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In her element
Travel writer Lori Erickson’s new book finds the spirit all around her outdoors
Celebrated travel writer and Iowa native Lori Erickson has crossed the globe for years, writing about spiritually significant places. But when preparing to write a book about holy sites right here in the United States, the COVID pandemic hit.
Erickson was then faced with an existential crisis: How do you write a travel book in the middle of a pandemic? How do you worship when you can’t go inside?
The answer, she found, was simple: She went outside and found the sacred around her.
Accompanied by her photographer husband and their trusty camper, Erickson visited “a lot of out of the way places,” and found herself “being outdoors almost all the time.”
The result is her latest book, “Every Step is Home: A Spiritual Geography from Appalachia to Alaska.”
Since it was not possible to worship inside thanks to the pandemic, Erickson focused on sites that were often experiential in some way. For example: sleeping under the redwoods on her 60th birthday, or being in a remote hot spring inside a cave.
Visiting such sacred sites required a different level of commitment, Erickson explained. “You have to walk to get there. There’s effort involved. You’re soaking in hot water. You’re walking under the trees. You’re going down into a cave.”
“The places are more vivid and I think they have the capacity to touch us more deeply because of it.”
The book includes also reflections on the power of different elements, such as water, stone, fire and more.
One of the first places Erickson visited was the holy site of Chimayo in New Mexico. Often referred to as the Lourdes of North America, Chimayo is famous for the healing properties said to be held in its soil.
“I’m a farmer’s daughter from Iowa,” Erickson said. “I have always loved the idea of dirt, of soil, being holy.”
“There really is nothing more elemental, nothing more humble, than dirt. And so I thought it was a wonderful sort of teaching about how the spirit comes through everything — can come through everything — including this most humble of elements.”
“Chimayo is a wonderful example of the ways in which Indigenous traditions often get blended with later traditions, in this case Christianity. On the surface you might think that they’re contradictory,” Erickson explained. But in a place like Chimayo, “they really blend beautifully and amplify each other.”
“I also like the fact that it is a healing shrine. Many, many holy sites around the world in many different faith traditions are there because people go for healing. So I wanted to make sure that there was a place like that in this book.”
Erickson hopes her book will “give people another piece of the puzzle for thinking about ways the spirit can speak to them.”
“I think we tend to put the sacred in boxes and say — this is the Christian box, this is the Jewish box, this is the spiritual but not religious box, this is the new age box, etc. And I think we forget how connected everything is. And that the spirit flows through landscape, it flows through buildings, it flows people, it flows through books.”
“I would argue that the spiritual is threaded through virtually everything.”
In addition to being a spiritual and travel guide, “Every Step is Home” also reassures readers that they don’t have to travel a long distance to find holy places. The book begins, for example, with Effigy Mounds, a “beautiful and important place” located right here in Iowa.
“I really do think the United States is an incredibly beautiful country. And a place with rich, rich, cultural history.”
“We have these remarkable treasures and I wanted to sort of take people by the elbow and say: “Look! Look at this! You can see this! You don’t have to have a passport to see these places.”
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