Al-Hajj (The Pilgrimage)
Reflections from a Month Outside in Search of the Holy and Wild
Be a barefooted wanderer. God grants wings to a person who does not let themselves be overcome by bodily desires and feelings, and saves themselves from their influence. Leave thoughts and worries. May your heart be as pure as the face of the mirror in which there is no image.
— Rumi
Do you need to know what a pilgrimage is to embark on one? Do you need a clear intention, destination and dedication to a religious tradition? A belief in God or the divine? No. You need none of these things. If you are alive on Earth, you are ready for pilgrimage. That is all it takes. You need only to listen to the stirring waters within your depths, beneath the hard cracked ground of the intellect, and their song that speaks of a longing for the ocean. And then you need to answer. Not with a word or a statement, but with movement. A movement as irrational and mysterious as the invitation: to walk (without any clear intention, destination or dedication). To leave on a journey from the known and familiar to the unknown, waiting, and open. A search. A seeking. A question.
A pilgrimage begins with the outer journey: the journey of the body through the world. The feet on the Earth, the face in the web of faces, the hands clutching objects, tools, clothes. There may be clarity around this journey: a well-trodden path leading to a well-known site of mystery, significance or beauty; a place of lineage, tradition, or ancestral devotion. Or there may not. There may be nothing more than a direction. Ours was South, from Bristol down to Glastonbury, the pulsing green heart of Avalon, and then South-West, towards Dartmoor, Cornwall, and the Sea. The one other thing we knew was duration: the lunar month of Ramadan, one new moon to another, during which we would stick, as close as we were able, to the conventional fasting and prayer schedule. We left our shoes behind, and walked.
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We settle for our first night outside aside a winding stream, under reaching trees newly budding in the late spring air, the whole landscape greening and expanding and breathing after months of cold contraction. We bed on tarps in our bivvies and bags, cooking city-skipped chips and bagfuls of wild garlic in our wok on the circle fire, sitting cross-legged on the cold ground in the night, the open, stars all around in the void looking on, and we at them, singing harmonies and talking dharma and strumming away on our beaten little nylon-string. We wake at 3am to jump and shake and warm extremities and rekindle embers and sit for morning prayer and meditation round the fire, for calm silent sitting on the living giving ground, the soil primordial holding us and sending life all around us upwards and outwards into space, stretching out towards the moon, gleaming throughout our daily vigil, our gathering in the deep night to eat our last before the light returns: oats, bananas, peanut butter, and the holiest of all, dates — our imaginal connection to the mythical providence of the Fertile Crescent.
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What is the difference, then, between a pilgrimage and any old journey, any old ramble or walk through the world? I believe it is this: that on a pilgrimage the emphasis, the focus, the primary field of inquiry is the inner journey that takes place as the outer journey unfolds. The movements and explorations of the heart, soul, spirit, and imagination as they are presented with a torrent of unfamiliar forms, landscapes, people, plants, and animals. Questions, insights, epiphanies, frustrations and shadows gush like a river through the mind of a barefooted wanderer. There is no knowing whether the next corner will bring revelation or despair, boredom or ecstasy. It is this flow of life, to which the wayfarer must submit and surrender, which carries the psyche to new lands as surely as a leaf floating downstream. If you decide to walk, and keep walking, life will take you where you need to go within yourself. It will not always be pleasant, or fun, or enjoyable. But it will have its resolution in beauty, release and insight, so long as you are patient and committed to the path, to the progress of the inner journey. This resolution comes at a later stage of the pilgrimage, when the inner and outer journeys merge and all imaginary separations, such as those between soul and world, body and cosmos, self and other, begin to blur and dissolve.
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Sunset over Babylon. Fading green to burning gold. Cracked ground and an open mouth, both longing for droplets. Streets heavy with hate. Fields shackled to distant stomachs, hills lifted by wandering eyes. Walking under foot of the messengers, the soil temple dredged and racked, and we — flying. Suns set over Babylon, nights bring visions, and the body threatens to buckle. Onwards, on, the caravans, of faces clad in cloth, looking to the ground, all dust, horizons filtering out from the blue, hills on hills cascading, and the light flowing, ever lighter, reflected in the blackstone eyes, gleaming and glinting and grinding, waiting for another, the patient return to night.
