One of my Zen painting teachers announced, as I leaned over a sheet of rice paper with my brush resting beside the ink, ready to dance in my hands: “Paint this koan: a pilgrim without a destination.”

When I heard him, something froze within me. And at the same time something rejoiced at the possibility that there might be nowhere to arrive—and yet still be moved by the desire to be somewhere. Like the wind blowing over an ember, keeping it alive and incandescent. The wind blows without a destination, yet it blows because it is the breath itself—this is its nature, and in doing so it touches every place. The wind blows, the ember remains warm, offering its heat to those who pass by, as if waiting for the Beloved to sit beside it and finally say: I found you.

In that moment, I felt something more than the desire to find something. I felt the possibility of being found while walking—that rare sensation when something unexpected pierces through you and carries you away, and you were simply walking! For knowing that you will arrive, and actually arriving, can be a tremendous loss. But to be on the path and be found—by a lightning bolt, a saint, a magical animal, by something that awakens you from your obsession with goals, destinations, and outcomes—and that, like a koan, leaves you bewildered, instantly granting you a new identity or returning a part of yourself that you were unable to integrate. It gave me the feeling that the pilgrim without a destination is the one who is always ready for an encounter.

It is difficult to name the invisible and ever-changing presence behind that constant feeling that something is missing, as if lacking something were terrible and needed to be remedied at any cost. In our society, sustaining emptiness is seen as something negative, even as an inability to recognize the beauty of one’s own life. For many years I carried guilt, believing there was something wrong with me because I could not fully rest in the happiness that existed around me. But there are many kinds of emptiness. Neurotic emptiness. Hungry emptiness. Sterile emptiness. And there are others that seem to hold a secret opening, and it was this space of profound mystery that I began to observe with greater generosity and curiosity.

I looked at this space from many different angles, and listened to friends, loved ones, and strangers speak about their own inner absences. Everyone seemed to carry something silently unfinished—a search for meaning, for belonging, for a “more sacred gratitude” that might finally allow them to rest at the center of their own lives. After a long time, I began to call this contemplated emptiness saudade—a word so beautiful in Portuguese, impossible to translate completely. Longing may be its closest counterpart, but it is still insufficient.

Since childhood, I have felt saudade. Before I even knew how to run on my own feet, I would look at horses and feel a longing to ride them, despite having no memory of ever having done so. It was not imagination. It was an ancient ache without explanation. When I first saw photographs of the Himalayas—high, distant, wild, silent, sovereign, and mystical—I felt longing for those mountains, as if I had left something of myself among them. I wanted to move toward that horizon without knowing exactly why. It was not curiosity. It was recognition.

The same thing happens with deserts. The times I have visited them, I experienced a profound resting in the center of who I am, immersed in a mysterious suspension of time. It was precisely because I recognized the power of places that felt sacred to me that I traveled to the Moroccan desert in 2023. At that period in my life, I had become lost in an existential black hole. I had lost important people in my life and a path I cherished with all my being. The altar had caught fire and I was living among the ruins of the temple of love.

For two years I wandered without solid ground beneath me, searching for myself, carrying an immense longing for myself. Where was I? I wasn’t sure. But I intuited that I needed to go to the Sahara Desert and witness the alignment of the Moon with Mars and Venus above the dunes. The journey through Morocco and the days leading up to the dunes were already refining my heart. I had reached such a state of surrender that I felt if I were to die there, it would be the right place.

I sat and watched the Sun set on one side, gilding the dunes until they became mere silhouettes against a sky of blue and purple. Then the Moon appeared, shining like a pair of silver horns, crowning the union of Mars and Venus. And that moment crowned me as well, proclaiming my return to the throne of myself. I opened because I knew that the world I inhabit is a reflection of my inner structures. I concluded that I could ritualize the birth of a new inner world through the co-emergence of my presence with those dunes, the Moon, Venus, and Mars. And it was magical. I remembered myself. I carried the memory with me. What guided me there was saudade.

I have always carried longing. Longing for a home where I never lived, yet whose scent, temperature, and light I seemed to know intimately. There was a period when I even felt longing for imaginary worlds, friends who never existed, and impossible mythological creatures. I began to realize that perhaps I preserved that feeling of emptiness almost as an act of fidelity to an invisible Beloved, and that I also kept others from coming too close because my emptiness was my most intimate and vulnerable inner space—always waiting for a presence never announced, yet silently anticipated at the center of the heart.

And so it was toward the Himalayas that I moved, where I also lived for many years, allowing longing to become the secret fire of consciousness in motion. There was an intuition within me that I would become ill if I did not obey that invisible force. When desire arises from this formless source, perhaps that is what we call the sacred: the moment when life ceases to be merely a trajectory and becomes an offering.

Following this call rarely appears rational. Often it threatens the very architecture of safety we have built around our lives. Perhaps that is why so many of us do not follow it. Yet an ignored calling does not disappear. It simply becomes denser within the body, revealing itself as sadness, anxiety, compulsion, or a persistent sense of misalignment.

