Many, many years ago, soon after my children had both left home, I was completely at a loss as to what to do with my life. We had been living in New Zealand and even though I had raised my kids to be independent as young adults, when they both returned to Australia I felt the need to be at least within coo-ee of the homeland.

The trouble was – I had no idea where to be.

So I bought a car. I drove the east coast. I slept in the back of the station wagon, spent my days walking the beaches, reading, fishing and taking my occasional catch down to the local restaurant, where they’d cook it up for my dinner. I was utterly lost, though living a delightful, easygoing life.

Then I got down to my last fifty bucks. Fifty dollars between me and proverbial starvation. I sat on the wide green headland at Hastings Point, the light bright blue above and the deep ocean blue below, staring at the yellow note. And decided I would have a yoga lesson, a private session with my old teacher in Byron Bay. I found her number. I rang her from the phone box outside the shop (it was the 90s). I booked my lesson for the next morning, 6am.

I woke in the darkness, snuggled down in my comfortable bed, safe and warm in the back of my station wagon parked high on the headland, and drove south to Byron Bay. I was early, so I drove on to Broken Head. As I stood on the dunes looking out at eastern horizon, the morning crisp and clean, I marvelled that in all the years I’d been driving to and through Byron Bay I had never previously stopped at Broken Head.

I ran down the golden dune towards the water, the sand cold on my bare feet. And I walked along the water’s edge as the rising sun lit the morning gold. The waves, small and gentle, white and frilly, lapped at my feet. Shoosh. Shoosh. They broke in tiny tumbles over my feet, coming and going, coming and going.

I was lost. My spirit overwhelmed with my lack of direction and purpose. Bathed in the beauty of the earth and her gifts, deeply connected to our natural world, I was without bearings in the realm of human endeavour, or even community and connection.

As the golden sun popped above the horizon I suddenly turned my heart to the light and with all the passion and fullness of my entire being I raised my eyes to the light and asked the world a billowing bellowing question – ‘what’s it for?’

‘What’s it for?’

At that moment I looked down at the wet sand as a small wave tipped her lacy frill onto my feet and receded to deeper waters.

And there, on the damp and spotted golden shore, just near my toes, lay a small green heart.

I stared. I bent slowly to pick it up. I held the polished green heart, the size of my thumb nail, between my fingers. I held it up to the light. I stared in wonder at the precious gift – the answer to my question.

What’s it for?

For love.

This whole human journey is for love.

It is for love.

I have my first male testimonial about my book, My Pilgrim’s Heart: A woman’s journey through marriage and other foreign lands, and it had me laughing out loud.

‘Insightful as the Dalai Lama on a good day,’ said Paul, a toy maker from Bellingen.

I’m not sure what followers of the Holy One might think, but nonetheless, it’s nice to know a man appreciated My Pilgrim’s Heart.

After all, women can’t put it down!

Paul’s comment is especially touching – and haha funny – when you consider he is the father of my children.

Of all the people on this good Earth who might have had legitimate cause to find it confronting or infuriating, it would have been Paul. As it is, he loved it. He read it three times, cover to cover.

Because, of course, it’s not just my story about my experiences of marriage and relationship – it’s just about everybody’s! And that is the secret of its success.

(Okay, so some of us are enlightened enough to have moved beyond the themes of obligation and compromise and their relationship to sex, money and power – blessings and love upon the rest of us still sorting ourselves out.)

I love that Paul has read it and I applaud a man with maturity enough to know it’s not personal . . . yet can recognise it is an offering, a gift of insight into the cost of marriage to a woman’s spirit.

Imagine that! I, as a woman, can say what I like without tiptoeing around a man’s sensibilities – and a man can receive my truth. He may or may not agree with me – that’s not the point.

The point is: he allowed the truth of a woman.

He received the truth of a woman.

And that is a hallelujah moment for humanity.

For human beings, truth is a shadow. It is the underside of the leaves playing in the light. It is the coals that warm the fire and burn the flesh. It is the path that humours no choice. It is benign and terrible and when it can no longer be contained, it is the earthquake, the tsunami, the hurricane, the bush fire.