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Any path will do. The only requirement is to walk. There is no wrong way. There is no destination but this step, this breath, this posture. The body is the alchemical crucible where all the broken ways of being that we carry within us are smelted and reformed anew. That reformation and reconstruction is the activity of the creative imagination, shining and bright and tireless. It is the ability of the dreaming mind to suffuse any phenomena with beauty, meaning, divinity — the touch of love that transforms the entire dream of life into a heavenly vision — a paradise, a revelation, a playground, a temple. The possibilities for new ways of being, seeing, and relating are boundless, unlimited, infinite.
How, then, is one to walk this Earth which is at once so beautiful, green and vibrant, so very very alive, and is also the site of untold suffering and senseless violence? Torn between heaven and hell, how are we to live?
There is no answer to this question that one can arrive at and hold and rest with, safe in the knowledge that it will never change. No answer that can be given in words. But there is a silent answer, more powerful and resonant, more transformative to the human being than any statement or declaration of language could ever communicate. It is the dance of the imagination in communion with the world — not the abstract world of thoughts and ideas but this world: of water, breath, metal, fire. Of soil and sound and light. Stars, horses, gates, rivers, stones, hills, paddocks and people and valleys. It is a coming so close to these things that they are no longer seen as things at all, but something wholly other: inconceivable, majestic, mystical. It is a wordless answer of endless movement, endless dissolution, endless recombination and constant evolution. It is a journey, a pilgrimage, and a coming home. It is the answer of the heart responding to the world by rushing up to it and embracing it, in allowing one’s entire being to align with life’s one underlying desire: to serve life, selflessly and unconditionally. In this way the loving imagination, infusing everything with mythic significance and divine beauty, is gateway to the eternal. So teach the Sufi mystics: hold fast to beauty (the timeless divine) and let the beautiful (the mortal and temporal forms of the world) come and go.
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Witness O, the escapadres and madres of the barefunk bindits, the scarefunk syndicate of the impending com-post-apocalypse — ice crystals searing needlenumb feet by first light in grassdrenched meadow; smoke blistering eyes as chants rise from flame to heaven; potatoes liberated from bins to dance again amongst oil and onions, charred and gleeful in the newfound blackness of bellies; soil under nails and golden lipstick morphing faces into geometric tribal funkometry — the mass and measure of a world laid bare by those who dare to cast their ships into the crashing waters of the unknown unknown; grit and gravel grinding and clawing at the soft pads of the underfeet; blazing hot long afternoons of heavy tread and hipache and sore contracted thirst; desperate timepass napping in forgotten graveyards and fields; hazy hours stirring pots and slicing vegetables by slanting orange evening light, counting down through voicings of gratitude to the first date, the first sumptuous morsel of divine abundance to pass the lips and ignite the tongue and send the bliss mechanisms whirring, grasping, singing all rapture at the sugary reception of earthly providence; irritabilities unravelled in (im)patient conversations; forests entered and lost; ancient climes echoing with chants of deepest time; stones vibrating in circles placed long ago by warpaint ancients; lakes glistening; winds howling; poems escaping on the wind; questions in notebooks and on the edges of lips; lips dry and cracked like the pine needles catching and charring and glowing brightest orange to warm the weary bodies of the brightsoul wanderers, the pilgrims past and new, future-makers, lost and found at once, children of words and light, timeless beings of the pathless path — the gnostic magicians of imaginative freedom; disciples of the body in all humility and reverence; irreverent and blasphemous in their raucous rejection of all divine truths perverted into empty symbols and dusted scriptures; followers of the lake-born guides — breath, abdomen, tension, vision — five senses wrapped in clouds of disbelief, clouds parting at the incision of loving attention to reveal the sky-like ground of mind, the void holding all, the free space, and the gleeful leap beyond-within and back to life: awake, awake, awake upon the Earth! Smile, touch and smell, and continue, continue, continue in light! Continue to create! Continue to show us the faces of beauty! O beaming one, walk as the great soul you are — noble and holy and wild! Walk and the world will join you, and the path will bow to your vision, and the soil will pledge itself to your journey on into boundless roaming freedom.
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“Eternity is in love with the productions of time”
— Blake
The world is like the visible song-and-dance of the invisible heart. Going into that invisible realm by listening to the heart, the world disappears and we are taken beyond, to the realm of the non-where, the invisible, outside all time and space yet permeating it and nourishing it, just as the silent invisible breath infuses the body with life and awareness. The mind cannot go here, and this is why a central thread of any path is chiding the mind to surrender and be still so that true peace can be tasted. But the heart dwells here, has never left and never will, and the soul is the guide, unfolding symbols and significances, omens and invitations, desires and longings that guide the being back to its primordial origins in the unfathomable beyond. Our dreams are the living tapestry of those messages from the depths.
