This is the Power of Cellular Memory.

The trees are turning, the golden threads are spinning and I am following the pilgrims call.

Fiona Vail Photography

I live in a small country town. A place where currently the leaves are turning, the night sky is widening and the morning sun spills like a warm reminder of good and Godly things. I feel very at home here in this small country town — almost as though I have lived here before — and yet since the conception, carrying and birth of my second son, I have been called to faraway lands.

It has felt like cellular memory. An ancestral calling. Something both finite and infinite that only my body knows. Something unseen and invisible, that has been urging for me to lay eyes upon landscapes I only know of through story and dream.

For the last five years, I have been experiencing an increasing longing to return to what is familial, to follow family lines, to walk the land my ancestors once walked in order to remember through body all that my mind has forgotten through time.

Then recently, as I arrived upon a waterhole with a dear friend who had guided me along a bush track I had never walked, she turned to me wide-eyed and asked…when did this calling for pilgrimage begin? As I began to answer, I looked around at where we were standing and to my absolute astonishment, I said…right here! I realised in that very moment, that we were standing at the exact waterhole I had been photographed at while pregnant with my second son, Omar. A place I had not returned to since then. A place that holds something ineffable in the air. A place of incredible beauty and darkness that five years earlier — while carrying a scorpion baby and a growing call for pilgrimage — I had entered along another track.

We stood, laughing and crying together, in recognition of the divinity in it all.

Fiona Vail Photography

For the last five years, every time I closed my eyes the word pilgrim appears. It’s shape, tone and sound has found rhythm on my tongue and grown new feeling in my hands. It’s formless calling now taking form as a pilgrimage I will walk in ode of my 40th year — a pilgrimage I depart for next week.

This pilgrimage is not what I had originally planned for. Previously, I intended to walk and listen to poetry with my philosophy teacher I have known and worked with for years. Someone who was familiar.

However my heart had other plans.

More recently, something within has been calling me not to do what I often do. Something has been beckoning me to step out of my grounded and intentional ways and to be spontaneous and fluid. Something inside has been calling me to work with the unknown by acting on intuitive call. Something has been calling me to walk alongside a woman, not be led by man.

In preparation for this pilgrimage, I am being called to release control and in many ways am willing to surrender because history has shown me…

that when I let go of the reigns

that when I step out of what I believe to be the way

that when I get humble enough to listen and be led

something large and miraculous always appears

something I could not have planned for

something only accessible through dream —

something that I can only ever understand by having followed the invisible threads of charm into the vast and untamed landscape of my heart.

So as the trees of my small town turn and I unfurl at the door of my heart, into this new season of life I willingly go. Deep into the winter that on the other side of the world will be dancing in the last of the light. A place that I will very soon walk wild landscape, pray by holy wells, gather with women in ceremony and be guided by a wise crone — whose name I have only just learnt — through the hills of my ancestors, listening for whoever and whatever it is that has been calling my name.

My bags are packed, I’ve called in family to help care for our sons and I am putting into action what has long lived only as word. Word, that has now spun like golden thread around time, around action and around the cellular memory that has called me to spend 3 weeks walking, 3 weeks dreaming, 3 weeks searching for deeper meaning in the word, home.

This is your invitation to journey with me, my friend.

Will you join?

Love,

Alanna