The speaker walks up and down a mountain on an autumn morning, noticing small things as they go: steam rising from compost, acorns clattering down, hawks circling in a thermal before heading south. Below, a farm show is under way, and a line of tractors rumbles through the fields. The walk is called a pilgrimage, and the line about descending "just so I can climb it yet again" suggests the point is the repeating, not the arrival.
The mood is calm and observant, with a dry joke near the end. The speaker recalls that people once said rogation, a custom of blessing the land and asking for good crops, helped the harvest. Then comes the blunt line about "bullshit" walking "on six legs" into the earth. The image is odd, but it seems to say that old claims, like insects, slowly return to the soil. The speaker doesn't sound bitter, though. Watching the world carry on is its own kind of blessing.