This Pilgrim’s Progress
How the journey to Samarkand opened my eyes to what I have been up to.
When Julia Hailes and I wrote our book Holidays That Don’t Cost the Earth back in 1992, we explored why and how people travel—and spotlighted the social and environmental ripples and impacts their journeys help create. What we didn’t touch on was the deeper story of pilgrimage, sacred and secular, which runs through human history like a golden thread of movement, meaning, and transformation.
A recent conversation with a longtime friend brought this home to me. They spoke of remaking their life, after a recent reverse, in terms of a pilgrimage. I realised I’ve been on a lifelong secular pilgrimage myself, though one that is now, once again, shifting in new directions. Our Silk Roads adventure felt like a critical part of that journey.
Seeking the center of the world
From the earliest times, humans have felt a pull to move beyond the known horizon—not just for food or safety, but out of curiosity, hope, and the quest for understanding. Across continents, people set out to encounter and, if possible, touch what they believed was holy:
In ancient Mesopotamia, worshippers climbed ziggurats—man-made mountains linking earth to the divine.
In India, the Vedic peoples spoke of tirthas—“fords” or crossings between the human and divine.
In Greece, pilgrims traveled to Delphi to seek Apollo’s oracle—something that we managed to do just as COVID-19 shut down Greece all about.
So, at its heart, pilgrimage involved movement toward the axis mundi—the “center of the world,” where heaven and earth seemed to touch. Next, with the rise of organized religion, these journeys became ritualized expressions of faith and redemption:
In Buddhism, pilgrims walked to the four sites of the Buddha’s life—Lumbini, Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and Kushinagar.
In Hinduism, pilgrimage became a way of life; India’s very geography was sacred, with rivers, mountains, and temples forming a living map of divinity.
In Christianity, from the fourth century onward, pilgrims journeyed to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela—for penance, devotion, or healing.
In Islam, the Hajj to Mecca became one of the Five Pillars—a ritual of equality and submission before God.
In Shinto Japan, the Kumano Kodo trails linked physical and spiritual landscapes, echoing a journey into nature and self.
In every case, the pilgrim was both traveler and transformer. The outer journey mirrored the inner ones.
Arteries of civilization
By the Middle Ages, pilgrimage routes had become the arteries—and the engines[1]—of civilization. Inns, monasteries, and markets sprang up along the routes and paths. Pilgrims carried not only prayers but also ideas, art, and trade. A badge from Canterbury or Compostela was both souvenir and a testament to spiritual endeavor. Even rulers undertook “political pilgrimages” to show piety or consolidate power.
Later, the Enlightenment and modernity redefined travel. The Grand Tour of the 18th century became a secular pilgrimage for the educated elite—an initiation into art, history, and culture. By the 19th and 20th centuries, with the rise of trains and steamships, pilgrimage blurred into tourism.
Yet the longing for transcendence never truly went away. The Romantics found it in nature—as a result, Wordsworth’s Lake District and Thoreau’s Walden Pond became modern shrines. And the pilgrim’s quest morphed into a search for authenticity, for meaning in landscapes, ruins, and “untouched” cultures.
Today, pilgrimage has returned—revived and reimagined. Millions still walk the Camino de Santiago, often with spiritual but not religious intent. Others take environmental pilgrimages—to sacred groves, glaciers, or ancestral lands—reflecting a new ecology of reverence.
Music fans make secular pilgrimages to Graceland, the Abbey Road studios (where I’m bound next week), or other sites steeped in pop-cultural legend. In like manner, we took part in a street art safari in London’s East End a few weeks back. And in our digital age, people undertake “virtual pilgrimages”—involving meditative walks, online retreats, and mindful communities.
Whether sacred or secular, all these journeys express the same deep yearning: to cross a threshold, to find meaning in movement, to be changed.
At heart, clearly, the pilgrim is a universal figure of transformation. Unlike the tourist, who circles the world to return home unchanged, pilgrims walk to be undone and remade. Their journeys—across mountains, deserts, or city streets—mirror the timeless passage from ignorance to wisdom, from fragmentation to wholeness, and from exile to homecoming.
The journey itself is home
The poet Bashō put it this way: “Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
My own evolving quest for answers—and, specifically, sustainability solutions—has been my wider home for five decades now. And it has powerfully shaped life, for good and ill, in the family home we have occupied for fifty years this year. Still, wisdom suggests that no pilgrimage continues forever.
The time comes to hand over—to family, to colleagues, to fellow travelers in the wider world of change. That is the task on which I am now embarked. At times it is a joyous process but, if truth be told, it can also be gut-wrenching. Sometimes the path is chosen, sometimes forced.
One part of it has involved reanimating my Countercurrent platform, that I first launched in 1983. The idea is that over time it will become my primary vehicle for my ongoing pilgrimage, involving learning journeys and an evolving array of writing, speaking and advisory projects.
As ever, there will be ups and there will be downs. But the relevant trials will be as nothing when set against the biblical benchmark established by the Prophet Job, whose alleged tomb we visited in Bukhara. The story of the Chashma-Ayub Mausoleum links to the theme of my second post in this series, touching on the plight of the Aral Sea and Amu Darya river.
According to tradition, and during a severe drought, the prophet Job (aka Ayub) arrived in the Bukhara area and, by striking the ground, produced water that saved the people. Some people also link the site to the idea of Ayub’s final resting place, though this seems unlikely.
Intriguingly, though, the site may have earlier roots in the world of water worship and sacred springs, later absorbed into the Islamic tradition. If so, I sense a deeper connection, linking back to a Mother Superior’s challenge to me in the 1950s, when I was seven and in Northern Ireland, that I was either a pagan or pantheist—and she didn’t know which was worse.
That moment, though she was oblivious of the fact, triggered my lifelong atheism. Still, I take existential comfort from my favourite lines of poetry, quoted in Tickling Sharks, which come from T.S. Eliot’s 1943 poem, Little Gidding:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
That, increasingly, is where I find myself—though, as Eliot implies, I have no intention of willingly ceasing from exploration. Or ceasing sharing, as best as I can, the sights (as with the splashing sparrows below) and the insights I stumble across along the way. Perhaps that is the essence of my ongoing role as a Chief Pollinator.
And so, with huge thanks to our guides and companions, this has been a highly personal account of a key stepping stone in my ongoing journey of inquiry, discovery and, hopefully, enlightenment.
John Elkington is Founder & Global Ambassador at Volans and Chairman & Chief Pollinator at Countercurrent. His personal website can be accessed here.
His latest book, Tickling Sharks, is available on Amazon and through good bookshops.
[1] As our guide Saïd put it.