Living

Column: a Pilgrim Before Lincoln

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Pagan Perspectives

It strikes me that I ought not to be making this walk upright. Pilgrims on their journey to see the Shroud of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City are known for crawling on their hands and knees as they approach the basilica where the Shroud is kept; my father told me that when he visited, he saw a line of prostrated devotees starting miles from the church. There are no such pilgrims here, but it seems that there could be. The stones upon which I walk are perhaps among the most sanctified in the secular religion of American civic life; certainly no single mile of soil in the United States has been more consciously constructed as a pilgrim’s road. I had not intended to make any sort of pilgrimage today.

Living

Column: A Pilgrim at Stonehenge

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Pagan Perspectives

My suitcase is an antique, a big red leather monster. It doesn’t do anything that modern luggage is supposed to do. Suitcases today have wheels and collapsible handles, so that there’s no difference between carrying one change of pants or twenty. Mine doesn’t have that, and I kind of like it that way. Suitcases are meant to be picked up and carried, hefted with one’s own arms and back.

Paganism

Column: Within the Lines

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I have been thinking about land and sacredness, about the idea that we can choose a spot on a survey map and declare it sacred ground. My thoughts are grounded in the Gaea Retreat, the Pagan nature center in Kansas where I most often make my pilgrimages, but thinking about that particular place leads me to think about places like it more generally. What does it mean to call a place “sacred?” What does that mean for our relationship to it? And how do our religious, spiritual, and magickal conceptions of a place sit alongside the legal and social borders of the location?