by Amanda Wagstaff, Hut2Hut Pilgrimage Editor
“A pilgrim travels differently. Always in pilgrimage, there is a change of mind and a change of heart.”
– John O’Donohue.
In a roundabout way, John O’Donohue is the reason I am living in Ireland right now. In the summer of 2014, my sister and I travelled to northern Virginia to visit a family friend who was living with cancer. We all knew that it might be our last time together, and indeed, it was the last time that I saw Aunt Ann.
Whenever I visited Aunt Ann’s house, I always spent time looking at her vast collections of books and ‘things.’ She travelled widely, and she accumulated bits of pottery, books, and other odds and ends, even a collection of Tibetan Singing Bowls. I have Aunt Ann to thank for introducing me to ‘things’ like this that I would otherwise never have encountered. I grew up on a dairy farm in southern Virginia, and while my parents and extended family knew how important it was to expose me to a variety of experiences, the opportunities for them in Mecklenburg County, Virginia were almost nonexistent.
In some ways, growing up as a rural child was great – I have my reverence for nature and empathy for animals AND people to thank for that. It also made me naïve in some ways, but as a result, I am, to this day at 27 years old, STILL amazed by and appreciative of the simplest things. Aunt Ann and her Things were one of the influences in my life that fed my hunger for knowledge and encouraged my questioning mind.
It was in her library that I stumbled upon John O’Donohue. I started pulling out titles about the Book of Kells, Iona, and the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne, and nestled among these books were O’Donohue’s Anam Cara and To Bless the Space Between Us. O’Donohue’s words and the images of medieval manuscripts and monastic ruins were a revelation to me at that time.
This was the summer after I’d earned my MFA in Studio Art in North Carolina, and I was still reeling from the intensity of grad school. I went to grad school because I felt like I needed more guidance, and what I experienced during those two years was excruciating self-doubt and a breakdown of all the preconceived notions I’d had about myself and the world. Every other day was a new epiphany or a new crisis.
At least that’s what it all felt like to me. I was suddenly more sensitively aware of myself, but also painfully aware that this experience of ‘being’ that felt so big was actually so small in relation to the world around me.
The summer of 2014 was the ‘Dust-Settling Period’ that I had been warned about/assured of by many mentors who had themselves been through grad school. It was an uneasy coming down from a turbulent high. I felt this terrible sense of urgency and anxiety.
Once I began reading Aunt Ann’s books, ideas began flowing immediately. I viewed those images and read those words in the context of all the things I’d been stewing over in the studio, and I realized that I was a pilgrim and a mystic and a monk. I had always moved in and out of these roles, I just hadn’t known it.
And that may be the lesson pilgrimage has to offer. You go off in search of answers, or something new. Something else. But you end up seeing more clearly what was already there. Something essential.
I don’t think there’s ever been a time when humans weren’t led out into some incarnation of pilgrimage by their desires. The history of our species is a history of movement. We began as nomads, and once we settled down, we never lost the itch to go back out again. The invention (or discovery?) of agriculture and our subsequent settling down into permanent villages may have solved some of the problems of food, security, and shelter, but living in close quarters introduced a whole new set of existential problems: how to divide up the new labor loads of food production, child-rearing, clothing production; how to interact with other permanent settlements; how to live together with a growing population…
And so began a long and intense process of identity-forming and meaning-making that we continue today.
Its forms may change or be recycled, but pilgrimage has been present throughout history and all over the world. We are re-forming it too, whether we are aware of it or not. Over the next few months, I will walk the ancient paths of St. Kevin and St. Patrick in Ireland and visit the holy sites of Lindisfarne and Iona in the UK. I hope to share my experiences and observations with Hut2Hut readers and offer some reflections on the persistence of pilgrimage and the ways contemporary pilgrims are finding new meaning in this ancient tradition.
Stay tuned…
By Amada Wagstaff, Pilgrimage Editor, Hut2Hut