Dispatches from the team at Lost Theory — on the trails we're building, the stories we're chasing, and the long-held belief that the steps you take every day ought to mean something.
A letter to walkers thirty days into Sacred Steps: Ohenro. What the science actually says about daily walking — mortality, mood, the hippocampus, sleep — plus a few observations about what pilgrimage walking seems to add on top, and a quiet word for anyone whose habit has already wobbled.
Read postA note on the research craft behind Sacred Steps: Ohenro. The popular English-language guides to the Shikoku 88-temple pilgrimage share a problem — they tend to repeat each other, and a small number of errors have propagated for decades. Here are seven we corrected, where the right answers came from, and why we think it matters.
Read postThe most common question we get is the most reasonable one: what is it actually like, day to day? Below is a journal of one pilgrim's first seven days inside Sacred Steps: Ohenro — six temples, sixteen kilometers, and the quiet rhythm a virtual pilgrimage starts to take in the corners of an ordinary week.
Read postDear walker — somewhere on the southern Japanese island of Shikoku, a 9th-century monk drew a line between eighty-eight temples and started a thousand-year tradition. This is the story of how we set out to bring that trail to your pocket, what we built along the way, and the family of adventures we're crafting next.
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