‎I ate the first jalapeño from my own garden this week.

I planted it in May. I watered it through the dry stretch in July, staked it when it leaned, and pulled the weeds crowding its base. The plant did the rest, which is to say the plant did nearly all of it.

That distinction has changed how the food tastes.

The Plant Cooperated

Here is what I actually contributed: seed, soil, water, attention, and a reasonable location. Everything after that belonged to the plant, the ground, the light, and whatever more-than-human others moved through the yard doing work I never observed.

I made conditions. The pepper made peppers.

When I picked the first one, I said thank you out loud, which felt slightly ridiculous and entirely correct. Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the Honorable Harvest as a set of obligations that run in both directions, including the obligation to share whatever you have taken. Taking is the easy half.

Food tastes different when you were present for the whole arrangement. I know this pepper. I know the week it set fruit and the morning I thought I had lost the plant to something chewing the lower leaves. Eating it was the last movement of a conversation that started in May.

The Garden Is Still Working

Early August is when the first things come in. Older reckonings call this Lughnasadh, the Celtic marker for the opening of the harvest season rather than its completion. The fields me show exactly that. Some cut. Most standing. The whole process visibly unfinished.

If you live in an area with no fields, the turn is already underway around you anyway. The light is shorter at both ends than it was in June. The market tables are heavier than they were in July. Something has come in whether or not you watched it happen.

My garden has given me 3 peppers so far, and the plants are still flowering.

This is what first harvest means. Something is ready while nearly everything else remains in process, and the readiness of the one does not wait on the rest.

Worrying About the Walk Does Not Get You Closer to Walking

I have walked the Le Puy route in France 6 times now, most recently in June, 98.9 miles over 7 days, mostly in silence.

People write to me before their first walk with questions that turn out to be the same question wearing different clothes. What if I am not fit enough? What if my pack is wrong? What if I arrive and discover I cannot do it?

I understand the questions. I asked them myself, at length, for a full year before my first walk. I even revisit them each year now, in somewhat different forms.

Here is what that year of preparation taught me: almost none of it prepared me. Buy the boots. Break them in. Walk some hills. Then stop reading and go, because what prepares you for walking is walking, and no amount of advance worrying can substitute for the first 3 miles with a weight on your back.

Fear presents itself as diligence. It looks like responsible preparation right up until you notice another season has gone by.

The Thing In My Drawer

I have been writing a book called Walking the Threshold: A Reflective Journal for Pilgrims, Hikers, and Edge Walkers.

Most of it is done. Most of it has been done for a while now.

What stops me is the question of how to bring it out, whether to seek a publisher or self-publish or find some third arrangement I have not thought of yet. That question has served as a very respectable place to hide a finished thing.

I am telling you this in a post about first fruits because the irony was becoming difficult to ignore.

A withheld thing does not improve in storage. My peppers would have rotted on the plant. A manuscript does not rot, though something happens to anything you keep waiting on, and the waiting begins to feel like the work itself.

What Comes In Early Is What Gets Given

Across the harvest practices I have studied, the first portion is the offered portion. First grain and first loaf. The last of the harvest goes to the storeroom, and the first of it goes outward.

The logic runs opposite to how I would arrange things. I would offer from surplus, once the count was in and the winter looked secure.

These traditions call for an offering to be made while the outcome is still unknown, from a supply that is visibly insufficient. That timing carries the instruction, as generosity from abundance costs nothing.

My three peppers barely fill a bowl. They are what I have.

What to Watch For

The words to look out for is the phrase “once I have.”

Once I have trained more. Once I have settled the publishing question. Once I have practiced enough to teach it, gathered enough to share it, and so on.

Every one of those is reasonable. Every one also functions as a storage container, and the season keeps moving whether or not the container ever opens.

A Practice for the First Harvest

Let me share some ideas for how to work with this in your life, as I am raising some heady issues here that may benefit from being worked into practice.

Walk alone, without music or a podcast, for 15 minutes or more.

Match one phrase to your steps and repeat it until the words wear down into rhythm. Pick whichever of these fits where you actually are today:

This much has ripened. For when you are counting what you have and finding it small.

We grew this together. For when you are trying to work out how much of this was yours.

Enough has come in. For when the waiting has gone on long enough that you have stopped noticing it.

I was given this. For when the harvest arrived through work that was mostly not yours.

Give the first. For when you already know what you are holding back.

