In 1953, a woman started walking from Pasadena, California, to spread peace. She carried no coat, no backpack or supplies, and had no team helping her. Only a blue tunic announced her purpose. She walked until given shelter, sleeping in a busstop, truck stop, or outside, wherever she was, if no one offered her a place to stay. She fasted until given food. She did this, using the name Peace Pilgrim, until her death in 1981. She walked over 50,000 miles, often 50 miles per day, to spread and teach people about peace.
Street life? You can't get much more in touch with the real streets of North America, than actually walking them for 27 years, every day, well over 50,000 total miles total. She walked as a pilgrim, to help people across the U.S. and Canada find inner peace, peace among individuals, peace among groups and nations, and world peace. Many of her sayings, along with an interview by KPFK radio, are in a small booklet titled "Steps Towards Inner Peace." You can see it online at this link.
In 1991, I got a job duplicating videos in a small, family owned business, in North Hollywood, California. I had put myself about $7,000 in debt the year before, self-producing a BMX freestyle video, and living off my credit cards for a while. BMX freestyle, which had been my life for about 8 years at the time, had pretty much died. Money left the BMX industry, and poured into a new thing called mountain bikes.
While I had managed to stumble into the BMX and skateboard industries, the video company I worked at, Unreel Productions, had been shutdown in 1990. I was kept on at the parent company, Vision Skateboards, but had almost no work to do. Bored out of my skull, I quit after six months, and found some freelance work at a surf video distributor for a few months, while I spent $5,000 of my own money producing my own video, The Ultimate Weekend. It sold about 500 copies, through that surf distributor, and I got about $3 per sale. Being a young guy, I didn't pay off my credit cards, so I was in what seemed like a ton of debt for that time, and found video work sporadically.
I got hired in the office of a TV production company, my first "real" TV production job, a production assistant at a company manking supercross and monster truck shows. That gig lasted for about 3 months, and one of the producers helped me find the duplication job. I moved to a sketchy apartment in the hood of North Hollywood, where I rented a bed, not a room, week to week. There were about 12 total roommates, some of then kind of sketchy. But it was cheap, and about a mile from my new job. So I would go in at 5:00 pm, and run two systems, with 45 total VHS machines, making copies of all kinds of videos, until 1:00 am. The first night I made copies of an automatic bowling lane sweeping machine. It would sweep one lane, and then "walk" to the next lane, and sweep it. Boring.
As the nights went on, I dubbed videos about different kinds of corn for farmers to grow, about marine navigation, and all kinds of promo videos for different businesses and products. One guy wanted copies of all the old "Blaxploitation" movies, so I made copies of Dolomite similar movies for a few days. We dubbed a few martial arts training videos, and a whole bunch of really boring business videos, like meetings and in house business conferences for different companies. Sometimes I would be busy making 500 five minute videos in a night. But most nights I had longer videos, where I didn't have much to do while they were running. So I had a lot of time to think, to read, and to be depressed.
I was depressed, not making much headway paying off my debt, making $7.00 an hour, and rethinking everything about life. Working that job for several months, I started reading a bunch of self-help books, and trying to figure out what life itself, and my life, were all about. I wound up reading well over 150 books in the next several years, looking for answers, and seeking a life that made sense. That year working at the video duplicator was a big turning point for me, the beginning of a search for meaning, and my own inner peace, that lasted about 14 years.
Among the videos I dubbed, were three or four videos with this crazy sounding lady with white hair, Peace Pilgrim. We duplicated her videos for a group of her supports, called Friends of Peace Pilgrim. That's when I first her of this woman who walked alone, until offered a bed, and fasted until offered food, for nearly 30 years. While much of what she said didn't make sense to my 25-year-old self, there was no getting around how tough her pilgrimage was, and her incredible faith. Her ideas stuck somewhere in the back of my head, and made more and more sense as time passed.
About seven years later, living in downtown Huntington Beach, I walked over to the laundromat on 17th street to wash clothes one day. Someone had left several copies of her little blue pamphlet, Steps Towards Inner Peace (link above), on a counter. I picked one up, read it, and read it many more times over the next several years. I finally lost it in a move, I think.
As my own thinking about life, and why we're here on Earth, expanded over the years, I realized Peace Pilgrim's thoughts were true, and I just wasn't ready to accept them. It was well over 20 years after I first heard about Peace Pilgrim, that I found this documentary above on YouTube, which shared a lot more background about Peace Pilgrim, who's ideas began to influence me 31 years ago. She is one of many people who have had a positive influence on my weird path through life. So that's how I came to know about Peace Pilgrim.
You can read, or download and print out her pamphlet, "Steps Towards Inner Peace," at this link. There is also a book you can get, for free, about her life and teachings. The Friends of Peace Pilgrim do accept donations to help this work continue, at this website: Peace Pilgrim Now you, too, know about a woman who called herself Peace Pilgrim, and walked over 50,000 miles to teach and share peace. Perhaps her life and thoughts will help you as well.
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