pilgrim

I think that my November birthday helped make "pilgrim" feel particularly apt for me. There's a coziness to November that I think often gets ignored for the spookiness of October or the festiveness of December. November is a great month! It's the one time of year you can have a pumpkin spice latte with breakfast and a Christmas ale with dinner. What is not to love??? Thanksgiving is Christmas without pressure, an exercise in pastoral vibes and good food that I genuinely love. Now, my use of the word "pilgrim" isn't specifically Thanksgiving related, and in fact I'd like to separate it from the murky waters of the "Thanksgiving story", but I do think that my sharing of a birthday month with Thanksgiving helped "pilgrim" feel particularly syncronistic for me.
A pilgrim is anyone who travelers for a religious or spiritual purpose. A traveler on a sacred journey.
Over the Garden Wall is one of my favorite shows of all time, and I think it may be the most November show ever made. Yes, it does (spoilers) take place on Halloween, but technically it BEGINS on Halloween, meaning the 10 episodes could exist in the first week of November (my birthday week). And beyond that, the pastoral aesthetic, the spiritually moving story, the excellent music and characters - these all feel resonant with my soul. In "Songs of the Dark Lantern", when the above exchange happens and Wirt is labelled "the pilgrim", I felt immediate resonance with that, too. Aren't we all travelers on a sacred journey?
Some of my favorite characters and stories are or feature "pilgrims" in this sense - the Dune series, Snufkin from The Moomins, Chihiro from Spirited Away, games like Year Walk and Monument Valley. Even songs I love, like Borderline by Tame Impala or Planet Hunter by Wolf Alice speak to a certain waywardness; traveler's tunes. My friend and I used to have a theory - and a chart we created to go with it - that everyone can be categorized somewhere on the scale between ghost, vampire, and cowboy. We took it further: between a ghost and a vampire is a witch, between a vampire and a cowboy is a pirate, and between a cowboy and a ghost is a zombie. Then, each distinct point on this spectrum had its own title. I am decidedly somewhere in the vampire-witch sphere, and I think I am a pilgrim.
Pilgrim is a hard one for me to explain because I feel it so intuitively and identify with it so deeply. Putting words to it feels like seperating it from its true essence. This is a bit more than a fashion thing for me, but it fits so nicely into my style, too.
The pilgrim aesthetic is a little buttoned-up, it's practical wear for a traveler on a long journey. But it's cozy, hand-made, crafted with old fashioned methods and tools. Sacred. It looks a lot like folk art, crafts like those that came along with some American Girl Dolls, and a bit of a wistful and twee edge - a bit gothic, a bit boho. Somewhere between; vampire and witch, starting point and destination, night and day. Growing up I loved "old" things - I once made an old-timey telephone out of a detangling-hair-spritz bottle and a plastic medicine cup - the kind where you talk into the spray bottle part and hold the cup against your ear.

I think I'm an "old soul". I'm still taken with typewriters, beeswax candles, embroidery, and religious iconography. I guess pilgrim is really where the intricate and the analog overlap, and I think that makes sense given its inherent liminality.
Onward, sacred traveler!