One phrase for the whole walk. Trading among them turns the walk into deliberation, which is the condition you are walking to get out of.

Something specific will surface. It usually arrives around the point where you stop trying for it. When it does, say it aloud to the trees, the road, or whatever is present, then name one person or living being who could receive it this week.

If sitting suits you better than walking, bring it to your sit spot instead. Stay until the place stops noticing you. Then name one thing that has come in since June, and one person it belongs to.

The saying aloud matters. A first fruit acknowledged in silence stays in the drawer.

Mine is a manuscript, and I have now told several thousand people that it exists, which I suspect was the actual point of writing this.

What has come in for you?

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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is available to you wherever you are walking this week.

Where Insight Meets Earth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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‎⁨A book will hold still for you.

You can return to the same page a hundred times and find the same words waiting: patient, unchanged, indifferent to whether you come at all. This constancy makes sacred reading possible in its traditional form. When the text is a hillside, an oak, or a pond outside a French village, something decisive changes. The reading goes both ways.

The text notices you back.

I wrote about Earth-Based Lectio Divina in April, and I have been refining the practice since. What follows is the version I am now deepening into in my own practice and teaching: four movements, framed by arriving and returning, that you can try on an ordinary walk.

Four Movements, Nine Hundred Years Old

Guigo II, a twelfth-century Carthusian monk, named four movements in his Ladder of Monks. It has since been adapted by many contemporary people seeking to develop their spiritual practices.

Lectio is slow reading until something stops you. Meditatio means staying with it until it moves through the body. Oratio is responding from whatever has surfaced. Contemplatio releases all effort and rests in what is present. In Guigo’s formulation, reading seeks, meditation finds, prayer asks, and contemplation tastes. That sequence is the framework of the practice, and it has served contemplatives for nine hundred years.

The sequence stays. The text changes, and so does the orientation beneath it.

My adaptation rests on three premises:

1. The living world has agency.

2. Encounter is mutual.

3. Reciprocity is required.

Hold these three, and each movement becomes a relationship rather than a technique. That shift is the whole of it. Reading a book leaves you with understanding, while reading the Land leaves you with a relationship, and a relationship changes both parties. The oak you return to across a year knows your seasons. The stream you sit beside recognizes your weight on its bank. Contemplatives across many traditions have found their way to the same discovery: that sustained attention to any living presence opens into kinship, and that kinship is what most of us are actually hungry for when we say we want to spend more time in nature.

Where Arriving and Returning Belong

The version I published in April contained five movements, and one of them belonged somewhere other than the ladder.

I had placed Arrive at the beginning and Return at the end, alongside the four central movements. Both are important, and both are part of the frame rather than rungs of the ladder. Guigo’s monk also arrived at his cell and returned afterward to labor and community. The tradition left those actions unnumbered because they surround the practice rather than constitute parts of it. Naming them as additional steps made the ladder longer than it needed to be and burdened the practice with too much preparation.

So, go outside. When you finish, come back carrying what you received.

That is the frame. Inside it are four movements: Receive (lectio), Ponder (meditatio), Respond (oratio), Belong (contemplatio). Read them once and then forget the list, because they describe what already happens when you give a living being your sustained attention. The names are here to help you recognize where you are, rather than to be followed in order.

1. Receive

Let your attention settle on one presence: this oak, this crow, this patch of moss along the wall, rather than the landscape at large.

Stay with the one and let the many recede. Take in what it offers through your senses, slowly, the way lectio was always meant to be practiced. Let the hunt for meaning wait.

Inner posture: I allow encounter and let meaning come as it will.

2. Ponder

Stay with what you have received and let it work on you.

What is this presence doing, swaying, holding, decaying, emerging? What does it stir in your body or memory? Let associations rise without forcing them into an interpretation.

Inner posture: I am part of what I am noticing.

3. Respond

What you receive from the living world creates an obligation.

Answer what you have encountered, with gratitude, apology, curiosity, or a promise of care. Your response may be spoken, silent, or embodied. If you have picked up a stone or fallen leaf, return it as you finish. Reciprocity does not always mean leaving an offering, and sometimes the most fitting response is to depart with care.

Inner posture: I am in relationship here.

4. Belong

Everything before this was preparation.

The receiving, the pondering, the response, all of it was clearing ground for the movement that follows, and this is the one worth walking out for. Stay. Let your awareness widen. The Land speaks at a pace we are unaccustomed to, slower than conversation and slower than thought, and this is the movement that finally gives it room. Something may arrive after several minutes: a shift in the light, a bird returning to the branch it left when you approached, the sense that the place has stopped holding its breath around you. Whatever comes will not announce itself, and much of what passes between you here registers somewhere below language.

