The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred (For Readers of A Pilgrimage to Eternity)

Praise for Phil Cousineau and

The Art of Pilgrimage

Stories, anecdotes, quotes, vignettes, and practical suggestions from travelers and pilgrims throughout history create a guide to building a personal journey by learning to slow down and linger, savor, and absorb each stage.

—Library Journal

It’s just marvelous the way you have demonstrated how similar the journeys in myth are to those in art, literature, movies, and dreams. You’ve done what all artists and writers have to do with the great stuff of myth. You’ve made it your own.

—Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces

"The Art of Pilgrimage—that’s a classic."

—Deepak Chopra, author of Spiritual Solutions

"If Joseph Campbell, the Dalai Lama, and Bill Moyers were to have collaborated on a book about journeys I suspect it would look very much like The Art of Pilgrimage."

—Austin American Statesman

Of all the books I’ve ever read about pilgrimage, this is the most poetic, personal, and timely.

—John O’Donohue, author of Anam Cara

One of the greatest travel books I’ve ever read. Cousineau writes like a jazz musician and travels like an artist.

—Ray Manzarek, cofounder of The Doors

Recently, I read your two of your works, on pilgrimage and on creativity with great interest. Fascinating connections. I find your work resonates a great deal with my own.

—Leonard Pitt, author of Walks through Lost Paris

If Phil Cousineau’s fine book were to have the influence it deserves, tourism might cease to be an environmental blight and become an educational blessing… Taken together with Cousineau’s wise advice, such sweat-capital pilgrimaging might be an admirable way to save what’s still left before the airlines, hotel chains, and tour buses overrun it all.

—Theodore Rozak, author of The Making of a Counter Culture (from the San Francisco Chronicle review)

A must read before a trip.

—Escape

Phil Cousineau’s book is an excellent resource for anyone who is interested in moving from a tourist to a pilgrim, and yearning to make their travel a more sacred experience. Pilgrimage doesn’t require a journey halfway around the world. You can engage a pilgrimage spirit for a trip into your own backyard. Cousineau will help show the way.

—Revjmk, For the Someday Book

Phil Cousineau reminds us that we can make all of our journeys more intentional: With the roads to the exalted places we all want to visit more crowded than ever, we look more and more, but see less and less. But we don’t need more gimmicks and gadgets; all we need do is reimagine the way we travel. If we truly want to know the secret of soulful travel, we need to believe that there is something sacred waiting to be discovered in virtually every journey."

—U.S. Catholic

I have made pilgrimages all my life. One, along the sea-roads of Charles Darwin, consumed more than twenty years. Then I found Phil Cousineau and now he is my guide on every wandering.

—Georgia I. Hesse, founding travel editor, San Francisco Examiner

Seeking answers to one’s own existence? Cousineau guarantees that the pilgrimage approach is the right path for obtaining those answers.

—Brad Hooper, Booklist

The quintessential traveling companion.

—Spirituality and Practice magazine

"Transcendent, exciting, and true. Cousineau fires our night with flaming soul-bursts from every age and quarter… If there is such a thing as a world soul—an anima mundi—it would address our times in something like Cousineau’s voice."

—Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions

Phil Cousineau is the finest and most inspiring pilgrimage guide writing today.

—Alexander Eliot, TIME magazine art critic, author of Because It Was Beautiful

"‘…a journey without challenge has no meaning; one without purpose has no soul.’ Phil Cousineau wrote these words twenty-five years ago, and they ring true even more now. The Art of Pilgrimage has served as a guide to thousands of people seeking meaning in their lives—for a ‘time in’ in search of a new perspective—so this third edition brings me joy. Enjoy the stories, the insights, and the potential places you may travel whether from your armchair or a knitch in an airport. Phil is a consummate traveler; one who shares meaning and his soul."

—Lauren Artress, author of The Path of the Holy Fool: How the Labyrinth Ignites Our Visionary Powers

This book made me wish I could retrace my footsteps with Joe [Campbell] when we traveled the world together.

—Jean Erdman Campbell, dancer and choreographer

"Phil Cousineau gets right to it—the human soul’s need for meaning. I’m so happy to see his Art of Pilgrimage again in celebration of all he has to teach us. Travel is a quest for meaning and pilgrimage is the answer. Whether your pilgrimage is to the sacred sites in your own neighborhood, to the Taj Mahal in India, or the Shrine of the Black Madonna of Poland, Phil Cousineau is a trustworthy guide. The Art of Pilgrimage is an essential companion to life’s journey and the depth of meaning you might find."

