting the faculties of the mind and the body. Joys of thought when it finds and discovers, joys of the body when it achieves without effort. That is why joy, unlike pleasure, increases with repetition, and is enriched. When you are walking, joy is a basso continuo. Locally, of course, you may run into effort and difficulty. You will also find immediate moments of contentment: a proud gaze backwards to contemplate the long steep plunge of the slope behind you. Those satisfactions, though, too often present an opportunity to reintroduce quantities, scores, figures (which track? how long? what altitude?). And walking becomes a competition. That is why expeditions in high mountain country (conquering peaks, each one a challenge) are always slightly impure: because they give rise to narcissistic gratification. What dominates in walking, away from ostentation and showing off, is the simple joy of feeling your body in the most primitively natural activity.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Mountain’s realization comes through the details of the breath, mountain appears in each step. Mountain then lives inside our bones, inside our heart-drum. It stands like a huge mother in the atmosphere of our minds. Mountain draws ancestors together in the form of clouds. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the raining of the past. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the winds of the future. Mountain mother is a birth gate that joins the above and below, she is a prayer house, she is a mountain. Mountain is a mountain.”
― Joan Halifax, The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom

“And then Serafina understood something for which witches had no word: it was the idea of pilgrimage. She understood why these beings would wait for thousands of years and travel vast distances in order to be close to something important, and how they would feel differently for the rest of time, having been briefly in its presence.”
― Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife

“Renga with Katie


There's no better place
Than in each moment with you
Traveling through life

Regardless of place and time,
Or seasons and location,

I never look back
To a time without you there
And wish to return

We are each other's constant
In an ever changing world





On a pilgrimage
To no place particular,
Destinationless

Each moment we're arriving
At another sacred place

Appreciating,
Remembering life before
You opened my eyes

It's both vivid and soothing
Like I'd never had vision

Now I see the way,
As we travel together
The fog is lifted

Each sight reveals each other
Each step reveals another”
― Eric Overby, 17: Haiku Poems

“You lift your head, you’re on your way, but really just to be walking, to be out of doors. That’s it, that’s all, and you’re there. Outdoors is our element: the exact sensation of living there.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“In the history of walking, many experts considering him (Wordsworth) the authentic originator of the long expedition. He was the first â€� 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 â€� 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 ‘one of the first to use his legs in the service of philosophyâ€�.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“In seeking after what the soul desires we become pilgrims with no home but the path the soul would have us follow.”
― Michael Meade, Fate and Destiny, The Two Agreements of the Soul

“There is of course a deep spiritual need which the pilgrimage seems to satisfy, particularly for those hardy enough to tackle the journey on foot.”
― Edwin Mullins, The Pilgrimage to Santiago

“If you want to hear the distant voice of the ocean put your ear to the lips of a seashell.

If you want to hear the voice of God place your ear upon the chest of any living being.

If you want to be awakened from slumbering through life, place your ear up to the core of a corpse because the voice of honesty can clearly be heard there and the fingers of such a ribcage love to pinch dreamers into action.

But if you want to hear the voice that directs your personal pilgrimage, you must find a way to keep your ear glued to your body’s fragile shell.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones, Giants At Play: Finding Wisdom, Courage, And Acceptance To Encounter Your Destiny

“I hear a swelling swoosh; from the south a bullet train whizzes into view on the tracks, knives through the landscape in a matter of moments, then disappears with a whoosh. It has just covered in a few seconds what has taken me hours to walk. That very fast train reminds me that, as a pilgrim, travel is made holy in its slowness. I see things that neither the passengers of the train nor the drivers of the automobiles see. I feel things that they will never feel. I have time to ponder, imagine, daydream. I tire. I thirst. In my slow walking, I find me.”
― Kevin A. Codd, Beyond Even the Stars: A Compostela Pilgrim in France