You are in the company of kin, and the work is to stay long enough to become part of the scene rather than a visitor standing in it.

Inner posture: Nothing to do. I belong here.

The phrase I use for carrying this, updated along with the movements: receive one being, ponder what it offers, respond with care, and stay long enough to belong.

Four Movements, One Morning in France

Thirty minutes outside Espalion in June, in light rain, two frogs called loudly enough to stop me mid-stride.

I had seen the pond and would have walked past it. Their calling pulled me three meters off the path. I stood at the edge in the rain while they carried on, wholly consumed by their own urgent morning. This was Receive, and notice who initiated it.

The frogs had read me first.

I stayed for several minutes. What rose in me was the odd but accurate word honored: honored to witness something real that was not performed for me and did not require me. In Ponder, the encounter worked through my body before my mind found language for it.

My response was smaller than the moment deserved. I recorded a short video because the encounter seemed worth remembering. I said thank you. Then I left them their pond, which was Respond.

I stayed on after that, which is the part I had walked out for. Two small lives in a puddle of a pond, a man in wet boots, all of us in the same rain, and none of us needing anything further from the others. That was Belong. It did not last long, and I have carried it since.

Begin Where You Already Walk

Most people drawn to nature-based practice carry some anxiety about doing it properly.

They wonder whether they are spiritual enough, knowledgeable enough, or attuned enough, and they wait for permission that is already theirs to give themselves. The living world asks for presence, and expertise stays optional. What the practice requires is that you arrive, stay, and come back another day, because repetition is where depth lives and how relationship grows.

The tree you visit once is a stranger. The tree you visit across a full year becomes a teacher, holding your seasons as you learn to hold its own.

Go outside this week. Find one presence that draws you. Stay a little longer than feels natural, and notice what notices you back.

What nearby being would you choose, and what has it already shown you? If you try the practice, I would be glad to hear what happened in the comments.

If you find this useful, please like or leave a comment.

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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is available to you wherever you are walking this week.

Where Insight Meets Earth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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I talk about rest for a living, and I am terrible at taking it.

I teach contemplative practice. I guide people toward slowness, silence, and restoration, and I write this newsletter about walking as a way of returning to ourselves and to the living world. Meanwhile, I work nearly every day. I am a consultant, which means many clients and no natural end to the workweek, and most of the people I serve do work I believe in: nonprofits, academic institutions, spiritual communities, and people seeking a deeper relationship with the natural world. That makes stopping harder, not easier. The work matters, the people matter, and the needs do not pause because Saturday has arrived. I tell myself I will rest over the weekend, then I work through it, and too often I rest only when the energy runs out, which is a collapse rather than rest.

I am writing this partly as advice, and mostly as a reminder to myself.

Willpower Loses to the Inbox

Years of failed weekends taught me something about my own character: I cannot trust a daily decision to rest.

When rest has to compete with the inbox every morning, the inbox usually wins. It does not need to win every time. It only needs to win often enough. So I stopped relying on the decision. Once a year, booked far in advance, paid for, planned around, and non-negotiable, I walk alone for a week through rural France, on the Le Puy route of the Camino de Santiago. This June was the sixth year. The place matters to me, the old villages, the open fields, the cattle in wet grass, the rain and the birdsong and the long stretches of quiet. The structure may matter even more. I commit to the week too far ahead to surrender it to the urgency of any given moment, so by the time June arrives, the decision has already been made.

I do not take the week because I am good at rest. I take it because I am bad at rest, and I finally stopped pretending otherwise.

The First Two Hours Tell the Truth

The honest version of this annual walking retreat is less serene than it looks from the outside.

The first hour of walking, most mornings, is an argument with myself. Why am I doing this again, instead of the beach, or a stack of books at home? The pack is heavy, the feet ache, the path climbs, and my knowledge-worker mind runs on at full speed, planning, organizing, revisiting conversations, researching problems nobody asked me to solve that day. I am a researcher at heart, and a beautiful landscape does not switch that off.

So I keep walking. Somewhere in the second hour, something loosens. The mind exhausts its arguments, my attention returns to my body, then to the path beneath me, and I begin to notice the weather, the shape of the hills, the birdsong changing, the small lives moving at the edges of the trail. The world comes back into view. Only then does contemplative walking truly begin.

