I've discovered that I'm on a pilgrimage. I didn't intend to do this—it just kind of happened. Coincidentally, my final for the semester was on comparing my semester abroad to a pilgrimage—so I recognize the signs.

In my paper, I talked about pilgrimage as a rite of passage consisting of a leave-taking, a period of liminality, and a return. One takes off from all that has become familiar and safe to face mental and physical trials which act as a catalyst in our transformation from one state of being to the next. These rites of passage occur at threshold times in our lives: birth, between adolescence and adulthood, marriage, in becoming a parent, in leaving youth behind, and before death. 

A pilgrimage is also a rite of passage and during the pilgrimage you experience all three stages. But what state of being are you leaving behind—and what will you become? Perhaps it only marks a certain stepping stone—afterward everything in your life is delineated as "before" this event—or "after." Perhaps no further meaning is necessary. Perhaps this is because the journey itself makes its own meaning. To journey outward is also to journey inward. You go out into the wilderness alone, naked, and you enter into yourself and discover what you are really made of.

This is certainly true of each journey I have been on; however, in this case, south India has also been a pilgrimage in the usual sense as well. Beginning in Chennai and traveling down the coast—to Mahabalipuram, Chettinand, Ramashwarm and too many places with unpronounceable names, which I can't just now recall—I've visited temple after temple and along the way seen uncountable pilgrims on my same route. Indians from all over—from north and south and east and west—have flocked here to pray in temple after temple. To make offerings, give thanks, and placate the gods. Maybe to find a husband, a wife, wealth, or happiness—maybe to find themselves. I haven't seen may Westerners on this path, I can't say why, and there's always a great curiosity about what in the world I could be doing here. "Why?" I don't have answers. I ask myself the same, every day.

I wonder, though, if I can ever come home. There's a type of bird (swallows maybe?) that can never touch the earth. They must perch high up because if they landed on the ground they would never be able to take off again. I feel like that sometimes. Like I can never rest—though sometimes I am tired—but always, always this drive to keep on, to see what has never been seen before. Like Tennyson's Ulysses:

 Vest the dim sea: I am become a name;
 For always roaming with a hungry heart
 Much have I seen and known; cities of men
 And manners, climates, councils, governments,
 Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
 And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
 Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
 I am part of all that I have met;
 Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
 Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
 For ever and for ever when I move.
 How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
 To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
 As tho' to breath were life. Life piled on life
 Were all to little, and of one to me
 Little remains: but every hour is saved
 From that eternal silence, something more,
 A bringer of new things; and vile it were
 For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
 And this gray spirit yearning in desire
 To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
 Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.