05/05/2026
While on a walking pilgrimage The Way of St James - Santiago de Compostela one quote written on a stone stayed with me … ‘You are the light you seek ‘ 👣 👣…. On the final leg of Camino I experienced a sacred moment with a fellow traveller - striding passed each other in opposite directions we both simultaneously witnessed each other’s light - that encounter etched the gift received on the Camino xx deeply grateful
Every culture in history has sent its people on pilgrimages.
To Jerusalem. To Mecca. To the Ganges. To Delphi. To Santiago de Compostela. Thousands of miles on foot, through hardship and uncertainty, toward a place considered holy.
But the deepest teachers in every one of these traditions eventually said the same thing.
The sacred place you are walking toward is not at the end of the road. It is inside the one who is walking.
The outer journey was always a symbol of the inner one. The rough terrain, the physical exhaustion, the stripping away of comfort and distraction, these were not obstacles to the pilgrimage. They were the method. They created the conditions under which the inner journey could finally begin. When everything external falls away, when the noise stops and the familiar world is left behind, what remains is the self in its nakedness. And it is there, in that nakedness, that the encounter with the sacred becomes possible.
The real pilgrimage has no geographical destination.
It moves inward. Through the layers of persona and conditioning. Through the accumulated fears and the unexamined beliefs. Through the shadow and the silence and everything that was buried before it could be understood.
The road is the road to the soul.
And the soul, when finally reached, is not found as a distant sacred object. It is recognized. As the thing that was there all along, waiting beneath everything that had been placed over it.
———
Artist: Johan Egerkrans
