show of photographs and writings depicting my view, one pilgrim's view, of a journey retracing the African Atlantic slave trade route: where we went, what we saw and heard, what I felt, what I learned, and how I changed, or might change. Sites of lynchings, auctions, imprisonments, rebellions, celebrations. history breathed into life by each of us being present, both bodily and in spirit, in prayer.

Faces, gestures, sky ("one sky" really?), feet, lines of walkers, trees, hosts, food, sleeping, toilets, repairs on bodies, rest, strain, hopes, conflicts, leadership, luminaries, ordinary folk, temples and churches, song, dance. This is a swarm of insects, or birds, or trees, all images.

That's more or less for the pilgrimage, one necklace of images for this One Sky collage.

Then there's my solo journey from new Orleans to Chicago, coming home, driving the ailing Japanese car (what was it? a Datsun? Mazda?) so many miles, some 1000 just to Chicago. Sleeping in parking lots, campground bathrooms, plantations, talking to campground directors, vigilers, blues singers, eating in Shoney's, visiting museums, finding sites of personal and national import like Money, Mississippi, where Emmett Till was murdered, and Clarksdale, Mississippi where Charlotte [an African American Quaker friend] was born and Bernice [her mother] was raised and worked and married, driving past groves of live oaks and sugar cane and chemical plants along the most polluted section of the Mississippi River, a mere one week or so to Chicago, with one more week in Chicago itself, my homeland.

Chicago: "city of tall shoulders" but also intense racism, Martin Luther King saying, "one of the most viciously racist cities in America," no memorial for the Black Panther men killed at the instigation of the FBI, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, little memorializing of the Civil Rights Movement (contrasted with the South). A city that works? Or a city that emblematizes the color line? Maybe both, for different people different experiences. What was mine?

My home, once, and continuing, a spirit home, a dream home. Returning with Dan T to "our" southside, mythical beginning point for Dan and me. Then to Cabrini Green, both of us, another beginning point, at least for me, me photo-graphing Chicago Fellowship of Friends (remeeting Charlotte, Bernice, Candayce, Shirley, Gloria, Steve, Marleen, Greg, Brian, and many others, dropping in just as they're preparing for the winter holidays). What will this portion of One Sky look like, feel like photographically?

A one month break, maybe the hardest month, with Louise, my dearly beloved, but not fun this time living with her. Me with one foot on pilgrimage, the proverbial traveler, and one foot homebound, at home with Louise, my domestic-for now-partner.

A hassle over whether to put my energy into editing a slide show with Louise or redesigning my ailing website, plus wishing to revise essays, workprint a cross section of the journey, organize the remaining trip, visit friends and family, exhibit love between partners, and recover from the often tumultuous journey of the Middle Passage, US style. Plus keep in touch as best we can with the pil-grims now in the Caribbean and West Africa. Not easy, instead, arduous and rocky.

Then, in May 1999 (a little over one year ago)-South Africa. Here a true blossoming of intent and dream: pro bono photography and meeting the pilgrims in Johannesburg. Widespread traveling thru the country, with the pilgrimage in Jo'burg, Soweto, Manneburg, Cape Town, with Louise solo down the Garden Route and Indian Ocean coast, and alone as itinerant photographer in Durban, Jo'burg, Oukasie, Alexandra, Evaton, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, and returning for more photography to key pilgrimage sites like Manneburg and Soweto.

I sorted thru my mixed feelings of being back, highlighted by remeeting Jeremy and Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, she now the deputy minister of defense, he, her husband, the director of the Quaker Peace Center. The new nation, post-apartheid, ANC-led, crime ever-present and affecting all, including Stephan [a fellow pilgrim] and me, mugged on a Sunday afternoon downtown after Quaker meeting, outside the Home Affairs office in Jo'burg.

First gig: Ditsela, Development Institute for Training, Support and Education for Labour (also pathways in a native language). Last gig: Oukasie, the township outside Pretoria.

Film: total of 300 rolls, 1/3 black and white print, 1/3 color print, 1/3 color slide.

Yet to do: prints, slides, editing, exhibits, shows, publications. All grist for the digestion mill. What to make of this momentous experience?

Rather than detailing that, I refer readers to my laboriously crafted report [please inquire via schiel@ccae.org) written some 9 months ago, now being some 11 months since returning home.

And so, as if a wild mind recounting the entire story, one eye on telling it, one on indicating the photo components, and one-the third-on arguing that this is a worthy project to pursue, even if for the rest of my life.

These photographs of the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage, a journey retracing the route of the Atlantic slave trade, were taken in 1998. The Pilgrimage (the Middle Passage is the cross-Atlantic leg of the journey of slavery) was inspired by a politically active Buddhist order, but enlarged by African American wisdom, leadership, and participation. The year-long, intercontinental Pilgrimage was an opportunity to examine the Atlantic slave trade historically, to symbolically join with some 50 million Africans forced out of their home regions, and an effort to go beyond the facts of history to build a new society. How do we address the contemporary societal ills of poverty, militarism, racism, corporate dominance, and environmental devastation? The pilgrimage was based in prayer, faith, ancient teachings, voluntarily-endured suffering, shared community, story telling and celebration.

For more information about Skip Schiel's work see www.ccae.org/~schiel.