—China Galland, author of Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna

A treasure. It triggers the imagination and memory of all inner and outer journeys one has or has not taken.

—Angeles Arrien, PhD, cultural anthropologist and author of The Four-Fold Way and Signs of Life

"Inviting, enlightening, deep, and enduring, The Art of Pilgrimage is the spiritual traveler’s bible. I first read it decades ago; it never gets old. It’s how I love to travel; it’s what I like to read."

—Linda Watanabe McFerrin, author of The Hand of Buddha and Navigating the Divide

Whatever your longing, path, or destination, Phil Cousineau gives you the most valuable gear you could pack in your satchel.

—Anthony Lawlor, author of A Home for the Soul and The Temple in the House

Phil Cousineau is the most effective public speaker I have ever heard. His book on pilgrimage is one of the greatest travel books I have ever read.

—Peter Feibleman, author of Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman and staff writer on Columbo

Phil’s book is a reminder that all poets are pilgrims of the word and all pilgrims are poets of the road.

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author of Coney Island of the Mind and Little Boy

"Phil Cousineau’s classic work, The Art of Pilgrimage, is a soul-stirring read about the deeper meanings of travel. The book has inspired our own personal travel practices and informed our work in the transformational travel movement. Phil’s writing has been a guiding light in the way we mentor travelers to help them ‘bring back the boon’ so they might lead better lives when they return home."

—Michael Bennett and Jake Haupert, cofounders of Explorer X and The Transformational Travel Council

The Art of

Pilgrimage

The Seeker’s Guide to

Making Travel Sacred

Phil Cousineau

Foreword by

Huston Smith

Copyright © 1998, 2021 by Phil Cousineau.

Published by Conari Press, a division of Mango Media Inc.

Cover Design: Jermaine Lau

Layout & Design: Suzanne Albertson

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The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2021938757

ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-290-9

BISAC category code TRV026090, TRAVEL / Special Interest / Literary

Printed in the United States of America

To Richard Beban,

fellow pilgrim

Art is here taken to mean knowledge realized in action.

—René Daumal

"PILGRIM, n. A traveler that is taken seriously."

—Ambrose Bierce

"One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions

that will make happiness;

one only stumbles upon them by chance,

in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere,

and holds fast to the days…."

—Willa Cather

Contents

Foreword

Preface to the Third Edition

Introduction

I    The Longing

II    The Call

III    Departure

IV    The Pilgrim’s Way

V    The Labyrinth

VI    Arrival

VII    Bringing Back the Boon

Gratitudes

Permissions

Recommended Reading

List of Illustrations

About the Author

Foreword

The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation—to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life. Nothing matters now but this adventure. Travelers jostle each other to board the train where they crowd together for a journey that may last several days. After that there is a stony road to climb on foot—a rough, wild path in a landscape where everything is new. The naked glitter of the sacred mountain stirs the imagination; the adventure of self-conquest has begun. Specifics may differ, but the substance is always the same.

Travel brings a special kind of wisdom if one is open to it. At home or abroad, things of the world pull us toward them with such gravitational force that, if we are not alert our entire lives, we can be sucked into their outwardness. Attentive travel helps us to see this, because the continually changing outward scene helps us to see through the world’s pretensions. With its phantasmagoric, kaleidoscopic character laid bare, we see it for what it truly is—perpetually perishing maya—and the world loses its wager. We can understand how perpetual wandering can be a spiritual vocation, as with dedicated pilgrims and sannyasins.

As Phil Cousineau has recently published a book on synchronicity, he can hardly object if I weave my foreword around an instance of it.

When his invitation to contribute a foreword reached me and I was wondering what I might say, the answer jumped out at me from the closing pages of the book I was reading, Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River. Set in Nazi Germany during World War II, it is about a misfit, a dwarf named Trudi whose entire life is a longing to belong. As a child she would hang from doorframes for hours, hoping that the weight of her body would stretch its length. When it became apparent that her head was growing disproportionately large for her body, she wrapped it so tightly in bandages that it ached mercilessly the entire night. To no avail, of course.

