Trip to Leverett
In 2009, on the last day of summer break before my junior year of college, I took a road trip from my hometown in central Maine to Leverett, Massachusetts, and back.
What's in Leverett, Massachusetts? The New England Peace Pagoda, a shrine.
The creation of the pagoda was organized by Nipponzan-Myōhōji-Daisanga, a Buddhist-adjacent Japanese religious organization founded in 1917¹. This is the pagoda — it's the domed structure on the right-hand side of the photo²:
There are peace pagodas all over the world, including in London, New Delhi, and Vienna.¹ They're intended to promote world peace.³ The one in Leverett was the first one built in the United States and was built in 1985.¹
I drove around 5 hours to Leverett, spent maybe 30 minutes at the pagoda and the grounds around it, then drove home. The round trip was about 11 hours.
People have been making pilgrimages for thousands of years. A pilgrimage can be secular, too: the Grand Canyon or the Eiffel Tower.
Earlier that summer, on the way home from a different pilgrimage of sorts — to coastal Maine and back — I was talking to my father on the phone. He told me Jack Kerouac used to feel somehow "wiped clean" after his travels.
Below is an updated version of a poem I wrote — I think shortly after the trip — about the area around the pagoda and the pagoda itself. The poem wasn't for a class or anything: I just felt like writing it.
The word "circumambulation" in the poem means "walking around a shrine in a circular pattern". Circumambulation is a traditional way in which a person interacts with a shrine.
Leverett
Winding roads, roads that seem to slow the shrubs
that grow beside the trees
and bend quietly the gait of children
who wander in the shade.
And give that shade to mailboxes,
which lie beneath the boughs that spring upward
from the dust of their gravel shores.
And you, great pagoda,
hardly there amidst the pines,
with hardly a glance to support
your so worthy intentions.
Or circumambulations to show how irrevocable
is the nobility of your shining
beneath the trees.
Sources:
¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipponzan-My%C5%8Dh%C5%8Dji-Daisanga
²: https://newenglandpeacepagoda.org
³: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Pagoda