We imagine the right retreat will hand us peace at the door. That has never been my experience. The Camino does not hand me rest. It holds me in place long enough for rest to become possible, two difficult hours at a time, and no weekend at home has ever held me that long.

The Living World Rests, and I Am Part of It

The Land I walk through could teach a course on this.

The cattle lie down in the wet grass for hours of the day. The fields along the route rest fallow in their turn, a practice farmers have kept for millennia because soil that never rests stops giving. The birds end their singing at dusk. Winter itself is the Earth’s own sabbath, half the living world asleep until the light returns. Rest is built into the order of things, woven through every being I pass on that trail, and somewhere along the way I absorbed the idea that I alone was exempt. Walking among beings who rest without guilt, I remember that I am one of them, an animal with limits, part of a world that renews itself by stopping.

The guilt says rest is stolen from the work. The fallow field says rest is how there is any harvest at all.

Who the Week Actually Belongs To

From the outside, this week looks like the most self-indulgent thing I do all year.

The rest of the year tells a different story. My teaching at both the university and the seminary draws on it. The chaplaincy work draws on it. The gatherings I lead, the walking retreat I will guide in September, and every essay here, including this one, come from the well that walk refills. The people I serve from July through May are served by someone who was restored in June, and the restoration shows in small consequential ways, in patience, attention, generosity, and the ability to stay genuinely present when someone brings me a need.

The old monastics built prayer and work into a single rhythm, ora et labora, because they understood that withdrawal and service belong to one another. What is gathered in silence can be carried back into the world. Those of us who help, teach, guide, or care for others sometimes treat continual giving as a sign of devotion. Pouring from an empty well leaves us with less to offer, and eventually with nothing, and the people we serve are the ones who receive the emptiness.

Rest Beyond the Reach of Argument

If you are anything like me, good intentions will lose.

Rest needs a structure strong enough to protect it from the person you become when the inbox is full, and everything feels urgent. Put one real period of rest into your calendar, a week, a weekend, or one guarded day each month, sized to the life you actually have. It does not need France, a pilgrimage route, or a heavy pack. It needs to be planned ahead, protected, and difficult to bargain away, so that when the time arrives, the decision has already been made.

My own practice remains imperfect. I still give advice about rest that I fail to follow most weeks. Once a year, through structure rather than strength of character, I step away, walk until the clamor quiets and the world comes back into view, and remember what the work is for. Much of what I give during the rest of the year begins there.

What is one period of real rest you could put on your calendar now, far enough ahead that the decision will already be made when the time arrives? Who, besides you, might be served by your taking it? I would be glad to hear in the comments.

If you find this useful, please like or leave a comment.

Leave a comment

The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is available to you wherever you are walking this week.

Where Insight Meets Earth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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I walked 98.9 miles across southern France in June and never meditated once.

At least, I never meditated the way the instruction books mean it. Classical walking meditation asks you to rest your attention on the soles of your feet, on your breath, on the lifting and settling of each step. I practiced that way for years, and it kept me sealed inside my own head while the living world went on around me, unmet.

For years, I felt something real happening on those walks and had no words for it. I had also absorbed the rule most of us are handed: that meditation, done right, means stillness, silence, and solitude, and that anything else is a lesser substitute, a beginner’s compromise on the way to the cushion. By that rule, whatever I was doing on the trail did not count. What follows is the language I finally found and how I earned it.

The Direction Nobody Asks About

Most conversations about meditation focus on posture and place.

Seated or moving, cushion or trail, indoors or out. The more useful question is one I rarely hear asked: which direction is your attention pointed? Seated meditation turns attention inward, in stillness. Walking meditation, as usually taught, turns attention inward while moving. The feet become an anchor, the path becomes background, and the practice remains a private event that happens to occur outdoors. A person can walk a forest trail this way for an hour and never actually meet the forest.

Contemplative walking reverses the direction. The silence is the same. The direction is different.

The old rule had it partly right. The silence is essential, and I keep it for hours at a stretch. What the rule mistook was the rest: the stillness and the solitude were never the point, only the container one tradition used. Walking keeps the silence and trades the container, and nothing about the practice becomes lesser for moving through a field rather than sitting in a room.

Two Definitions, Six Years in the Making

I want to give you the definitions as I now hold them and be honest about how long they took.