Truth, my dears, is elemental.

Honesty, some of us like to say, is the best policy. It is a shared value, as it suits us. Usually it depends upon what there is to lose. We can dance with honesty till morning denounces night and darkness returns to claim the mantle, round and round, but we know, instinctively, that truth is the point of no return.

Honesty is telling your boss you do not enjoy the way he pats your arse in the tearoom. Truth is telling him you can no longer work with him. Either he stops or you go.

Honesty flirts with the situation – truth puts it on the table.

Honesty says I don’t like it but . . .

Truth says I am willing to risk all for my integrity. And, ironically, yours.

Women do not tell men the truth. It’s been centuries now, millennia even. We hold our tongues and hide the truth of who we are and where we stand – largely because we’ve forgotten who we are and where we stand. O yes, there are women who rage and spit their fury. Their expression is not a reflection of the words that spill from their mouths, or even truth; it is, rather and always, the madness of their grief. They are telling stories to make sense of their loss, for they know they have lost something . . . they just have no idea what it is. Or was.

We have a contract, men and women, a contract that buys the silence of one in exchange for the manipulation of the other. Most women, the maddening un-mad, sign it the day they arrive through the portal between their mother’s legs. Since the greatest truth-telling exercise in history, the Women’s Liberation Movement, women in the West and courageous souls dotted elsewhere around the landscape have made their peace with honesty.

Do not claim, my darlings, to be telling the truth.

Honesty is the emotion of the wounded heart speaking. Truth is the pin-point focus of pure mind, the non-negotiable here now.

Honesty is malleable, dependent upon time and circumstance. We cannot split hairs with truth.

Honesty is uncomfortable; truth is downright dangerous.

Honesty is a story, a place to define our reality outside of ourselves. Truth is on the inside, the absolute reckoning of self.

Honesty is the child making a courageous stand. Truth is the adult, invincible and vulnerable.

Honesty is gratification; truth has nothing at all to do with what we want.

And that’s the frustrating and confronting thing about truth

what we ‘want’ is irrelevant.

When you are in a car, beautiful places are a moment;
if you stop the car, they are a cluster of moments.
When you walk, beautiful places are an eternity carved into the soul.

From My Pilgrim’s Heart, by Stephanie Dale

Okay, so leaving my marriage to walk from Rome to Istanbul was a particularly dumb thing to do . . . at least that’s how it looked to so very many people.

And then there’s how it looked to me . . . which was a bellowing call echoing through every cavernous chamber in my body to walk with my son across the landscapes of Italy towards the burning eastern sun.

Pilgrimage is the art of ancient travel. Pilgrimage harks back to forever, when human beings set out on journeys from which they might not return, journeys they knew would transform the rest of their lives – journeys that were worth every risk because, live or die, to deny the call was to close the door on life and that meant certain death anyway: death to the spirit.

Pilgrimage is a subpoena from the heart that defies all common sense. It is a mistake to attempt to rationalize the irrational – and an even bigger mistake to attempt to justify your decision to set forth to those around you (they’ll think you’re a basketcase anyway).

Just ask Jessica Watson, the 16-year-old Australian who has just sailed solo around the world. Her parents understood that Jessica had to go – that the call to put everything on the line for transformation was greater than their fears for her safety.

The pilgrim is not unlike a comet, burning off all that is futile and unnecessary until what is left is the essential, unmalleable core. The pilgrim walks the Earth, walks the wheel, walks the turning seasons, surrendering all of who she is and all she thinks she knows and all she think she wants to the road and the weather and, in Jessica’s case, the world’s great oceans.

Pilgrims are those who embark on journeys of endurance and, in the end, these journeys ask nothing more from us than to keep going. Crazy as we look from the outside, we are honouring the call of the human spirit – our collective yearning for transformation – and, in so doing, we do it for everyone.

Pilgrimage is where the romance of the road meets reality, boots to the bitumen.

We can think about what we’d love to do in this life – or we can do it.

This is why we need our pilgrims – the ones who put everything on the line for freedom and love and truth – for all of us.