“Ask where the good road is...travel there, and you will find rest for your souls.”
Waymarkers History
The seeds for Waymarkers began in 2004 with a group of Seattle Pacific University students Mary DeJong led on a vocational discernment retreat to Iona, Scotland. The Sacred Isle offered its ancient self, inviting the sojourners into the archetypal stages of pilgrimage, where we would ultimately find ourselves more at home with our unique and integrated place within this planet. This journey, and subsequent others to Iona, inspired the book form of Waymarkers. Waymarkers (2011) was written to support the pilgrim in getting to Iona well. This companion guide does more than direct the traveler to good accommodations and eateries. This book provides a vade mecum, a soul text of writings and reflections that would challenge the pilgrim to make the most of this particular trip and transform it into the journey of a lifetime. It was a project that aimed to invite a profound posture of perception; a noticing of the natural world—akin to the exilic waymarkers in Old Testament scripture— that would lead one back to a sense of belonging to themselves, the Sacred, and our planet Earth. Pilgrims the world over now use Waymarkers as a personal guide to mark their way to Iona, Scotland.
Waymarkers grew beyond the pages to become an LLC in 2010; out of this emerging context Mary DeJong has facilitated and guided numerous pilgrimages to Iona, Scotland and convened reflective Rewilding Retreats locally within her native Pacific Northwest home-scape. Waymarkers has become the way by which Mary continues her retreat work, and it has also become the on-line presence for her writing that will encourage and inspire a renewed sense of the sacred within ourselves, the natural world, and the cosmos.
Inspired by Creation Spirituality and the teachings of ecotheologians, Christian and Celtic mystics, ecopychologists, and scholarly thinkers such as Thomas Berry, Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, Matthew Fox, Sallie McFague, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Bill Plotkin, David Abram, and John Philip Newell (among others), Waymarkers' hope is to guide others toward a holistic and harmonious inter-connected life with the more-than-human world through restorative rewilding rituals and pilgrimage practices that recover a way of seeing the sacred in the soil, the stars, and even in our neighborhood streets.
“We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth’s beings.”