Hiking The Sacred: A Reflection by Noah Guthrie

(A stop on St. Cuthbert's Way, photo by Julie Guthrie)

    I am excited to share this guest post by Noah Guthrie. Noah is the mind behind The Green Phoenix, a website that "strives to use writing and online dialogue to cultivate a healthy and holistic relationship with the natural world." Without further ado, enjoy.

--Cami

Hiking The Sacred

    Some of my favorite hiking memories come from St. Cuthbert’s Way, a Scottish pilgrimage trail that my family went on in the spring of 2019. The trail goes from Melrose Abbey to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, and many believe that it traces the footsteps of St. Cuthbert, a 7th century hermit renowned for his miracles. My family took this journey mostly by foot (occasionally aided by taxi), and it lasted four days, starting at the Eildon Hills.

    My most vivid memories of the Eildons involve the gorse. These were huge bushes, some of them as tall or taller than I was, rolling up and down the slopes with their winged, butter-hued blossoms. Their flowers outshone their thorns. As beautiful as they were, though, I was the most charmed by their scent, which I struggled to identify. They reminded me a little of coconut or shea butter.

    As I hiked up those gorse-covered slopes, I felt my usual setting and routine recede behind me. Personally, I think that’s one of the main purposes of pilgrimage: dragging you out of the familiar. Freed from my typical distractions, I entered a more profound awareness of the sights and smells, the leaves and hooves that surrounded me.

(Flowering gorse, photo by Sophie Guthrie)

    At one point of our journey, we passed a herd of cows. There was no fence to divide the dirt path from the ring of grazing muzzles, but the cows continued with their business as we clumped by, resting on their haunches or prying at roots. They were apparently used to pilgrims.

    I noticed a bull seated in the middle of the group. Unhurried, he pressed his hooves into the grass, then raised up his weighty brown hide. His quadriceps coiled and mounded. Subtle, powerful, the shallow crescent of his horns rising, he was like a king standing up from his throne—but no human could bear this kind of girth. Seeing the bull stand was like watching a boulder heave itself aloft.

    I turned my head to continue watching him as I passed, though he was just standing still, now. I don’t know if I would have even noticed the creature if this path hadn’t been so new to me, or if I’d been driving by in a car.

    Aside from the gorse and the bull, my family and I also came across herons, goats, and ponies, and as we walked through purple sweeps of heather at the Northumbrian Nature Reserve, quail shot out of the underbrush. Whenever the quail flew out, it was so sudden, it looked as though our toes had tripped a catapult, sending the speckled birds vaulting away in long, low arcs. A more unpleasant surprise befell us on the second day of the pilgrimage, when a light hailstorm whipped out of nowhere to spit its teeth at us. But even that let me engage more fully with the natural setting. It may have been a bit annoying for some in our group, but in getting to know the natural area, we had to engage with that whole range of sensations.

    One of the most profound sensations from that pilgrimage, though, happened as we hiked up the green, tussocky hills of Grubbit Law. As we crested the hilltops, we could see sheep in the distance, looking like cottony bushes while they grazed. Low cobblestone walls snaked around them, not setting bounds on the land so much as suggesting them, ringing around the bends in the hills.

    Across every hillside, a tumultuous wind blazed out. It gushed into us, cascading through sinew and marrow, and rushed out again. Oddly, though the wind wrestled against me, it made me feel stronger, broader—like a ripple carried and amplified by the current. A greater Spirit was filling and enlarging me.

    The gale of Grubbit Law gave me an effective image for “sacred geography,” a pillar of many pilgrimage traditions. The idea of sacred geography assumes that the world does not consist of two isolated spheres—the natural and the sacred—but rather a tapestry in which natural and sacred interweave. So, by interacting with a certain “sacred” space, one can (according to this viewpoint) experience God’s presence.

    In the case of St. Cuthbert’s Way, this is meant to be a path where a God-filled person walked, so when one walks on that same soil, they hope to experience something of the divine, an overlap between earth and heaven. At Grubbit Law, I imagined that divine presence in the wind—scouring the land, stirring every leafy and cottony hide, filling my own body to overflowing—a wind that, though distinct from the land, filled and enlivened it.

(Mountaintop, photo by Sophie Guthrie)

    This experience of sacred geography is another reason I’m grateful for that pilgrimage. Throughout the entire journey, the novel setting and the demanding hike was pulling me outside of myself, urging me to fully engage with the land. The otherness of the gorse, the bull, the hail, the endless hills, and that blazing wind confronted me at every step—each of them a stranger to me, demanding my attention. Though many aspects of St. Cuthbert’s Way were internal (thoughts, prayers, and the like), a lot of its value also stemmed from pulling me out of myself and into this natural setting. Even in the simple act of hiking, pressing my feet into the soil for all those hours, I was pressing my energy, my being, into the surrounding world—all the way from Melrose to the Holy Island.

    So, on the fourth day of the pilgrimage, we arrived at the trail’s final stretch, going from the English coast to Lindisfarne. As it turns out, we didn’t need a boat, because Lindisfarne is only an island when the tide is in. While it was out, we walked across the floor of the North Sea. To keep the brown, slushy sea-mud from swallowing our shoes, we went barefoot. Most of it was solid, but in some wet spots, someone would take a bad step and sink almost to their hip in slime.

    It was a meaningful experience, nonetheless. We walked over the long, bronze, slick expanse, bare feet slapping in the puddles, the air wet and cool beneath flat white clouds. We finished our pilgrimage on the other side, and soon after, the sea rose up behind us—as the Red Sea must have millennia ago—to wipe away our tracks.

(Coast of the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, photo by Julie Guthrie)