Let me take you on a trip
"The unique aspect of this pilgrimage was that I didn’t go alone."
Dear Readers and Friends,
I love the ways that travel lights up our brains and liberates our spirits, and I write about that frequently here. So today I’m really excited to introduce you to a dear friend named Abby who recently went on a pilgrimage to Italy. When asked her what this trip meant to her, she said:
“The reality is, many people do not have access to travel. This pilgrimage taught me the potential travel offers for mutual transformation. Sharing it with friends who are homebound allowed me to be more grateful for the gift of my own journey.”
Abby and I met in 2001 at a yoga studio. She was pregnant with her second son and we connected over tea and stories of our Catholic grandmothers. She grew up traveling with hippie parents in a van around Mexico and further south. About her unusual childhood, she says, “Wandering is my earliest formation of home.”
We’ve known each other for more than two decades now and our conversations about travel, art, family, and spiritual practices have always taught me things. We are roughly the same age, but she started a family earlier than I did. In my late 20s and 30s, Abby was that strong female guidepost that I think many of us wish for, literally taking me in and housing me when I was heartbroken, helping me regain strength after my first pregnancy, and even teaching me how to hand-press tortillas.
So when she told me she had traveled to Italy with the intention of sharing her trip with housebound friends at home, I thought of my grandmother.
At the end of my grandma Helen’s life, when she was widowed and housebound, she would watch travel shows on TV. I can remember her telling me, with her typical enthusiasm and gratitude, “Today I went to Italy!” after watching Rick Steves on PBS.
Going through some boxes recently, I found trinkets wrapped in wads of tissue paper, each one labeled in my grandmother’s handwriting. They are souvenirs from her travels, collected just for me. A true explorer, she visited 48 of the 50 United States before she died. She also adamantly believed everyone should have a collection. On a plain brown rock, a scrap of paper affixed with Scotch tape says: Washington. On a piece of driftwood: Oregon. Holding that box in my lap, I knew it was a collection of her prayers.
The diversity of ways people have discovered or invented to pray gives me hope. By pray, I mean how we can pay attention with reverence for the details and the context. Sometimes it is simple, and delightful; at times it can be extraordinary.
I think you’ll find Abby’s reflections about the transformative powers of travel, compassionate service, and pilgrimage to be really interesting! But first, to set the stage, I want to tell you a little more about my Catholic roots, a holy dose of food poisoning, and cross-cultural epiphanies.
Thanks for reading!
My grandma was my first yoga teacher
As a child, I struggled to fall asleep. My grandma Becker loved to play games, so she made my naptime into a race. She’d challenge me fall asleep first.
I don’t think I ever actually slept, but instead I just watched her.
Naps were her superpower. She’d lay down on her back wherever we were — on the floor, on my bed, on the metal cot near the potbelly stove on her farmhouse porch. Marvelously, mysteriously, she’d sit up ten minutes later ready for another game of cards. She practiced like this every day, I’m sure, whether I was there or not.
My grandparents lived on Murnan Road in a house my grandpa built, on land he’d bought from Grandma’s parents. Extended family lived up and down Murnan Road. I grew up about two and a half hours away, an only child without any other relations nearby. Roadtrips ended at Murnan Road.
Grandma liked to take me to visit her gravesite. Saint Joseph Cemetery was a reasonable walk from the farmhouse, just one left turn onto Alexandria Pike. I can still picture the lush summer grass, the bouquets of plastic red roses, and metal crosses propped against gravestones. My grandma’s plot was next to my uncle John’s, her oldest son who died before I was born. Grandma led the way like a tour guide, happy to talk about where she’d be some day. She spoke with pride and a sense of belonging, and her confidence and contentment left a solid impression on my young self.
My grandma died just before my 27th birthday. She was 87. Always a careful planner, she left her grandchildren small gifts, and I spent mine on a pair of earrings. Made of turquoise, my birthstone, they were imported from Nepal. At the time I had not given the Hindu Kingdom in South Asia too much thought but the earrings felt special and I wanted something solid to wear in her memory.
When I found myself leaving to spend a month living in Nepal, I wore the earrings as a way of carrying her along on my adventure.
