Making Room for Serendipity
From the archives: A pilgrimage to NYC, April 2004
I wrote this piece twenty years ago. I unearthed it last week when I was writing the post about walking as pilgrimage. It moved me quite a bit. I had forgotten what it felt like to explore New York City for the first time just two and a half years after September 11th, 2001.
In the spring of 2004, I had been working on the Gaian Tarot for about 3 years and had been blogging for about six months in the "Gaian Tarot Artist's Journal." I went to the Readers Studio in New York for the first time to display my work-in-progress and meet up with the tarot community. I gave myself a few days to explore the city before the conference started. (I went on to attend almost every Readers Studio for the next 15 years. The last time I went was in 2019, to celebrate the publication of the Herbcrafter's Tarot.)
I hope you enjoy reading this piece from my archives as much as I did. You'll recognize some of the themes I visited in last week's post. You may also notice that the phrase and teaching "make room for serendipity" found its way into the Gaian Tarot Seven of Air.
From the archives, April 2004 …
A Pilgrimage to New York City:
Making Room for Serendipity
“A pilgrimage is a transformative journey to a sacred center . . . It is a journey of risk and renewal . . . . There is something sacred waiting to be discovered in every journey.”
— Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage
As I prepared for my first visit to New York City in the spring of 2004, I pondered Phil Cousineau’s words. What then, is sacred to me in this context? I wondered. As I wrote in my journal, it came to me that I hold these things as sacred:
The female face of the Divine
Nature
Art, Music, Books
Myth & Symbol (most especially the tarot)
Spiritual community and friendships
So I set my intention to be open and alert to discovering the sacred on this journey. As I leafed through The Art of Pilgrimage on the plane, I came across a story Cousineau tells about Joseph Campbell. He was listening to a woman tell him about her detailed itinerary of a tour of sacred sites in Greece. He told her, “Madam, I sincerely hope that all does not go as planned for you!” When asked why he replied, “Unless you leave room for serendipity, how can the divine enter in? The beginning of the adventure to find yourself is to lose your way.”
I wrote in my journal: