James E. Mills - Pilgrimage Pathways for the United States

Copyright 2021 by James E. Mills. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by

North Atlantic Books
Berkeley, California
Illustrations by Dr. Tyra Olstad
Cover photo Piotr Krzeslak/Shutterstock.com
Cover design by John Barnett
Book design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Printed in the United States of America

Pilgrimage Pathways for the United States: Creating Pilgrimage Routes to Enrich Lives, Enhance Community, and Restore Ecosystems is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mills, James E., 1956- author.
Title: Pilgrimage pathways for the United States : creating pilgrimage
routes to enrich lives, enhance community, and restore ecosystems /
James E. Mills ; illustrations by Tyra Olstad.
Description: Berkeley : North Atlantic Books, [2021] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020039481 (print) | LCCN 2020039482 (ebook) | ISBN
9781623175498 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781623175504 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: EnvironmentalismUnited States. | SpiritualityUnited
States. | Pilgrims and pilgrimagesUnited States. | TrailsUnited
States. | HumanitarianismUnited States. | CommunitiesUnited States.
Classification: LCC GE197 .M557 2021 (print) | LCC GE197 (ebook) | DDC
203/.50973dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039481

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039482

This book includes recycled material and material from well-managed forests. North Atlantic Books is committed to the protection of our environment. We print on recycled paper whenever possible and partner with printers who strive to use environmentally responsible practices.

For my parents, and all those who have walked lifes pathways and gone on before us

Deep thanks to my colleague Dr. Tyra Olstad for the graceful illustrations. She astounds me with her artistic and literary talents on a regular basis. I am fortunate to have her artwork included in this volume.

Daniel Boyd spent months helping me develop a better understanding of the ways pilgrimage routes might be configured here in upstate New York. He spent many hours in the field and developed a robust GIS program and methodology that could be used to help pilgrimage planners here and in places around the country.

Deb Bruce came to my rescue by her careful reading and editorial suggestions of the manuscript. Her keen sense of humor and kindness took some of the sting out of seeing my many mistakes and lapses. Any remaining errors are surely my own.

My thanks to Shayna Keyles and the rest of the staff at North Atlantic Books. It has been a great privilege and pleasure to work with such professional, passionate, and caring individuals.

None of this would have been possible without Susan Ryder, my beloved wife, who has always been at and on my side.

Many trails can converge at the same destination. Thus it has been for me. In both my personal and professional lives, I have journeyed down different routes to reach the vision of creating new pilgrimage pathways as articulated in this book.

One of these paths has been my life as an environmentalist. Much of my time on Planet Earth has been spent walking and exploring landscapes across the US and around the world. I completed several degrees in natural resources and geography. I have taught environmental studies and issues of sustainability to thousands of students over the last thirty years. I conducted research on a wide range of environmental topics from soils to scenic rivers. For many years I served as the director of an environmental science program and helped create a new major in environmental sustainability that now enrolls well over a hundred students annually.

These experiences and training leave me acutely aware of the many environmental challenges we face todayincluding climate change, loss of biodiversity, pollution, and rampant resource consumption. Solving such problems will not be easy. We need to better embrace the science, but I also know that to solve these problems we need to go beyond. We will have to change ourselves and our culture. The environmental crises we face will not begin to get better until our behaviors, values, institutions, and ultimately, human landscapes are transformed in significant ways.

Another pathway I have followed in my life is more about spirit and meaning. I was brought up in and still respect my Lutheran heritage. But encounters with friends and colleagues from around the world who are Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh helped me to understand that there are many faces and means to the divine. My PhD dissertation explored the notion of sacred place as it was perceived and conceived by pre-Columbian Indigenous People in the Upper Mississippi River Basin, and compared that to the notions of feng shui practitioners in South Korea and other parts of East Asia. I have taught a course on sacred space and spiritual landscapes for many years. I have been an active member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation for the last twenty years.

It is clear to me that interfaith understanding is absolutely critical in the US as our society becomes more diverse. It is also clear that something else is happening. More and more people today find that no organized religion or codified set of beliefs or rituals seems to speak to them anymore. Demographers and social scientists see a country in the not-too-distant future in which more than half of the residents claim no particular religious affiliation at all. This does not mean that Americans are no longer interested in affairs of the heart and spirit, however. What it does mean is that the US is increasingly a nation of seekers, hoping to find new ways to tend their souls. I share this sentiment as well.

Yet another avenue I continue to traverse is to better understand my own privilege in the highly unequal and unfair society that the United States has become. I am not wealthy, but I have never experienced the crushing poverty that millions of Americans deal with most of their lives. I have never had to suffer the cruel discrimination, prejudice, and violence suffered by so many Americans who are not white or Christian. Women and those who are not cisgender or heterosexual have had to navigate a hostile and often dangerous culture in ways that I can only imagine. My ongoing struggle and hope is to do what I can to make the US more like the beloved community Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. imagined.

What does all this have to do with pilgrimage? Like most Americans, pilgrimage had little meaning or significance for me growing up. I was unaware of any pilgrimages anywhere in the United States and did not know of anyone who had ever been on a pilgrimage. It was rarely, if ever, a topic of conversation. If anything, pilgrimage might have been something I read about in history books or travel magazines.

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