The Hermit and the Pilgrim

A wandering year - and a new publishing project

I go through phases. Don’t we all? Is life’s journey anything else but a series of phases, or stages? Looking back from the vantage point of my sixth decade, it seems that these phases are often quite distinct, and that we are not really in control of when they begin and end. Often we don’t notice them until later. At that point, it may become clear what they were for, and where they were leading us.

I am currently going through a phase of quite intense silence and withdrawal. This has happened to me before and I’m sure it will happen again. The last time it happened with power was during and after I wrote my book Savage Gods, which catalogued my battle, and disillusionment, with words. After that, I swore to myself that I would write nothing new for a year and a day, and I stuck to that promise. I thought I might never write again. But it turned out that something was composting. When the seeds sprouted in the dark night soil, they grew into the Abbey of Misrule and, later, Against The Machine. Then other flowers grew, from that same rich loam: they became the Christian essays and journeys I have catalogued on here, and then my forthcoming book, The Book of Wild Saints, which will appear next year.

After all that, the rich soil was drained of its nutrients. And so here I am, composting again.

But I am not going to battle with words this time, or with myself. I have learned my lesson. What I learned was that when the silence descends on you, it happens for a reason. When you feel the need to be quiet - when, in fact, it feels quite clearly like a spiritual compulsion - then you need to follow the feeling. It did not come from you. You have used up too much; probably said too much. You have exhausted the soil. You need to listen. You need to grow some green manure, then dig it in. There is a season for everything; for words, for silence. For growth, for stillness. For death, and then for rebirth.

Death and rebirth for me, this last eight months or so, has been more than metaphorical. I got badly ill last autumn, after years of warning signs. In essence, all of this work wore me out. I burned my candle at both ends for too many years. I am still recovering from the consequent nervous exhaustion, with all its accompanying physical maladies. I am a good deal better than I was, but I still can’t take anything for granted. I am learning to do a lot of things differently: eat differently, drink differently, work differently. To slow down, to pay more attention. To remember that I have a body. To remember that everything is in God’s hands, and not mine. To pray more. To be quiet when needed. I intend, and expect, all these changes to be permanent. It will be slow, but most good things are. It’s past time.

Slowing down mean saying less, and for a while I have had nothing much to say. I know you have all noticed this, and if you’re still around - well, thanks for being here. As I wrote last month, a writer can’t be on output all the time. I feel, right now, that it is a spiritual compulsion, as well as a physical necessity, for me to continue being quiet for a while, as I wrote back in March. I won’t say more than that, but the signs have been there for me, recently. I don’t know how long this will continue for. But I am back, again, in a hermit time.

I have been a hermit before; I know how to do it. In a way, it comes naturally to me. After a dozen years out in the Irish west, hidden down a lane away from most things, perhaps I don’t know how to be anything else. But recently, a question has been teasing me: can a hermit also be a pilgrim?

That word - pilgrim - has been coming at me on and off since I became ill. For most of this year I have been in no physical condition to undertake any actual pilgrimages, and I’m still not, really. But I feel that, as well as shutting up for a while, I am also being asked to go out seeking. Seeking what? I don’t quite know. But I suppose a pilgrimage is like this. It tends to have a destination - Canterbury, for example, or Jerusalem - but what happens on the journey, rather than the ultimate arrival, will be what really matters.

I looked into the etymology of the word last week, and it intrigued me:

pilgrim(n.)

c. 1200, pilegrim, “a person traveling to a holy place (as a penance or to discharge some vow or religious obligation, or seeking some miracle or spiritual benefit),” also “a traveler” generally, “a wayfarer,” from Old French pelerin, peregrin “pilgrim, crusader; foreigner, stranger” (11c., Modern French pèlerin), from Late Latin pelegrinus, a dissimilation of Latin peregrinus “foreigner, stranger, foreign resident” (source of Italian pellegrino, Spanish peregrino, German Pilger), from peregre (adv.) “from abroad,” from per- “beyond” + agri, locative case of ager “country, land” (from PIE root *agro- “field”).

That last part grabbed me especially: ‘beyond the country’, it says, or ‘beyond my country.’ Pilgrim means ‘foreigner’, or ‘stranger.’ You must go beyond the fields you know, if you are to find what you need to find. God has something to say to you out there, perhaps. A still, small voice whispers in the reeds and the hedges. But you need to go walking to hear it. You need to venture beyond all that is familiar, within you and around you.