“An author who composes while walking, on the other hand, is free from such bonds; his thought is not the slave of other volumes, not swollen with verifications, nor weighted with the thought of others. It contains no explanation owed to anyone: just thought, judgement, decision. It is thought born of a movement, an impulse. In it we can feel the body’s elasticity, the rhythm of a dance. It retains and expresses the energy, the springiness of the body. Here is thought about the thing itself, without the scrambling, the fogginess, the barriers, the customs clearances of culture and tradition. The result will not be long and meticulous exegesis, but thoughts that are light and profound. That is really the challenge: the lighter a thought, the more it rises, and becomes profound by rising â€� vertiginously â€� above the thick marshes of conviction, opinion, established thought. While books conceived in the library are on the contrary superficial and heavy. They remain on the level of recopying.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“When one has walked a long way to reach the turning in the path that discloses an anticipated view, and that view appears, there is always a vibration of the landscape. It is repeated in the walker’s body. The harmony of the two presences, like two strings in tune, each feeding off the vibration of the other, is like an endless relaunch. Eternal Recurrence is the unfolding in a continuous circle of the repetition of those two affirmations, the circular transformation of the vibration of the presences. The walker’s immobility facing that of the landscape â€� it is the very intensity of that co-presence that gives birth to an indefinite circularity of exchanges: I have always been here, tomorrow, contemplating this landscape.”
― Frédéric Gros

“Praying is holy pilgrimage.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“It’s funny how you doubt yourself through & through, when the sun & the moon are parabolically on a pilgrimage, encircling the mecca of you.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones, Mirrors Of The Sun: Finding Reflections Of Light In The Shittiness Of Life

“To feel the pull, the draw, the interior attraction, and to want to follow it, even if it has no name still, that is the "pilgrim spirit."The "why" only becomes clear as time passes, only long after the walking is over.”
― Kevin A. Codd, Beyond Even the Stars: A Compostela Pilgrim in France

“When walking in this mode we discover the immense vigour of starry night skies, elemental energies, and our appetites follow: they are enormous, and our bodies are satisfied. When you have slammed the world’s door, there is nothing left to hold you: pavements no longer guide your steps (the path, a hundred thousand times repeated, of the return to the fold). Crossroads shimmer like hesitant stars, you rediscover the tremulous fear of choosing, a vertiginous freedom.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“And as we know from the pilgrimage diaries of Swami Ramdas, it is when we renounce everything that everything is given to us, in abundance. Everything: meaning the intensity of presence itself.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Perhaps the itinerant monks called ‘Gyrovaguesâ€� were especially responsible for promoting this view of our condition as eternal strangers. They journeyed ceaselessly from monastery to monastery, without fixed abode, and they haven’t quite disappeared, even today: it seems there are still a handful tramping Mount Athos. They walk for their entire lives on narrow mountain paths, back and forth on a long repeated round, sleeping at nightfall wherever their feet have taken them; they spend their lives murmuring prayers on foot, walk all day without destination or goal, this way or that, taking branching paths at random, turning, returning, without going anywhere, illustrating through endless wandering their condition as permanent strangers in this profane world.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Let thy pilgrimage be a prayer.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“My prayer is my pilgrimage.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Is this what I am doing now?
Watching the currents, passages
of life around me.
I am not looking for books to explain
more with their words, but
listening to poets with their imagery, symbols, listening to my own feelings as I
continue my pilgrimage in this life,
pausing, watching, catching glimpses
of deeper down things.
-Deeper Down Things”
― Robert Trabold, Watching the River Flow By: Selected Poems

“Her eyes are full of sadness,
I am on a pilgrimage since millennia.”
― Tripurari

“Ecclesiastical officials have placed a votive prayer box beneath a mural of the Virgin Mary, and the box is continuously emptied and refilled during two annual pilgrimage days. When the box is full, the chapel officials bless the votive messages and then, to my enormous exasperation, burn them. Despite my repeated requests, they never have allowed me to examine these scraps of paper, adamantly informing me that these are messages from believers to God. That relationship clearly does not include a third-party ethnologist.”
― BenoiÌ‚t Fliche

“Pilgrimage: to journey to a sacred place.
Pilgrim: a traveller or wanderer, a stranger in a foreign place.
Crusaders: pilgrims with swords who attempted to conquer the Middle East.
Hajj: the journey to Mecca, one of the five pillars of Islam. Shahadah, Salat, Zakat, Sawm, Hajj.
Pleasant, perhaps, to say that I am a pilgrim, but looking at it, counting the swirl of white as the devout move round the sacred stone in Mecca, watching the fans scream at the movie premiere, listening to the old men sitting on their benches by the sea who report that everything changes, and that’s okay�
fuck me who isn’t a fucking pilgrim anyway?”
― Claire North, The Sudden Appearance of Hope