Following the Light
What an east-to-west pilgrimage can teach us about the inner journey.
Every Waypoints pilgrimage runs the same direction: east to west, Pacific to Tasman, first light to twilight. People sometimes ask whether that is a practical decision. It isn’t. It is the whole idea.
Travelling with the day
When you move west across a country, you travel with the sun rather than against it. The day does not happen to you in fragments between appointments. It unfolds alongside you, and you are inside it the whole way.
Aotearoa is unusually good for this. Both islands are narrow enough to cross in a day or two, and the change as you go is dramatic: dry east coast light, interior forest, the mountains, then the softer, wetter air of the west. The land itself provides the shape of the journey.
We follow the light across the land, becoming attentive to the Light within and among us.
The shape of an inner journey
There is an old instinct that says the spiritual life moves forward, that we are meant to be arriving somewhere, improving, accumulating. An east-to-west crossing suggests something gentler. You begin in first light. You pass through country you did not choose. You end in the evening, at the edge of the water, with nothing to show for it but the day itself.
That turns out to be a fair description of most of the important journeys we make.
