That afternoon as I tramped around the lake I was thinking of Thoreau\u2019s essay \u201cWalking,\u201d which I often reread as it reminds me how to pray, and how to imagine \u201cthe holy land,\u201d which for Thoreau is wherever you are. It\u2019s not a place but a kind of presence, a prayerful attention\u2014which I\u2019m not very good at, which is why I keep walking. And walking. I\u2019m searching for the gospel of screeching ravens and snowy pine boughs and curling wood smoke.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe travel, initially, to lose ourselves,\u201d writes Pico Iyer, \u201cand we travel, next, to find ourselves.\u201d Iyer has written a dozen travel books about exotic far-flung cultures\u2014from the Philippines to Katman\u00addu. I loved these books, but the one I reread is a critique of all the others: The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, in which Iyer explores the necessity of the inner journey. The thesis of his book is suggested in a line he borrows from Thoreau: \u201cIt matters not where or how far you travel\u2014the farther commonly the worse\u2014but how much alive you are.\u201d<\/p>\n
When we travel we are always looking out at the physical world with the eye and in at the self, at the I. This delicate, difficult braid of self and world, of both seeing and seeking, is for me at the heart of the writing process. But it\u2019s also at the heart of prayer. <\/p>\n