Four mid-life women examine their individual and collective pilgrimages through, near and around the academy. Our pilgrimages are spiritual, moral, social, and developmental in a variety of ways. Our scholarship reflects these perspectives with language, research frameworks, and metaphors for understanding. We offer women of, within, and about the academy the metaphors as lenses to understand our academic journeys. So much of our language about recent membership in the academy depicts being "other" and about exclusion and indifference, we felt compelled to take a proactive stance about our own journeys. The language of these spiritually-grounded metaphors are a beginning.