In seeking pilgrimage or sacred sites, notes Lori Erickson, author of Every Step Is Home: A Spiritual Geography from Appalachia to Alaska, we often look abroad. Erickson herself has published several works of spiritual travel writing that journey to far places, but in this book, published last year, she turns her attention to the landscape of the United States. Her journey is first interrupted, and then shaped, by the outbreak of Covid in the spring of 2020. Traveling by car and teardrop trailer allows her to continue her project while avoiding congested areas and modes of transportation.
From New Mexico to Nebraska, South Dakota to Alaska, Erickson visits sites that have spiritual meaning, whether through association with a specific religious tradition or collective or local practice. Erickson is Episcopalian herself, but feels a restlessness in her spiritual life that makes her want to “get out and move, to explore, to feel the spirit moving through me in unexpected ways.” She takes this literally, and regards the movement of the body and the movement of the spirit as intimately related: “all those millennia of walking have shaped our souls too … Walking, in other words, allows our consciousness to expand and deepen.” Most of the sites she visits are best explored by walking, and for her evoke pilgrimage.
She makes the interesting choice to organize the book thematically rather than geographically: Chapters are titled “Dirt,” “Air,” “Mounds,” “Stone,” “Trees,” “Water,” “Fire,” etc. Each is structured around a particular location—El Santuario de Chimayo in New Mexico, Redwood National Park in California, the Ancient Ohio Trail—but the general headings allow her to range more widely, invoking, for example, the Maori, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Taoism, St. Cuthbert of Ireland, shamanism, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Finnish mythology.
While many sites are holy to a particular tradition or culture, whether an indigenous American people or a branch of Christianity, some warrant inclusion, she feels, for the way they are able to evoke a spiritual response. In the chapter on “Air,” she visits Nebraska to experience the great annual sandhill crane migration, and uses this as a leaping-off point to explore the link between air and spirit in the Judeo-Christian tradition, James Nestor’s book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, and the breathing techniques of the Dutch practitioner Wim Hof.
Every Step is Home is a slender book, a mere 200 pages, and more diversion than deep exploration. But it’s an enjoyable read and a good reminder that inspiration can be found at home, that the potential for a sacred geography exists here as much as in far flung places that have established pilgrimage routes, or are deeply identified with particular religious traditions.
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.