For years, I practiced without words for what I was doing. I knew it was not walking meditation as the books taught it, and I knew it was not hiking with a spiritual mood attached, but when people asked what I did on the Camino, I reached for other people’s language and felt it miss. The words arrived slowly, tested against hundreds of miles, revised after each summer, and they only settled into their current form this year, in time to be said aloud last week to a gathering in The EcoSystem community of the Wild Church Network and the Center for Wild Spirituality, the community where I trained and was ordained.

Here is the first, the practice itself:

Every word earned its place. Slowly, because the pace is the door, and hurry seals it. In silence, because the narrating mind blocks the meeting, and this took me the longest to learn, since I resisted the idea that my own commentary was the obstacle. Attention given, rather than paid, because giving is a gift and paying is a transaction, and the living world is owed the former. The second half, about silence, is the correction I most needed: for years I treated silence as going without, a discipline of subtraction. It is the opposite. It is preparation for company.

Here is the second, the larger claim:

This one distinguishes what I do from the two things it is most often mistaken for. Pilgrimage, as usually imagined, treats walking as transit, the holy thing waiting at the far end. Exercise with reflection added treats walking as a container; the body is busy while the mind does the real work. Both make walking instrumental. My claim, and it took all six Caminos to trust it, is that the walking is the encounter, the sacred met stride by stride, and the company of the living world is present the whole way, whether we are quiet enough to notice or too loud to be reached.

When I presented both definitions to the gathering last week, the room did something I did not expect. They took the words further than I had.

What the Old Monks Knew

This distinction is older than it sounds.

The Christian monastic tradition separated meditatio from contemplatio. Meditatio is the active, discursive work, the mind chewing and turning over. Contemplatio is receptive beholding, being with, being met. Most modern meditation, seated or walking, is meditatio in new clothes. What I practice on the Camino is closer to the old contemplatio, and the whole body does it: the rhythm of steps, the breath, the fatigue, the weather on the skin. Hour after hour, the planning mind quiets, and we open to wonder.

This history matters because it means the practice carries a lineage. If something real has been happening on your walks, you have been practicing a mode of contemplation that the monasteries named a thousand years ago, and the rule most of us inherited, stillness or nothing, kept only half of what the tradition actually held. Contemplative walking recovers the other half and gives it back to the body and the Land.

One Being at a Time

Here is what the practice keeps teaching me, and what the gathering seized on most.

Attention on a contemplative walk is never drawn to the landscape in general. It is drawn to a singular being. This tree, not the forest. This cow, not the herd. This moss on this stone. On the June walk, the Land offered itself back exactly that way, one being at a time: a cow in a field of flowers who [met my eyes and held them], two frogs in a pond outside Espalion whose [calling pulled me off the path], a stream that [asked nothing of me at all], a full day of rain that became [one of the fullest days of the week].

None of that was scenery. Each was a meeting, and each required silence first, since a mind still narrating cannot be interrupted by a frog.

When I described this to the gathering, the room named something I had been circling for years without saying plainly: the agency runs both ways. The walker does not only pay attention. The Land calls out. The cow turned her head first. The frogs raised their voices. The initiative so often belongs to the living world, and the practice is mostly a matter of becoming quiet enough to be reachable.

Any Path Will Do

You do not need a route across France.

The practice travels in three movements, and they fit the path outside your own door. Walk slower than feels natural. Turn attention outward, toward one living being. Let silence do the work. That is the whole method. The sidewalk maple, the crow on the wire, the weed in the fence line are all kin, all capable of the meeting, and the only equipment is a pace and a quiet you choose.

If meditation has ever left you feeling sealed inside your own head, or if you set it aside years ago because stillness never fit you, the practice may simply have been pointed in the wrong direction. Turn it around. The living world has been waiting on the other side of the silence.

What walk, or pilgrimage, has stayed with you, and why? I would be glad to hear about it in the comments.

If you find this useful, please like or leave a comment.

Leave a comment

The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is available to you wherever you are walking this week.

Where Insight Meets Earth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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The change you brought home from the mountain is supposed to fade.

Everyone knows the script. The retreat ends, the vacation ends, the pilgrimage ends, and for a week, you are different, calmer, clearer, resolved. Then the inbox and the calendar do their patient work, and within a month you are who you were, holding a few photographs and a faint guilt about how quickly it all wore off. If you have ever come home from something that mattered and watched it evaporate, you know the quiet grief of it, and you may have concluded that the change was never real.