When a circus with a dwarf named Pia came to town, Trudi was ecstatic. She was not alone! There was someone else in the world who was like her. During the circus days she sought out Pia at every opportunity, and Pia responded. She told her stories of a land where everyone was little. When the circus left, Trudi begged Pia to take her along, but Pia told her she belonged where she was.

The years go by. Trudi risked her life to help fugitives from the Nazis, and (as someone whose difference made her exceptionally understanding) she became the ears of the town as people poured out their troubles to her.

One evening toward the close of her life, instead of cooking her evening meal, Trudi climbed onto her bicycle and rode out to a dilapidated mill that had not been rebuilt. There, her preceding night’s dream of her loving and ever-supportive father, recently dead, came back to her:

It hit her so strongly, that she crouched right where she was and brought her arms around her middle. The scent of chamomile enveloped her, and as she looked down, the tiny flowers were right in front of her, their yellow centers ringed by white petals. The closer she looked, the more she saw, and the more she forgot herself and her pain and became part of something she couldn’t define, as if, by getting closer to a smaller world, she had found a larger world. How many times had she longed for a world where she knew she belonged? How often had she imagined living on the island of the little people? Yet, all she had needed was here, already here. Pia had been right—this was where she belonged. Despite the horror of war. Because of its horror. Working with the underground and the fugitives had taught her what it was like to belong. That you could initiate it, build it, be it.

With that insight Trudi reached her destination, her life’s goal. But though pilgrimage is always an inward journey—in Trudi’s case it was entirely inward, for travel was closed to her—it helps to objectify it by holding it at arm’s length, so to speak. So target a distant place—your Mecca, your Jerusalem, your Mount Meru—and set out. You needn’t don a hairshirt, for obstacles enough will erupt. But by attending to them now—openness, attentiveness, and responsiveness are the essence of pilgrimage—you will be able to surmount them by yielding to them in the way that life always requires that we yield to it. And draw the resilience you will need from those who have preceded you, for pilgrims are a hardy breed. They trudge rough roads, put in long days, and live on breadcrusts. But hunger turns those crusts into gourmet fare, and pilgrims sleep well from their fatigue, even when their beds are hard ground and stones are their pillows. On clear nights the stars that steer them cover them with their canopy and token the eternal.

What can we learn from them, these pilgrims who have preceded us? Much, but I will content myself with a passing point or two.

They tell us to be prepared to discover that from the spiritual point of view a journey is always something of a two-edged sword because of the dispersion which can result from contact with so much that is new. We cannot simply shut ourselves off from this newness or we might just as well stay at home—if we are going to travel, we naturally wish to learn something. If the newness threatens to overwhelm us, it can occasion periodic hardenings of the ego, as if in reaction to the fear of losing ourselves through dispersal we find it necessary to shore up our identities. The smallness of these identities is certain to bring suffering, however, beginning with feelings of impatience and annoyance. The art is to learn to master today’s unavoidable situation with as much equanimity as we can muster, in preparation for facing its sequel tomorrow.

In the course of this training, we come to see quite plainly how essential it is to have a purchase on our surroundings by being centered in ourselves, not somewhere in the outer world. The person who is always expecting consolation from without is like a swaying reed or a boat on a stormy sea. It seems as if in some uncanny way the surrounding world, the cosmic maya, senses this and loves to play with us—without malice to be sure, yet with a touch of mockery. To catch onto this trickery is a mark of sanctity.

Enough. Keeping in mind these token gleanings from those who have gone before, welcome to The Art of Pilgrimage. With his characteristic exuberance, expansiveness, and flair, Phil Cousineau captures all of the above and more in the pages that follow.

Dawn is breaking. It’s time to head out.

Huston Smith,

Professor of Religious Studies

University of California at Berkeley (June 1998)

Preface to the Third Edition

"Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.

You must travel it by yourself. It is not far. It is within reach.

Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know."

—Walt Whitman

While preparing for this third edition of The Art of Pilgrimage, I was intrigued by the throng of memories that came rushing back to me about how the book has fared over the last twenty-five years. It was gratifying to recall the thousands of readers who took the time and trouble to write to me by letter or postcard, marvel-filled correspondence that was franked with exotic stamps from all over the globe. I have heard from backpackers, travel writers, photographers, artists, clergy, soldiers, prisoners, teens, and elders. As diverse as that crowd of pilgrims might be, there is a common thread to their responses, which sounds to me like echoes of Joseph Heller’s book title, Something Happened.

