In the twenty years I’ve been writing I’ve only ever written two sentences I can recall at will:
The first is kind of clunky, yet I love it for its sentiment: “Like a good country song that goes round and back again, mountains everywhere sing the same song.”
The second, I adore. It was written wandering the backroads of Croatia. My son and I were making our pilgrim way to the five-kilometre stretch of coastline that belongs to Bosnia, when a woman opened her gate and summoned us to her kitchen table.
To the bewilderment of her three children, Teresa offered us showers, lunch and a mountain of fresh figs and mandarins from her orchard before sending us on our way.
Ten minutes down the road, Teresa pulled up in her car. The backroad border crossing was closed to foreigners. We would not pass. While I had walked from Rome, my son had begun his pilgrimage in Canterbury, England and was on his way to Jerusalem. There was no way on this green earth was he backtracking for two days through the mountains behind us to the correct border.
Teresa rang around. There is a track, she said. Locals with no patience for bureaucratic lines in their sand had graded it with their tractors to bypass the crossing.
As Ben and I wandered on in the evening dark, the stones on the track lit white by the rising full moon, this small string of words worked their way into my bones, and never left:
“When you are in a car, beautiful places are a moment;
if you stop the car, they are a cluster of moments.
When you walk, beautiful places are an eternity carved into the soul.”
To finish the story, at the top of the hill was a tiny chapel. We burrowed about for a key, hoping for a warm pew to lay our heads. No key, we unfurled our tents … only to realise we’d forgotten to dry them out after rain the night before.
A pilgrim reality on that trip. Not one I need to repeat now I’m older!
It is no coincidence that writing that satisfies my spirit comes through pilgrimage.
Walking and writing are alchemical. Together, they are sublime.
Pilgrimage is the art of ancient travel.
It harks back to forever, when human beings set out on journeys from which they might not return, pilgrimages they knew would transform the rest of their lives – journeys that were worth every risk because, live or die, to deny the call was to close the door on life and that meant certain death anyway: death to the spirit.
For most of us in the 21st century, the call to walk is not so dramatic.
Nonetheless, once the whisper of pilgrimage takes root it will not leave us alone.
And we get it – not everyone wants to walk hundreds of kilometres through ancient landscapes.
And few women want to do it alone.