What Are We Really Exploring?

Ever notice how a book arrives at exactly the right moment in your life?

For me, The Art of Pilgrimage by my friend, mentor, and advisor to the Transformational Travel Council, Phil Cousineau, was one of those books.

Happy Jake!

I first read it right around the time we were beginning to bring the TTC to life. I wasn’t looking for a business model or a strategy. I was trying to better understand something I deeply believed but couldn’t yet fully articulate: that travel has the potential to be so much more than moving our feet.

It can become a practice of paying attention, an invitation to wonder, and a way of returning home, seeing both the world and ourselves differently.

Looking back, I realize that book didn’t give me answers. It gave me language. It helped me recognize that what I was trying to build wasn’t really about travel at all. It was about creating the conditions for people to reconnect with themselves, each other, local communities, nature, and ultimately with what matters most.

Phil often speaks of his own mentor, the amazing Joseph Campbell, whose work on mythology and the Hero’s Journey became another important influence on my own thinking and many of the foundational ideas we’ve developed at both the TTC and Explorer X. Campbell reminded us that every meaningful journey follows a timeless arc. We leave the familiar, cross a threshold into the unknown, lose our bearings, encounter unexpected teachers, and, if we’re paying attention, return home carrying something far more valuable than souvenirs: wisdom.

Perhaps that’s why these stories continue to resonate across generations. They remind us that the outer journey is often a mirror for the inner one.

That may also be why I’m so excited for Phil’s newest book, The Wisdom of the Odyssey: 24 Life Lessons from Homer’s Epic.

The Odyssey may be one of humanity’s earliest stories of transformative travel. Beneath the adventure is a story about longing, identity, resilience, belonging, and ultimately finding your way home. Phil has a remarkable gift for helping ancient wisdom illuminate our own lives, reminding us that these ancient stories aren’t relics of the past. They’re living maps for how we navigate uncertainty, purpose, love, loss, and becoming.

The timing couldn’t feel more perfect. In August, I’ll return to Southern Oregon for a coming-of-age whitewater expedition on the Rogue River with my son Quinn, several of his close friends, and other families. Just days later, Quinn leaves for Cal Poly, making this one of our last great adventures before he begins the next chapter of his life.

The Rogue also happens to be not far from where I grew up. In many ways, this journey feels like a homecoming for me as well. There is something deeply meaningful about returning to the rivers and forests that helped shape me while witnessing my son prepare to discover the places and experiences that will shape him.

A few months later, I’ll carry the same book as I walk Japan’s Kumano Kodo, one of the world’s great pilgrimage routes.

One journey returns me to the landscape of my childhood. The other invites me into one of the world’s oldest pilgrimage traditions. On the surface, they couldn’t be more different. Yet both feel like chapters in the same lifelong story.

Perhaps that’s what I’ve been exploring all along. Not simply new destinations, but new ways of relating to myself, to others, to nature, and to life itself.

Thank you, Phil, for your friendship, your mentorship, and for continuing to remind so many of us that the greatest journeys aren’t about finding somewhere new. They’re about finding our way home.

And I can’t think of a more fitting dedication than the one you’ve made to your own son, Jack. As one father preparing to send a son into the world to another, it touched my heart more than you know.

Farewell for now,

Jake