“The mind does nothing but ask questions, search for meanings. The heart does not ask questions, does not search for meanings” — Rumi
The heart senses perfection and is at peace in a way that the mind cannot grasp, and the expression of this is joy. Even the suffering of the world is seen to be somehow necessary for the eventual realisation and freedom of living beings. The world is transparent; the light of the mystery shines through everything. And the only response on seeing that mystery is pure and unbounded joy. Cue unmitigated adoration (Whitman), divine madness, ecstatic revelry. Cue the Binfunkopalypse. Cue the deep green heart reaching root-like down into the thick wet soil, crawling with life, cold and great and ancient…
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Perhaps you saw us, wild-eyed and barefoot, rampaging through villages and tumbling down paths. Napping under bushes or splashing into rivers. Perhaps you heard us, singing and chanting, harmonising in the dead of night round a crackling fire. Perhaps you smelt us — woodsmoke, sweat and nettle juice. Perhaps you touched us with a gaze or smile or wave, a hug or embrace or kiss. Perhaps you walked with us, side by side in our thoughts and dreams. Perhaps we are walking still, together on this wayward path of love. But I know we will arrive home together, feet on the mystic ground, and see that we never left.
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“The other world is this world, rightly seen”
— Nisargadatta
Paradoxically, this inner movement into the beyond, into the unknown, is not a running away but a coming home. It is both a leaving and a return to the world. Again, this movement cannot be understood by the mind, only felt through the heart, through an aching love of everything that brings us into such poignant, unbearable contact and intimacy with it that we resolve to lay our entire being down at the foot of the mystery, forehead to soil, and say “I am yours. I need you. All of you. I am nothing without you. I love you, and now I see that you love me, and that my entire being is the product of your love”.
When the heart makes this declaration we see through the veil of independence, through the illusion that there is even the tiniest shred of our being that does not depend, fully and totally, on all other beings, alive and dead and beyond. We feel our total inter-dependence with all being(s), viscerally, and that is why we say “I need you”. What comes next is gratitude.
Every moment, sensation and experience can be received as a gift. Countless beings have conspired for countless aeons so that you might take a single breath and know the joy and peace and majesty of existence. Giving thanks, then, is one way to honour the ancestors, the dead, and the spirits of the past. And it becomes so clear that our role, too, can be to breathe life into the world, into countless unborn beings. We too are ancestors, and every moment of our love creates life.
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All turning, the mortal realm. Turning on, until the fire within consumes and burns through all limitation to reveal the open sky of limitless imagination. There are lives upon lives to live and enjoy, to give and serve and create. Step through the open gate of the heart and realise the deathless, the infinite, the shining indigenous dreamtime.
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A pilgrimage takes you where you need to go. We needed wildness, feral joy, the ecstasy of growth and blossom. The gnarled weirdness and buzzing heat of the ancient Earth, the icy rush of silent water running and weaving and sinking ever-deeper, never settling. We needed mud between our toes, blisters and splinters and bloody cuts. We needed wind in our faces, tugging our coats and curling up through every crevice in our clothing. We needed to become cold, and scared, and miniscule. We needed to argue and grow sick of each other, and sick of ourselves. We needed to become weak, pathetic, frustrated and enraged. The Ramadan schedule of fasting from water and food between first light and sunset ensured all of this; an ancient technology for submission of the ego and exposure of the unillumined psyche. Deprived of its usual hiding places (like food, anxious productivity and egoic posturing), the feeble little self is brought into the light of awareness where it can be confronted, questioned, and conversed with. Finally, after so many years of hiding, it can be addressed with respect and care and love, and restored to its rightful place in the community of the psyche: as a force for good, an expression of care, a necessary stage in the evolution of one’s being. Only then can the little self be calmed, and know itself to be safe, at home in the vastness. Only then will the mind be soothed, and a sigh of release issued from the core of one’s being. Anxieties and worries dissolve on the wind, and fearlessness is tasted. It is this unclenching and opening that allows us to see and love the world anew.
