Adventure or Pilgrimage?

As I am about to begin Leg 3 of my journey, I decided to write this little piece.

I don’t plan on the nature of my rides. I just ride. But sometimes a ride takes on a characteristic of its own. I just let that nature emerge on its own.

At the beginning of the planning, I let people know about the intended trip. If others want to join, then I know it’ll be “an adventure”– a time of fun, discovery, and interaction with other people, whatever the outcome. The focus is on the shared experience. When it is a solo venture, the ride becomes a different beast. It becomes a journey inside oneself. To me, if one tries to be spiritual in nature, it becomes a pilgrimage.

To most people, a pilgrimage takes on religious connotations, but it need not be. People of various inclinations often spend time reflecting within oneself, contemplating, meditating. One can contemplate in one place, as Henry David Thoreau did at Walden Pond. But when there’s movement, it can be called a pilgrimage.

It is a well-known fact that religious people use pilgrimages to give their meditation some focus. Famous pilgrimages, such as the Camino de Santiago in Spain or the Shikoku Pilgrimage in Japan takes the pilgrim to shrines or temples where icons direct their meditation. But one can also take a personal pilgrimage through nature and foreign lands and let whatever appears direct the meditation. That is my pilgrimage.

For instance, I talked with a man in Menzies, who without even knowing it, showed his racial biases. It helped my see where racial biases come from: not from falsehoods, but from truths. Our conversation was about the feral camels that roam the Outback. Camels run wildly in the outback, but more than a century ago, there were no camels. They were brought in from the Middle East. The man kept saying that “the Afghans” brought in the camels, and when they didn’t need them any more, “the Afghans” released them into the wild, and so “the Afghans” pretty much messed up the Outback life with their imported camels. What he didn’t say was that the British needed a way to cross the desert and the camels were the only way to do (since horses could not make the journey). So they brought in camels, but needed the Afghans who knew how to handle them. So the Afghans were the ones that took care of the camels, but the British were the ones that brought them in and later released them when the animals were no longer needed. Prejudice comes from truth, but from truths that leave out other truths.

There are many things to reflect on. And one can use the environment, or the emptiness of the environment to help in that reflection. People, conversations, trees, animals all contribute. In pilgrimages, the focus changes because one is always moving. Pilgrimages are not religious, per se. But it is spiritual in that it helps the contemplation, or more simply, plain-old-thinking, by changing the focus daily.

It’s just that simple. And ordinary. And still an adventure at the same time.