{"quotes":[{"text":"You lift your head, you’re on your way, but really just to be walking, to be out of doors. That’s it, that’s all, and you’re there. Outdoors is our element: the exact sensation of living there.","author":"Frédéric Gros","tags":["adventure","art","awe","beauty","discovery","earth","explore","freedom","fresh-air","get-outside","hikes","hiking","joy","movement","nature","our-planet","outdoors","outdoors-church","outside","peace","philosophy","pilgrim","pilgrimage","poetry","serenity","visual-poetry","walking","walks","wonder"],"id":1460,"author_id":"Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric+Gros"},{"text":"Queenie Hennessy - 'I am here to die.'Sister Mary Inconnue - 'Pardon me but you are here to live until you die. There is a significant difference.","author":"Rachel Joyce","tags":["death","dying","hospice","love","pilgrimage"],"id":8837,"author_id":"Rachel+Joyce"},{"text":"All this, I suspect, has been little more than the operation known as the pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, but I have had a comfortable feeling that, however ordinary my enterprises may have been, they had at any rate the advantage of containing, for me, an element of sustained unfamiliarity. I am one of those persons who begin life by exclaiming they've 'never seen anything like this before' and die in the hope that they may say the same of heaven.","author":"Siegfried Sassoon","tags":["life","pilgrimage","wonder"],"id":20480,"author_id":"Siegfried+Sassoon"},{"text":"How could we have discovered great lands, if we dare not travel?","author":"Lailah Gifty Akita","tags":["achieve","adventure","ambition","beautiful-places","country","cultural-heritage","curiosity","dare","daring","daring-greatly","daring-life","destiny","determined-spirit","discover","educational-philosophy","imagination","inspiration","journey","life","motivation","nations","path","philosophy-of-life","pilgrimage","places","positive-thinking","purpose","self-motivation","self-seeking","spiritual-wisdom","time-travel","tourism","travel","travel-writing","wonder","worlds"],"id":27002,"author_id":"Lailah+Gifty+Akita"},{"text":"This time, there’s no question of freeing yourself from artifice to taste simple joys. Instead there is the promise of meeting a freedom head-on as an outer limit of the self and of the human, an internal overflowing of a rebellious Nature that goes beyond you. Walking can provoke these excesses: surfeits of fatigue that make the mind wander, abundances of beauty that turn the soul over, excesses of drunkenness on the peaks, the high passes (where the body explodes). Walking ends by awakening this rebellious, archaic part of us: our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired. Because walking puts us on the vertical axis of life: swept along by the torrent that rushes just beneath us. What I mean is that by walking you are not going to meet yourself. By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologists’ consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.","author":"Frédéric Gros","tags":["adventure","art","awe","beauty","discovery","earth","explore","freedom","fresh-air","get-outside","hikes","hiking","joy","movement","nature","our-planet","outdoors","outdoors-church","outside","peace","philosophy","pilgrim","pilgrimage","poetry","serenity","visual-poetry","walking","walks","wonder"],"id":28968,"author_id":"Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric+Gros"},{"text":"None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.","author":"Frédéric Gros","tags":["adventure","art","awe","beauty","discovery","earth","explore","freedom","fresh-air","get-outside","hikes","hiking","joy","movement","nature","our-planet","outdoors","outdoors-church","outside","peace","philosophy","pilgrim","pilgrimage","poetry","serenity","visual-poetry","walking","walks","wander","wanderer","wonder"],"id":50407,"author_id":"Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric+Gros"},{"text":"Thoreau: ‘The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.’ That is why walking leads to a total loss of interest in what is called – laughably no doubt – the ‘news’, one of whose main features is that it becomes old as soon as it is uttered. Once caught in the rhythm, Thoreau says, you are on the treadmill: you want to know what comes next. The real challenge, though, is not to know what has changed, but to get closer to what remains eternally new. So you should replace reading the morning papers with a walk. News items replace one another, become mixed up together, are repeated and forgotten. But the truth is that as soon as you start walking, all that noise, all those rumours, fade out. What’s new? Nothing: the calm eternity of things, endlessly renewed.","author":"Frédéric Gros","tags":["adventure","art","awe","beauty","discovery","earth","explore","freedom","fresh-air","get-outside","hikes","hiking","joy","movement","nature","our-planet","outdoors","outdoors-church","outside","peace","philosophy","pilgrim","pilgrimage","poetry","serenity","visual-poetry","walking","walks","wander","wanderer","wonder"],"id":64563,"author_id":"Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric+Gros"},{"text":"Is this what I am doing now?Watching the currents, passagesof life around me.I am not looking for books to explainmore with their words, butlistening to poets with their imagery, symbols, listening to my own feelings as Icontinue my pilgrimage in this life,pausing, watching, catching glimpsesof deeper down things.-Deeper Down Things.","author":"Robert Trabold","tags":["inspiration","life","pilgrimage","poetry"],"id":74581,"author_id":"Robert+Trabold"},{"text":"And he began, 'What chance or destinyhas brought you here before your final day?And who is he who leads your pilgrimage?'Up there in life beneath the quiet starsI lost my way,' I answered, 'in a valley,before I'd reached the fullness of my age.I turned my shoulders on it yesterday:this soul appeared as I was falling back,and by the road through Hell he leads me home.'Follow your star and you will never fail to find your glorious port,' he said to me.","author":"Dante Alighieri","tags":["hell","life","pilgrimage"],"id":106201,"author_id":"Dante+Alighieri"},{"text":"I like the idea that when I die, I will have a long sit-down chat withGod and get answers to all my questions. For example, those apple coresthat I threw out of car windows when I was a child—did any of them becometrees? Few boys or men had ever asked me out. I told myself that itwas because I was almost 6-feet tall. Was that true or was there somethinghumbling I needed to know?","author":"Kristine K. Stevens","tags":["god","journey","pilgrimage","travel","travel-writing","truth"],"id":110658,"author_id":"Kristine+K.+Stevens"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":51,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}