INTRODUCTION TO “LETTERS FROM THE ROAD”
Elias Amidon and Elizabeth Rabia Roberts

On Pilgrimage

Four years ago the two of us sold our house and left on an open-ended “pilgrimage,” expanding on the work we had been doing to include more direct service and engagement with the social and environmental issues affecting the world today. Our pilgrimage follows from a decade of university teaching and thirty years of peace and justice work in the United States and abroad.

As we began these travels we wrote emails to our grown children, keeping in touch and describing our experiences. Soon we were copying these letters to friends, and the list grew. Our friends asked if they could forward the letters on to their friends. This is how “LETTERS FROM THE ROAD” was born, and by March, 2003, there were over 750 names on the list.

Over the past four years our pilgrimage has brought us to work with a great variety of people around the world – for example, the indigenous peoples of northern Burma, Buddhist monks and environmental activists in Thailand, the President of Indonesia, Sufi orders in Morocco, Syria, and Europe, the board of directors of the global Nonviolent Peaceforce, the Iraq Peace Team, and many others. For most of each year we live outside of the U.S., staying in ashrams, church basements, indigenous villages, small hotels and pensions, and friends’ homes when in the U.S. or Europe. We support our work with grants from small foundations and individual donors who believe in what we are trying to do.

We choose where to go as we feel a “good fit” between our inner call and the invitations we receive from different parts of the world. Also, we tend to go back to an area over several years, building up relations and listening for what wants to happen. We show up sometimes as teachers, sometimes as activists, sometimes as witnesses to the realities of conflict and injustice, and always as friends. Our presence tends to catalyze events in positive and often unexpected ways.

We have called this on-going journey a “pilgrimage” because for us it is intimately part of our own spiritual awakening as well as being a path of service. Maybe these two are the same. Being on the road without a home releases us from innumerable attachments and habits, and makes us accessible to people in ways we could never have imagined. We have learned how we are a part of a vast fellowship working for positive change in the world.

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©2003 Elias Amidon & Rabia Elizabeth Roberts, The Boulder Institute