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This young woman, sauntering lazily along with her two dogs, is the unwitting inheritor of a tradition dating back to the Middle Ages.
Over a period of two hundred years—from 1095 C.E. to 1291—Christian Europe initiated a series of crusades to ‘recapture’ the Holy Land. This was a period of terrible turmoil and strife, of religious repression and internecine violence. Many people were made homeless, and a great number of those displaced chose to make the trek to the Holy Land—perhaps as a penance, perhaps for the adventure, perhaps because they had no reason to stay put. Many of those ‘crusaders’ were ordinary people who wandered slowly, vaguely eastward through Europe, vagabonds asking for aid and charity in the villages they passed through, with no hope or real intention of ever reaching the Holy Land. They would announce themselves in each village—Je vais en la Sainte Terre. I am going to the Holy Land, to Sainte Terre, to saunter.
Every lazy walk, every stroll taken for its own sake, is, in a way, a trip to a holy land. Every walker is, in some way, a pilgrim—a traveler on a journey of personal significance. Sometimes that significance is the unadulterated pleasure of watching dogs play in the water.
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