Teasing Out the Whole Story: Pilgrimage Walkabout

Nature Notes - January 2025

The whole story of a place cannot be determined by the experience of one person, or even many. Every organism that experiences the place has a story that, together, are parts of a whole, and spiritual experience must be included in that story as well.

- by James Inabinet
Images courtesy of pexels.com

JM Rosario

In the last essay, I spoke of stories of the land, of getting a place’s “whole story.” To have this whole story, individual stories must include spiritual reality. Physical reality readily produces stories. We see, feel, hear and then knit together narratives about what physically happens in a place. It might be as simple as a leaf’s journey from tree to ground to worm. 

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Though true and absolutely believable, this kind of story rarely includes anything of spiritual reality. Spiritual reality is subtle, hard to get at, but necessary to get at the whole story.
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E. Toss

 
Spiritual reality’s energies dance invisibly all around us. To access it requires relationship with the Other, the deeper the better, even to the point of becoming-one-with. Through sympathy, a soul shapeshifts to interact with, to interpenetrate the soul of another as that soul “looks through” physical appearance to experience the depths of the Other’s soul, as a Thou. The Other could be another human, another being, river or sky, or the place itself.
 

J. Riesel

 
I have found ready access to spiritual energies when I engage in a “walkabout-pilgrimage.” This is a spiritual exercise inspired by Aboriginal origin stories that told of a dreaming walkabout that instigated creation, a pilgrimage undertaken by the ancestors who walked about on the “formless” landscape, checking the place out. Wherever they sat or got burned or drank copious water or slithered or fell became landforms, creeks and hills, valleys and watering holes. But that’s not the end of the story; it’s just the beginning–it’s an origin story! By retracing the ancestor’s paths, contemporary Aborigines engage in their own “dreaming” walkabouts to “re-create” what had been created in the beginning. Knowledge of these dreaming pathways have been passed down for generations. In this way, the spiritual existence of the Aboriginal home as a sacred place is ensured.
 

K. Grabowska

 
In the walkabout-pilgrimage I’m proposing, we take inspiration from the Aborigine by engaging in a “dreaming” way spiritually connecting us to our place. Without the benefit of mythic access to what our ancestors did as they walked about, we have to dig deep spiritually. The focus is on what we feel as we follow the spiritual energies of our home. It’s like a walking meditation, or a walking prayer. Wandering about in this way, following our dreaming, we engage our home place as of old even as spiritual energies–mana–swirls around us, enkindling tree, stone, cane, or the place itself–if we’re paying attention. Thus engaged, the energy becomes palpable; feeling becomes intense. So inspired, we might create songlines that engender a song of place, dreaming trails that engender a dream of place, mythlines that engender a power story of place. This is the rest of the story.
 

R. Clair

 
To put it another way, creating such a story codifies Beauty in its restoration. Beauty is the creative acts and order of nature as she creates out of herself manifold manifestations of living Beauty. It withers when unrecognized; humans can restore it through recognition, keeping it accessible to all Beings. On such a walkabout-pilgrimage, we restore Beauty and render the place from random collection of constituent parts [i.e., dirt, trees, bushes, animals, people, city streets, and houses] into home in a spiritual sense, a place of deep belonging and connection. This is the rest of the story.

Shvets

 
In their walkabouts and attention to Beauty, Aborigines and Navajos have been, and still are, active participants in the “coming into being” of the land – and that’s a story worth telling. Both are a kind of dreaming, the kind that can evoke stories that go far beyond any mere narrative of what happens superficially. Dreaming walkabouts evoke myth-telling, not myths as falsehoods but myths as true stories of the “ideas and emotions Earth,” of the relationship between humans and the land. We embody these ideas and emotions by mindfully being in the place, listening, attending-to, as we sing and story the place into “spiritual” being. Myths are how a land is storied, how as place becomes home. Places are already replete with stories that just need to be experienced, teased out by going there–and I am a part of it! This is the rest of the story.

S. Leonardi

 
Finally, it’s important to let our experience on the walkabout be the basis of art, of story-telling, of tuning up the connection between mind, heart, and spirit. The contribution each person may make – whatever it is: art, poetry, story, performance, song, chant, a single word or phrase – contributes to the whole as fragments of the place’s collective story, and it takes a lot of them for it to become coherent. Each story fragment is like a slice of a hologram. Holograms are made from myriad slices of a holographic image; each slice contains the whole, is the whole, but in a vague way. The whole image appears in each slice, but not clearly. As more and more slices are assembled, the image begins to clear.

With stories, each individual’s contribution is like a holographic slice. It contains the whole story, but vaguely. The more individual stories told, seen, heard, the clearer the whole becomes, until eventually it feels complete and speaks to home – our home, our story – mine and that of my neighbors, the birds and trees, earthworms and river. This spiritually connects us all to the land, to the place, to each other, to home, together. This is the rest of the story.
 

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