What my correspondents were reaching out to tell me was that something significant had happened to them on their various pilgrimages. Two Australian nuns wrote about how they were inspired to take a tramp steamer to Borobodur to help them understand different cultures and faiths. A Vietnam veteran informed me he had made a return trip to Saigon to make amends for what happened during the war. A Navajo soldier, who had fought in the Afghanistan war, informed me that she had completed a vision quest to one of her ancestral sites so she could renew her broken spirit. The family of an elderly woman came with her to one of my events at Book Passage Bookstore to personally relay to me their heart-stirring story. Their beloved mother had been felled by a stroke and lost her ability to speak, but her speech therapist had a brainstorm. She urged her to cut her favorite lines out of her favorite book—The Art of Pilgrimage—then paste them into a scrapbook so she could read from it every day until she regained the power of speech.

Slowly, with great care, she spoke slowly but proudly, I had never thought of reading as a form of pilgrimage, but now I do.

One of my favorite recollections dates back to the spring of 2010 when I was co-leading a journey around the West of Ireland with the Irish poet-priest John O’Donohue. Late one evening, in the village of Ballyvaughn, we left our hotel and sauntered past a flock of swans in the nearby harbor on our way to the legendary Monks Pub. Once inside, we sat in front of a blazing, sweet-smelling turf fire and pulled out of our leather satchels the manuscripts we happened to be working on at the time, then plopped them down on the old steamer truck in front of us. Over foamy pints of Guinness, we enjoyed a scintillating conversation about travel, poetry, and friendship. A troupe of local musicians arrived and set up their gear for a session of traditional music. John watched them with a look of glee on his face then dug back into his satchel and produced his road-battered copy of my pilgrimage book.

I have been greatly enjoying this, he said in his breezy Connemara accent. "I’ve recommended it to many friends as a fine overview of sacred journeys. But I feel compelled to add a caveat. I am afraid that, with even the best of intentions, pilgrimage can devolve into rote ritual. A bona fide pilgrimage may mean becoming more conscious about yourself and the world, as you write, but it needs to bring about a change of mind, a shift in the soul. No change, no pilgrimage."

As I considered his comments, I glanced down at our manuscripts and noticed that we were both working on books about beauty. Smiling at the uncanny coincidence, I pointed to our works-in-progress and said, Well said, lad, but what about the role of beauty?

John gazed into the glittering fire, took a country minute to think about his response, then said, Ah, yes, the art and architecture at sacred sites everywhere tend to be quite beautiful. The beauty invites the soul to express reverence and respect. The problem is that if we don’t carry it with us, we will never find it.

Calmly, he added, "Beauty may be how we come to love a place. But if we don’t learn to love the journey for itself, including the struggles and obstacles, we will never feel anything when we arrive at our destination. Nothing there will move us as it should."

And then, lest we get too serious, John, the mischievous mystic, quoted his favorite comedian, the deadpan Steven Wright, Everywhere is walking distance—if you have the time!’

Our pub conversation has glowed in my memory ever since. In a wonderful way, it evoked many of the themes I tried to cover in the book: intention, attention, reverence, respect, struggle, time, love of the road, bringing home the boon. Without turning these points into practices, we are mere tourists, voyeurs, or poseurs on the road of life. If we don’t allow ourselves to become passionate about why we are traveling, we will never comprehend the depths of what Henry Miller experienced in the amphitheater at Ancient Epidaurus, when he felt a great peace wash over him and realized that the cure for our troubles was to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.

Since launching The Art of Pilgrimage in 1998 at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, at the personal invitation of its cofounder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, I have often been asked about the dramatic rise in worldwide pilgrimages in our time. My patented response has been to suggest that the increase of meaningless travel (Is that all there is, my friend? as Peggy Lee crooned) has led to the demand for more meaningful travel. Something real. Something soulful. Something true. A willingness to go beyond the allure of travel posters to experience for ourselves what is sacred to the people we are encountering, their own favorite art, music, craft, architecture, religion, history, dance, or cuisine.

If the gods smile upon us and the light is right, on pilgrimage we may even catch a glimpse of infinity.

Seek the depths—or else, wrote the novelist Saul Bellow. Or else live out your days on the surfaces.

Look for sites and situations where you can feel eternity wrestling with time, as John