On many days, splayed out in fields or perched on hilltops, we simply needed long hours of rest, calm, and spaciousness. We didn’t have the energy or motivation for anything else. Coming from a culture of incessant and never-ending doing, we were long overdue an application the holy balm of non-doing. Sleep, dream, daydream… soft and gentle wandering in the free and aimless. To live as children once more, in the realm where awe and wonder might surface at the most ordinary of phenomena: a bug on one’s leg, a rope dangling from a beam, a pinecone nestled amongst dead and sodden leaves.
On observation we found that this world is not dead, as we had been led to believe through years of indoctrination into the cult of materialism, where everything is proclaimed to be dead, random, cold and meaningless matter. “Just atoms”, seething and frothing with mindless activity. Listening and watching for long enough for that narrative to fall away, everything was seen to be undeniably, unvanquishably and vibrantly alive: enchanted, mystical and magical. Rivers singing. Trees whispering. The ground humming and holding, and the Sun in constant adoration of all that walks the Earth. We are each invited to enter into this cosmic conversation, where all things are conversing with all things, sharing tales, songs, and poems on the path of love.
In growing weak, we grew strong. Or perhaps, rather, we glimpsed a source of strength within that never wavers, one that doesn’t depend on the energy or vibrancy of mind and body. The human spirit, shining and noble and dignified no matter the situation — a silent witness to all the dramas and frustrations of daily life. Fasting gave us clearer and more direct access to this spirit, this inexhaustible resource. Whenever we tried to reach for support through food or water, but couldn’t, we were forced to draw on something deeper, something immaterial and mystical. Vera calls this the Well of Ramadan: a collective pooling of inner strength that was added to every moment that someone overcomes an old habit pattern of reaching for food or water in order not to face a inner difficulty or hardship. In the month of Ramadan over a billion people are constantly filling up this well, this spiritual gift to humanity. I interpret the metaphor of the well as a source of inner nourishment from which billions drink together every day, a source from which flows the devotion to love and spirit that will carry them through the hardships of fasting.
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Fold, unfold, embrace, allow. Yellow breath by blue night dissolving. Flooded with light. Fire and circles, and voices passing through. Guests in the house of worlds. Souls adrift on the mystic wind. Padding soft, and the path receiving. The feet know well their forest home.
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The journey into wildness is a journey back to origins. To the indigenous ways, so distant and forgotten that we are as children clutching in the dark for some elder hand to guide us. It is necessary to enter that darkness, if the ancient messages are to find and direct us. We must journey to its centre: the heart of darkness, the portal in the depths of the blackest night that leads us onto somewhere we forgot, long ago, when the world came to meet us in all of her shining chaos and confusion. As a child without guidance, we were not ready for this meeting, and we were hurt and scarred by the violence of humanity, and so we retreated, broken, confused and fearful, pushing the world away in all her light and darkness and withdrawing into ourselves.
Here, in the sleepless nights of youth and adolescence, we spun a web of stories that drowned out the cries of the countless beings around us, allowing us to conform and operate within colossal machine-like patterns of exploitation and domination. The mind silenced the heart, for her song was too painful to bear. The soul grew cold and barren and the world grew dead and still — nothing more than a bank of resources to be tapped and transformed into yet more mindless and meaningless survival.
The journey back to wildness, then, began with listening, and the re-discovery of the song of the heart. That song takes us through the lament of the broken and devastated world, the wailing of the one inside us who longs only for flourishing of all, yet looks out and sees horror after senseless horror. But it also delivers us softly sung odes to the majesty, mystery and beauty of this cosmos, to the sweet delicious simplicity of life as an embodied human being.
Wildness is freedom. To self-create and self-determine, to evolve however one’s soul and imagination are called, without adherence to any tried-and-tested patterns. There has never been a being like you before. Fly away, O bird! Fly and know delight! Taste fruit, make what you will, and relish in the life of the world!
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Movement leads to stillness. Pilgrims, dancers, and whirling dervishes — anyone who pays close attention to the subtleties of movement and its continual stream of openings and closings, appearances and disappearances, eventually comes to rest in a silent stillness, unperturbed despite an entire cosmos in relentless motion. A great expanse, alive and pregnant and waiting. Timeless, bright, empty — utterly clear and weightless — holding all movement, from rushing rivers to gentle breathing, to flowing limbs and crashing storms. All is held in a boundless womb of emptiness; an impossible love from which flows all possibility.
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This pilgrimage of possibility has no end, has never begun, is perfectly reflected in this vision of life on Earth. Walk and taste freedom, O friend! You are holy, and you are wild.
With Love,
Laughing Goose
