To live is to dance with an unknown partner whose steps we can never fully predict... David Abram (The Invisible World) How do we overcome that detached attitude that is characteristic of our Western objectifying approach to reality and how do we "return to the world", how do we reanimate it and renew our ethical relationship with it? How do we open ourselves to synergy with humans and with other animals...
Category: Texts
A Manifesto of Revival: Politics and Poetics in the Anthropocene
Andreas Weber (1967) is a German biologist, philosopher, biosemiotician and journalist. As an independent scientist, he explores a new understanding of life as meaning, or “biopoetics” (“poetic ecology”). See more of Weber’s texts on the Pilgrim website. Hildegarda Kurt (1958) is a German cultural researcher, associate professor of social sculpture, founder and director of the Institute for Art, Culture and the Future in Berlin (2004). For many years, she has collaborated with a student…
Jiří Zemánek: Karel Hynek Mácha's Pilgrimage from Prague to Sněžka or How to Become Earthlings Again
“My love walked with me – over a high mountain, higher than the mountain I walked over…” Karel Hynek Mácha (Two Songs of Gypsies) Karel Hynek Mácha was a true poet-pilgrim who, during his short life, undertook a number of long walking expeditions across Bohemia and beyond its borders, to Venice. His literary work was particularly inspired by his travels to…
Charles Eisenstein: Not Doing
“At some point we will simply have to stop. Just stop, without any idea what to do. … When your old story is over or is about to end, don’t you feel like you tend to give up? … What once made sense no longer makes sense. You start to withdraw from this world. … Doing nothing is not some universal instruction; it is specific to the time,…
Jiří Zemánek: On the origin of Pilgrim, the meaning of pilgrimage and the Máchov pilgrimage
“We are not here to control the world. We are here to connect with the greater earthly community.” Thomas Berry In the mid-1990s, when I began to realize that we were in a time of great civilizational crisis and transformation—a time of searching for a new story—I asked myself how we could more deeply integrate our lives, our culture, and our spirituality…
Brian Thomas Swimme: How to Live in Space
Brian Thomas Swimme (born 1950) is a mathematical cosmologist, director of the Center for the Story of the Universe at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco, and currently a leading figure in the evolutionary epic cosmology, which views the evolution of the universe as one continuous story and explores how we humans fit into this grand story, what role we play in it. This new cosmology was born out of…
Jiří Zemánek: The Imagination of the Earth as a Body
This text was originally written for the anthology Živel ZEMĚ (Agentura Koniklec, Prague 2004, pp. 222-227); however, it was first published in the magazine Ateliér (21 / 24.10. 2002, p. 16) and subsequently published in a German translation under the title “Die Erde als Körper” in the German magazine Hagia Chora (5 Jahrgang / 15 / 2003, pp. 82-85). “Her heart beats in the highest heaven,…
Luděk Čertík: Know your feast
The year is 1985. Australian ecophilosopher Val Plumwood (1939–2008) sets out in her small canoe on a cruise down the Erre (East Alligator) River in Australia’s Kakadu National Park during the winter monsoon rains. Nothing bad seems to happen that day – after all, Plumwood is not on the river for the first time. However, during the cruise she is unexpectedly attacked by a crocodile…
Stephan Martin: Cataclysm – When Things Fall Apart
We bring you an excerpt from the book Living the Cosmic Life / Reflections on the Cosmos, Everyday Life, and Personal Experience by American astronomer Stephen Martin, published by the PILGRIM – Wandering University of Nature association in 2019 as its first publication in the On the Road series (translated by Jiří Zemánek). These are the chapters “Cataclysm: When Things Fall Apart” (pp. 40-45) and “Awakening to an Evolving Universe”…
Stephan Martin: The Universe is Change
We bring you an excerpt from the book Living the Cosmic Life / Reflections on the Cosmos, Everyday Life, and Personal Experience by American astronomer Stephan Martin, published by the PILGRIM – Wandering University of Nature association in 2019 as its first publication in the On the Road series (translated by Jiří Zemánek). These are the chapters “The Universe is Changing” and “We Are Cosmic Beings” (pp. 15-29). Stephan Martin is an astronomer, lecturer,…