A pilgrimage can be an inner as well as an outer journey, and I feel like I am, whether I like it or not, now embarking on both. And so, this last month, I decided to make this official, at least in my own eyes. I always need to do things like this: make public declarations so that things seem real, and I can’t quietly back off from them later. When I finished Savage Gods I decided not to write for a year and a day. This time around, I have declared the twelve months from this July to the next to be my Pilgrim Year.

What does this mean? For starters, it means that when I can I am going to get out on some actual pilgrim trails. Ireland is full of them, and I hope to walk some. Perhaps I will manage some further afield as well. If and when I am ready - if and when I feel I am being given permission - I may write about these journeys here. At the same time, my inner pilgrimage - the journey that all Christians embark on at baptism, and which continues until death - will continue as well. Who knows quite where either of these will take me, or what I will discover? I hope to write about it here when I am able.

Something else will be happening too - something that helped me realise that a phase of pilgrimage was being opened up for me. I have been asked to lead and teach on two public pilgrimages in 2027. I didn’t seek out either of these - they just came to me, and I said yes. One of them will be a paid trip - nine days in Ireland, in which I will be leading Christian travellers around holy wells, ruined abbeys, islands of saints and other such places. Another will be a pilgrimage to Iona, on which I’ll be talking about Christianity and the natural world. There will be more on both of these adventures here when I have it.

This is just one of many little nudges I have had that a period of walking, rather than writing, is in order for a while. What that means for what will happen here, I don’t yet know. For now, all my writing on the Abbey will remain free, and I will be grateful for any support or subscriptions you feel like offering - though I’ll quite understand if you don’t. Unfortunately, this sort of journey has no real timetable, and offers no exact promises. I suppose you just put one foot in front of the other, and see where you are taken.

Though I am not writing much at present, though, I have not given up on words. Not this time. This leads me to something else I am going to be talking about here soon. I’ve dropped a few hints about it recently, but I’m going to tell you a bit more now, because it has a bearing on this year of departures I am setting out on.

Words beyond the Machine

I have been thinking for a long time about how to write in a way that does not simply feed the Machine. I think that some of my current compulsion towards silence comes from my deep ambivalence about writing on the Internet, and about the unreal ‘culture’ it has fostered.

There’s a shallowness to the world we are living in at the moment. How are we to even navigate a world in which our machines are beginning to talk to us? In which it is so hard to live outside the purview of the Algorithm, which changes everything and seems to be out of our control? Being alive in 2026 is like living halfway through the pages of a twentieth century Sci Fi novel. Nothing much makes sense at the moment, and there is a strange paralysis around, as if all we can do is watch the plot unfold around us - and then have to deal with the consequences.

Perhaps some of this feeling is to do with my own present state, but I don’t think all of it is. Quite a number of you have written to me about this recently, and I take this as a sign. As everything goes online, my urge to go in the other direction just gets stronger. Not only do I need to go out walking, in the world and within, but when I do find words along the way, I want to write them down in a way that feels real, not pixellated and sold. I feel this strongly, and perhaps you do too. So I am going to do something about it.

While I’m staying here on Substack, at least for now, I want something else too. I want paper and physical writing. The freedom that comes from having no editor, no ‘market’ and no plan. During my burnout recovery, I have been scribbling poems in a blue leather notebook and remembering the freedom I had when I was a young, unknown writer with no publisher but plenty of dreams. There’s a freedom in that that is easy to lose, and if a writer loses it, they’re in trouble.

And so, I have a plan.

This autumn, my wife and I will be launching our own little publishing house. It will be a home for projects of mine which have less commercial appeal than my ‘big’ books. The books we make will be beautiful physical objects, put together by people we know. It will be a family operation, running from a cabin in our garden. There will be no AI involved, and we won’t be selling our books on Amazon. Everything will be personal and small. I’ll be signing every book and posting them out myself from the local post office. Perhaps we’ll end up producing paper newsletters too, or maybe we will publish selected brilliant works by other writers as well. We’ll see where it takes us. For now, we are working on a modest way of bringing writing back into the real world. A counter-Machine, small, local family operation, free to move anywhere it likes, free to follow the words where they lead. This is the vision, and you’ll be hearing more about it here in a few months if you stick around.

This has been a rambling post - appropriate, I suppose, given the subject matter. God willing, the rambling will become real sometime soon, just as my words will become real again if our little publishing venture works out. If you would like to help support any of this, you can do so below. If you just want to see what flowers in the rejuvenated soil when spring comes - well, stick around. You’ll hear about it when I am given permission to speak again.

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