Kathmandu is an ancient city nestled in hills at the confluence of two rivers, including the Bagmati — a branch of India’s holy Ganges River. The modern Kathmandu Valley hums with a mix of Hinduism and Buddhism that is specific to the region and that boggles the categorization of scholars. It is here that yoga practices emerged and blossomed, and further south in the Terai plains of modern-day Nepal that the The Lord Buddha was born. Yoga is a complex matrix of Hindu traditions and beliefs, which Lord Buddha was steeped in when he became enlightened. Hindu and Buddhist philosophies and lineages evolved together before traveling across oceans to the western world. I had come to Nepal in the midst of my own yoga certification and training and would be spending my time learning some of these modern-ancient techniques from a teacher named Raj.
On my first evening in Kathmandu, I walked to the Boudhanath Stupa. This is one of the biggest and most well-known Buddhist monuments in the world, and also the town square of the Tibetan community in Kathmandu.
The air in the cobblestone lanes of the surrounding neighborhood stirred with a rich incense that seeped through the heavy cloth hung in the doorways. My senses awakened as if I’d entered a church perfumed by frankincense and myrrh. There was a low murmur of human voices and the shuffle of feet on stone. Warmth enveloped me. I felt as though I was crossing a threshold.
I turned a corner to see the Boudhanath Stupa lit like a blazing bonfire.
A stupa is a dome that rests on top of flat, open platforms. Like St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, the Boudhanath Stupa makes a person feel small. On this particular night, thousands of individual butter lamps - small metal dishes with a simple twisted cotton wick on fire in a pool of oil - lined the stupa’s terraces like strings of twinkling Christmas lights. The light was so incredibly bright against the dark night sky.
The monumental pilgrimage site for Buddhists through the ages looked to me like the biggest Christmas tree in the world.
Bodies wrapped in layers of flowing fabric swept me into their current and I soon felt wrapped, too, in a softness that I’ll call a loving, universal embrace. I moved in step, pressed among the human mass of hunched elders in rhythm with tall young teens in robes, all of us circumambulating in something like a holy trance. All of these strangers, I noticed, were clicking strings of beads between their fingertips.
Holy is a word I associate with the Holy Ghost and my Catholic roots. My parents left the church slowly, in their own ways, but my grandma’s Catholicism was both the essence of my cultural upbringing and also a foreign culture to me.
Grandma taught me about faith by example. She also tried to teach me by memorization. She and my grandpa moved off their farm on Murnan Road when I was ten, so it was during my early childhood years that I memorized prayers at their kitchen table, the Tupperware salt and pepper shakers sitting on a laminated placemat in the middle.
Praying the Rosary engages body and mind. The first act is to center oneself, pressing the middle finger and thumb of the right hand together. Years later, I learned that the yogis call this finger gesture shuni mudra.
First making a swift pass from forehead to belly button, the hand then swipes from left shoulder to right. I copied my Grandma to draw the sign of the cross over my small frame before I could begin reciting The Apostles Creed. Then, taking the first bead into my fingers, Our Father, who art in Heaven…
I used a string of pink plastic Rosary beads that grandma kept in a small white box. The Jesus on the pink cross was painted silver and hung like a pendant from the middle. With each prayer, another bead, moving clockwise rhythmically around the chain, my grandma's worn fingers clicking through beads on her own rosary next to me. Three beads count out three Hail Mary full of grace….
These words, over and over, circled as my voice blended with my grandmother’s while the rosaries dangled from our hands, brushing our thighs. Cotton curtains hung in the window and we sat looking out over the expansive sloping hill leading up to the gravel edge of Murnan Road.
At the Boudhanath Stupa, the physical embodiment of prayer felt both exotic and familiar. After a simple dinner in a monk’s canteen later that night, I was urgently, mindlessly, and uncontrollably ill. In a room with nothing but a a drain in the middle of the floor and a hand-held shower head, I let go. I had the feeling I was dying. Somehow, I was ok with it.
Gratefully, the food poisoning did not kill me. I made it through the month and traveled home from Nepal carrying a string of beads I bought it at a Tibetan shop near the Boudhanath Stupa. Much like a rosary, the mala is used for counting prayers, or mantras. I chose one made of sandalwood and turquoise. The wooden beads are a soft, golden brown with a smell that reminds me of incense. The blue-green stones match the earrings I bought after my grandmother died.
Without expectation or explanation, I stumbled into mystery and belonging on the other side of the earth, a world away from Murnan Road. It was a curious feeling. Some would call it a remembering. For my grandma Becker’s sake, I’m sorry I am not a religious person as she might have imagined I could be. But I am grateful for the starter-kit of tools she gave me, as well as a sense of adventure.
