For millennia, a genuine cri du coeur, cry of the heart — a longing for a taste of mystery, a touch of the sacred — the yearning to embark upon a meaningful journey has been answered by pilgrimage, a transformative journey to a sacred center. It calls for a journey to a holy site associated with gods, saints, or heroes, or to a natural setting imbued with spiritual power...always, it is a journey of risk and renewal. For a journey without challenge has no meaning; one without purpose has no soul.
The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, a stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by biologists and antiquarians chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit — not a fossil earth but a living earth.