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PEACE PILGRIM SIGHTED
By Kevin Stoda
About 28 years ago this autumn, I met the Peace Pilgrim. That day she was in the midst of a fast of silence for a few weeks, so I was not able to communicate with her well. However, her eyes were special and she certainly glowed with spiritual bliss.
One year later, she would pass a way, but her memory is still around.
The Peace Pilgrim was born in 1908, so this year is the 100th Anniversary of her birth. She was born in New Jersey and began a perpetual pilgrimage around the world in the 1950s, i.e. in the Dark Era of Potential Nuclear Winter, which the planet knew as the Cold War.
She was constantly on a journey of witness for peace and was known by U.N. circles in her day--even as her feet took her over 25,000 miles around the planet between 1953 and her death in 1981. (NOTE: After 25,000 she kept walking but stopped counting the miles.)
http://www.peacepilgrim.com/index2.htm
At the end of this decade of global turmoil, a film on the Peace Pilgrim’s journey and lifelong witness has become available on-line in both English and Spanish. It is entitled: PEACE PILGRIM—AN AMERICAN SAGE.
http://www.peacepilgrim.com/htmfiles/sagevideo.htm
The Peace Pilgrim’s journey was naturally also a spiritual journey in the 1950s—long before such a radical spiritual journeys were in vogue.
In turn, Peace she was an environmentalist and a poet, too. She walked America for decades vowing to "remain a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace, walking until given shelter and fasting until given food.”
ONE OF PEACE’S MESSAGES
Peace wrote a little booklet on Steps to Inner Peace that was published in many languages, including Russian and Chinese, over the past decades.
http://www.peacepilgrim.com/steps1.htm
These steps are summed up as the Four Preparations, Four Purifications, and Four Relinquishments:
1. Assume right attitude toward life
