places, and cultures we meet with all our mind, heart, and soul, to live as fully as possible in every moment, every day. And it teaches us that this embrace is simultaneously a way of becoming whole and letting go.
Thatâs the way of my wanderlust. And now, with the same mixture of apprehension and exhilaration that I feel at the beginning of every journey, I let go of these tales and send them out into the world, on their own adventures. Thank you for taking them into your hands, heart, and home. I hope you find pieces that connect with your own lifeâs puzzle, and that confer meaning and inspiration on your wanderlust way.
Prologue:
Every Journey Is a Pilgrimage
When an editor with whom I had worked at Salon moved to Yoga Journal , she asked me if I would like to write an essay about my philosophy of travel, what travel had taught me through the years. This essay, written in early 2004, was the first piece where I succinctly expressed two ideas that had been germinating for decades and that have become the very foundation of my philosophy now: Travel is a way to collect pieces of the vast global puzzle so that we can understand that puzzle better, and travel is an act of pilgrimage that sanctifies the world, wherever and whatever the path we walk. In retrospect, I believe this all happened exactly as it should: It took a journal devoted to yoga, shining its light on me at a particular moment in my own journey, to ripen these seeds to full fruition.
ONE OF THE MOST REWARDING TRIPS OF MY LIFE was a five-day solo odyssey I made a few summers ago around the Japanese island of Shikoku. Shikoku has been a place of pilgrimage since the 9th century, when the beloved scholar and monk Kobo Daishi established a path of eighty-eight Buddhist temples that circle the island. Completing this circuit is supposed to give you great wisdom, purity, and peace, but I was on a pilgrimage of another kind. My wife grew up on this island, and I had first visited it with her some twenty years before. Now I had returned to see if the singular beauty, serenity, and slow pace of the place I rememberedâand the country kindness of its residentsâhad survived.
A few hours into my journey, I stopped a wizened woman, clad in the pilgrimâs traditional white garb and cone-shaped straw hat, scuffling along a leaf-paved path. She was on her second temple circuit, she told me. âThe thing about the pilgrimage,â she said, âis that it makes your heart lighter; it energizes you. It refreshes your sense of the meaning of life.â Then her eyes locked into mine, deep and shining as a cloudless sky.
During my five days on Shikoku, I ate fresh-from-the-sea sashimi with fishermen, philosophized in steaming public baths with farmers, spun bowls with fifth-generation potters, and talked baseball and benevolence with Buddhist monks. I lay down in rice paddies, lost myself in ancient forests, stared at the sun-spangled sea, and listenedâwith the help of an eighty-year-old âtranslatorâ I had met as she was mending a fishing net on a pierâto the whispers of ghosts in the trees. By the end of my odyssey, I too felt lighter, refreshed, and energized, but not because of the sanctified sites. The island itself had become one big temple for me.
That trip confirmed a truth I had sensed during two decades of wandering: You donât have to travel to Jerusalem, Mecca, Santiago de Compostela, or any other explicitly holy site to be a pilgrim. If you travel with reverence and wonder, with a lively sense of the potential and preciousness of every moment and every encounter, then wherever you go, you walk the pilgrimâs path.
I began to learn this after I graduated from college and moved to Athens, Greece, to teach for a year. By the end of that year, the wonders of the world had ensnared me. I would sit for hours on the Acropolis, staring at the bone-white Parthenon, trying to absorb the perspective of the