Perhaps pilgrimage is also an act of construction, a slow revelation of the infinite layers of who we are—but we must place ourselves in the walking. Where we go matters less than what guides us. We carry to the mountains what we are not yet able to see alone, so that it may become visible through the revelation of each step taken as an act of devotion. The sacred place is within, not without. The destination may be a temple or a carpenter’s house; what moves is the inner presence, and where we arrive is the inner space. There are places that inspire us because they possess the aesthetic of our longing.

Many times, when the journey is undertaken unconsciously, we confuse the appearance with the source itself. We seek people, relationships, material things, and even spiritual teachers and sacred places as though one of them might answer the wordless question we carry in our hearts. We approach a beloved face, a luminous teaching, a temple suspended in the mountains, believing—almost without realizing it—that what is missing rests there. And because this calling rarely reveals its origin, we easily mistake its reflections for its source.

I remember climbing slowly toward the Tiger’s Nest in Bhutan, captivated by the legends surrounding that place. I wanted to connect with the power of Guru Rinpoche and Yeshe Tsogyal, who had meditated there. Was their presence still infused within those caves? Did the power reside in the place, or was the place itself an inner temple?

I thought about symbolic ritual, just as I had in the Sahara. I allowed longing and pain to be my guides. Pain knows the history of humanity; it is older than everything that has ever existed. My fingers ached from the cold as I held prayer flags and a letter my son had written to himself and later torn apart. In those tiny scraps of paper I collected, I held his heart, and from that height I wanted to release the letter into freedom. He had not spoken to me for a year, for no apparent reason. I released the fragments into the wind, and they descended down the cliff like butterflies while I prayed for him and for us. 

Strangely, the emptiness only became more vast. But it also became quieter. And strangely more beautiful, more acceptable, more spacious, more human. It did not resolve itself. I simply gave it a place that was not resentment, but space. That space became the sacred emptiness, the true point of pilgrimage, of encounter, the inner altar, the Buddha’s throne, where everything is possible, like an empty stage upon which all things appear. 

It was then that I began to realize that what moves us so deeply in a teacher, a lover, or a sacred landscape may not truly belong to them. Something within us recognizes something through them. And that recognition creates the feeling of return, belonging, and inexplicable familiarity. Yet how often do we cling to the form when what we most deeply long for is ourselves? We confuse the reflection with the source.

In our attempt to replace an infinite hunger with finite experiences, we move through the world pursuing reflections of the infinite. And still, the call remains alive.

For a long time, I believed the goal was to no longer feel longing. I imagined enlightenment as a state of absolute stability, continuous clarity, a kind of final resting place where the feeling of emptiness would disappear. Until I came to understand that it is possible to refine the pain that arises from longing. It is as though longing were a language that, if listened to carefully, becomes clearer. We refine it, create poetry from it, and in doing so it becomes our guide.

I recognize the importance of the quality of suffering—the kind that refines and strengthens us. I am not suggesting that we become attached to our anguish, but neither should we blame ourselves for feeling it. We should remain open to the possibility that it may be pointing the way, teaching us, and helping us mature.

I share below a passage by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.

This is the path of the pilgrim without a destination, where the path itself becomes reality, guided by uncertainty and polished by longing, as a vow of loyalty to what is most sacred. It is the practice of integrating that sacredness into one’s life, returning more often to the throne of one’s own being, crowned by one’s own presence.

Perhaps we need to give our anguish a different place within us, with less fear and less urgency to silence it. For this uncomfortable language has much to tell us about ourselves whenever we drift away from the center of our being—the place that anchors the boundaries of our deepest values and principles.

When our journey ceases to be a pilgrimage open to encounters and becomes a race toward results, achievements, and victorious proofs of success, it is often anguish that raises the red flag, saying: “This pace hurts me. This race, this action—it hurts. I am moving beyond the boundaries of my own moral contours. Recalculate the route.”

And how many people, increasingly, choose to silence that voice with medication, drugs, endless distractions, anxious sex, financial ambitions—wearing down their feet and enslaving their spines beneath a world of self-imposed demands?

Anguish asks us a simple question: Is this truly the way?

Rarely will the answer come immediately. More often, we are required to change things, disrupting the structures we have carefully built and enduring the inconveniences that such changes bring. We must place ourselves on a pilgrimage—a pilgrimage that may slowly, and perhaps unexpectedly, reveal the direction back to the center of our being, toward the throne of the Self, and invite us to occupy it before the world dictates the shape of our life for us.

Wherever your heart journeys,
On whatever expedition
In your life and secret inner realms,
Breath in intimacy with infinity.
Where can you go to avoid
The One in Whom All Exists?
Reach down into your deepest being.
Take a stand in eternity.
Walk through this world, see every situation
As an expedition of the mystery.
Savor the tremble of recognition
The God in you is touching the God out there. — The Radiance Sutras, Lorin Roche, PhD

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Tiffani Gyatso
Yangchenma Arts & Music

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