Pilgrimage to Holy Mountain 7

SEVEN

My “Pilgrimage Director”

The people in the Holy Mountain office in Thessaloniki told me that it was easier to get a visa in the winter since foreign “pilgrims” usually only want to visit during the pleasant summer vacation months, but I really don’t want to spend two months in Thessaloniki waiting for a visa to visit Holy Mountain so I think I will just keep traveling until late October and then return to Thessaloniki to get the visa.

I am on the seacoast on the east side of the Holy Mountain peninsula and I know that if I keep peddling north, I will reach the Dardanelles strait and Istanbul. I have been through Istanbul before by bus and I didn’t care very much for the crowded, dirty old city—but I think it might be more interesting than Thessaloniki.

But when I try to peddle past the highway marked “to Thessaloniki” my inner ‘Pilgrimage Director’ demands that I turn left and go back to that city. It’s a nuisance and I don’t want to go, but I have learned to heed that “inner voice” which must be partly intuition, partly hunch, partly imagination and partly I don’t know what.

Sometimes when I have not listened, I have regretted it.

Maybe this “Pilgrimage Director” develops slowly as a person pilgrims and maybe it will never be a part of your consciousness—because people are very different, but I try never to argue with it or refuse to be guided by it—it has literally preserved my life in this body more than once—so I don’t argue, I simply turn left and head west.

Tomasito, 2009


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