Pilgrimage: Returning home
“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.”
—Zen Buddhist proverb
Returning home is part of pilgrimage. It is not meant to be long-term travel or exploration for no purpose. It is a journey of meaning to a specific destination, and once you have completed it, you must return home.
You might be welcomed back with a hug from a partner or friend, or a cuddle from enthusiastic pets, but the celebration will be brief and normal life will resume once more. You will put your dirty clothes in the wash and cook your favourite dinner and settle back to catch up on the TV you missed. You’ll do the inevitable life admin that piled up while you were away. You’ll go back to work and return to the routines of home.
There will be moments when you appreciate the simple pleasures you took for granted before leaving, but soon, they will become part of normal life again. Your pilgrimage will fade into memory.
The gifts of pilgrimage take time to emerge
The myth of walking pilgrimage entices people into thinking that it will enable some great life transformation. That a moment of divine inspiration will strike and the pilgrim will return changed forever.
That might happen, but equally there may be no transformational pivot point — and that’s okay. It may take time to well up, or it may not come at all. The expectation of such a change may prevent you from seeing smaller shifts, so try to stay open to possibility.
Take time to process your journey, whatever that means to you, and if you find no gifts, no gold, then perhaps you haven’t finished your pilgrimage journey yet.
My three pilgrimages of meaning
I always intended to write a pilgrimage book, and I had thought I would write it after the Pilgrims’ Way. For some reason, I expected a six-day walk to miraculously cure me of midlife ennui and pandemic locked-in-locked-down misery.
The walk was a much-needed escape, and I had moments of joy on the way, but no real clarity emerged. I had expected to find answers and write deep and meaningful insights in my journal, but it was filled with the practicalities of walking, glimpses of the physical landscape, and disjointed fragments of emotion.
Soon after I returned from that first pilgrimage in November 2020, the UK went back into another lockdown, followed by an even longer one in early 2021. It was a hard winter, so I planned my next escape, buying the St Cuthbert’s Way guidebook and maps of the route, fully expecting to walk it at full strength when the world had recovered from COVID-19, which we all expected to happen quickly.
But of course, it didn’t.
* * *
Bath, England — 6 February 2021
I walked alone in the freezing fog this morning, then lay weeping on the sofa. I am not okay. I feel like one of those caged animals who pace back and forth, wearing down the same paths, desperate to get out. I want something to happen, anything. No one is even zooming anymore. There is nothing to say. We’re all done.
* * *
I caught the virus in July 2021 and I was the sickest I’ve ever been. When I walked the St Cuthbert’s Way in the following October, it was partly to prove I was on the path to recovery, a short-term goal that I achieved — and yet the world had still not recovered.
Soon after my return from that pilgrimage in November 2021, we flew to New Zealand to visit my mother-in-law, the first time Jonathan could see her for almost two years. As New Zealand citizens, we were allowed into the country, but we spent a week locked in a hotel room and further days in isolation before we emerged into a fear-ridden Auckland.
Trapped in that hotel room, guarded by the military with only half an hour per day permitted outside walking in a circle around a parking lot, I sunk back into darkness. Jonathan gave me his time slot on several days, just so I could be outside. My tattered wings bled from bashing desperately against the bars of my cage once more.
New Zealand had just emerged from lockdown and the virus had yet to arrive. Fear was heightened and the bureaucracy of international vaccination certificates kept us from even buying a takeaway coffee. Any glimpse of freedom I had gained on the St Cuthbert’s Way was buried under the weight of renewed pandemic constraints.
By the time I walked the Camino de Santiago in September 2022, pandemic restrictions were almost completely gone in the UK and Europe. I wore a mask on the plane and on public transport, but outside on the Camino, it was as if there was no virus. You could smile at another pilgrim and see their smile in response.
My freedom to roam was restored once more, and I began to find meaning in my personal chaos.
As I returned from my Camino, I realised that home was where I wanted to be — back in Bath, with Jonathan.
I’ve always struggled with the idea of home, more interested in visiting new places and moving on, starting afresh. I didn’t understand the attraction of putting down roots or settling in one place, preferring the reinvention of a new city, a new country, a new culture.
In my teenage years, I was in love with Bruce Chatwin — or at least the idea of him as he died in 1989 before I even heard his name. I read all his books and wrote my journal in Moleskine notebooks because he had used them. I went to Australia because of his book The Songlines, and his words summed up my desire to move.
“Man’s real home is not a house, but the road, and life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.”
Bruce Chatwin was forty-eight when he died. His illness forced him to stop wandering, and his restlessness was stilled by the grave.
I am almost forty-eight as I write this, and these three pilgrimages over the last two years have calmed my wanderlust. The restrictions of the pandemic lockdowns made me walk the same local paths over and over as the seasons changed, and in the process, I put down roots and discovered what home might be.
A few weeks after I returned from the Camino, we adopted two British Shorthair cats, Cashew and Noisette. As I write this, Cashew lies next to me in a sunbeam by the window, purring quietly, while Jonathan works upstairs in his loft, Noisette on the beanbag beside him.
Pilgrimage teaches the blessing of simple pleasures, and gratitude for another precious day on this earth. I will walk alone again, but for now, I am home and that is enough.
“When I let go of who I am, I become who I might be.”
—Lao Tzu
Questions:
• How will you make time for your return to normal life?
• How will you reflect and learn from your experience?
• How can you allow time and space for the gifts of pilgrimage to emerge?
Resources:
• The Songlines — Bruce Chatwin
• What Am I Doing Here? — Bruce Chatwin