My grandmother’s religion embraced the extraordinary and often beautiful things that people do to make meaning in the world. She taught me to celebrate life, explore with an open heart, and take any occasion for a holiday. She also taught me the value of restful release, which the yogis call Svasana, or corpse pose, and helped me to understand that death is the destination we are all walking toward.
These seeds she planted continue to grow and the tools are infinitely useful. Most of all, though, I appreciate her gentle invitation to join her on a path of spirit.
Thanks for wandering along with me,
Travel as Compassionate Service: An Interview with Abby Hanson
Q: How has getting older affected your sense of yourself, or your identity?
Abby: Getting older is getting closer to my ideal. I love it!
I am 51 but I most associate myself with an old woman, the sort of Catholic grandmother who wears lace on her head at church, prays the rosary, and stocks her pantry full of baked goods. In my mind I have grandchildren and neighbors constantly stopping by for tea and gab. I am sitting on my porch swing cackling.
Q: What inspired you to leave your family and go to Italy alone? How would you describe the experience?
Abby: I went to Italy because I received a scholarship from my theology department to study accompaniment in pilgrimage.
I have long been a traveler. I was raised by hippie parents in a van. Wandering is my earliest formation of home. We mostly drove around Southern Mexico and Central America. My parents were not religious by nature, but we visited a lot of Catholic churches.
As a convert to Catholicism in my forties, I have oriented most of my recent travel around the idea of pilgrimage. My definition of pilgrimage is a religious journey to sacred space that involves devotion. My journey to Assisi last fall was a pilgrimage to the sacred places Saint Francis lived and preached.
The unique aspect of this pilgrimage was that I didn’t go alone. Physically I went solo, but my intention for the trip was to share the pilgrimage with my friends in Los Angeles who are homebound.
Most of the homebound community I work with are disabled seniors who do not have access to physical travel. Their spirit is willing but their bodies are not.
During the pilgrimage I wanted to share the experience of travel with my homebound community. Some of my homebound friends are limited by fears that arose during the pandemic and they no longer feel safe traveling. Some of my homebound friends desire the spiritual transformation of travel but are in hospice and approaching end-of-life.
Before I went on pilgrimage I discussed the itinerary with my friends, who I considered fellow travelers. Everyone received my daily schedule. Some of them expressed special interest in prayers at certain places, others asked for mementos to be procured at various locations, and some asked me to carry photos and prayer cards to be blessed by Pope Francis.
I sent photos, audio postcards, prayers, and written reflections home to my friends in Los Angeles every day of the twelve day pilgrimage. We also had a group zoom session half way through the pilgrimage so that I could share travel stories. Upon my return, we gathered together one-on-one and in small groups to look at a slideshow of the pilgrimage, and I gave out travel souvenirs and Italian snack items.
Q: What did you learn about yourself? About life? About death?
Abby: The idea of sharing travel is something new for me. In the past I have focused on my own personal journey rather than inviting friends from home to participate in the experience.
Often traveling can feel selfish and a bit privileged. I found that sharing travel with my homebound community allowed me a different mind space, one that was more integrated with my life at home.
I started with an invitation. My homebound friends were surprised and didn’t fully understand the potential of virtual travel. It’s like a “staycation” I told them, but where one person (me) goes out and gathers experiential material to share.
I hadn’t even imagined how much fun it would be to curate the daily travel packages to send back home! Every day I was thinking about sharing stories and photos and prayers with my friends at home. This made me realize that in the past travel had been about something else, about escape and getting away -- a search for disconnection rather than connection.
This pilgrimage taught me the potential travel offers for mutual transformation. The reality is, many people do not have access to travel. Sharing my experience allowed me to be more grateful for the gift of my own journey.
I appreciated my own able body and am grateful to still be able to get on a plane and to feel safe and to be able to hike around cobblestone streets! I realized this is a blessing I shouldn’t take for granted.
Q: What did you bring home with you?
Abby: I brought home a whole lot of rosaries and bottles of olive oil.
I also have learned something that I want to share: It is entirely possible, especially with all the technology at our disposal today, and a bit of good will, to share the transformative experience of travel with those who are no longer able or willing to travel themselves.
I want to remind myself when I am homebound that I can ask to accompany my loved ones on trips. I hope I can teach other people how travel can be more inclusive.
Huge thanks to Abby for sharing her story, and her travels!
If you enjoyed this interview, check out an interview with Amie Heeter about her time in India, making space for deep journeys, figuring out how to be free, and coming home.
Wonderful. A warm-hearted full circle story of grandmotherly lineages and practices.