Six weeks ago I finished my sixth Camino, 98.9 miles alone through southern France. By the script, the walk should be well faded by now.

Something different keeps happening instead, and it has changed what I think integration actually is.

What Faded, Honestly

Some of it did wear off, and I want to say so plainly.

The trail rhythm went first. On the Camino, by the third day, the releasing happens on its own, the mind loosening with every hour of silence. At home the releasing is work again. The unbroken days of walking are gone, replaced by hours and appointments, and I cannot pretend my attention in week six matches my attention on the Aubrac. Anyone who tells you the pilgrimage state survives ordinary life intact is selling something.

What faded was the condition. What keeps arriving is the meaning, and I did not expect the difference.

The Walk Keeps Sending Word

The cow found me again in the second week of July.

I was on an ordinary morning walk near home, nowhere special, half thinking about the day ahead, when the memory of her eye arrived, the wet dark of it, my own small reflection inside, and with it something new I had not seen in June: how much of my life I spend looking without any willingness to be looked at. The frogs have come back too, usually when I am rushing, their racket rising in memory precisely when I am about to walk past something. The day of rain returns whenever the weather turns, and I catch myself wishing it away.

I did not summon any of this. The walk sends it. Moments I thought were finished keep arriving with more in them than they held at the time, the way a letter can say more on the third reading. Six weeks on, I understand things about that week in France that I did not understand while walking it.

This is what the title of this post means, and I mean it almost literally. My Camino walk finished in June. Its walking of me continues, working through what happened at its own pace, delivering the meaning in installments on ordinary mornings.

The Ordinary Mornings Themselves

The practice that carries all this is small, and I want to describe it as best I can.

Most mornings, I am outside early with Winston and Banks, our two pugs, who conduct their own unhurried investigations of the same stretch of ground they investigated yesterday. Their pace is a teacher. While they read the grass, I stand with the morning, the breeze, the birds starting up, one particular tree I have come to know. Some mornings that is the whole practice, ten minutes of being where I am while two small dogs demonstrate what thorough attention looks like. In Paris, the same practice happens on the pavement, a pause with a plane tree on an ordinary street.

Nothing about this resembles a pilgrimage. That turns out to be the point.

The mornings do something better than preserve the Camino. They keep me findable when it sends word. The cow arrived on a dog walk. The frogs arrive when I am nearly late for something. The walk is alive on its own, and the small daily practice, mostly a matter of keeping some silence in the morning, keeps me available to it, the way keeping the door unlocked welcomes the guest while leaving the arriving to them.

The Meaning Arrives in Installments

Here is the reframe that these six weeks have taught me.

I used to treat coming home as a preservation problem: how to keep the retreat state from fading, how to hold on to what the trail gave. Preservation always fails, which is why the script of the fading change feels so inevitable. The state does fade. It is supposed to. What endures, if you stay findable, is the working of the experience in you, the meaning that was packed too tightly into the moment to be understood there and unfolds afterward, on its own schedule, in installments.

The pilgrimage was one week. The arriving, it turns out, takes much longer, and may be the larger part of the walk.

If you have come home from something that mattered and watched the glow wear off, consider that the wearing off may be only the first chapter. The experience may still be in transit toward you. The question is only whether you keep a few quiet minutes in your days where its deliveries can find you, a morning walk, a pause with one tree, ten unhurried minutes anywhere at all.

The Camino ended in June. It has not finished with me, and I have stopped wanting it to hurry.

What experience of yours might still be arriving, weeks or years after it ended, and where does it tend to find you? I would be glad to hear about it in the comments.

If you find this useful, please like or leave a comment.

Leave a comment

The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is available to you wherever you are walking this week.

Where Insight Meets Earth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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(This is the video of these little frogs I took that became the inspiration for this post)

Loving the Earth has become heavy work.

If you care about the living world these days, most of what arrives under that care is grief. The news carries losses too large to hold, the forecasts run in one direction, and the love itself starts to feel like standing watch at something vast and slipping. Many of the people I walk with and write for carry this quietly. They love nature so much, and from such a distance, that they have almost stopped feeling it. Francis Weller, in his classic text about grief, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, writes that grief and love are two ends of the same current, and that sorrow left untended will eventually dam the whole stream. The relationship becomes a relationship with an idea, and the idea is mostly sorrow, and sorrow at a planetary scale eventually goes numb, because no heart was built to hold a planet.

I carry it too. Which is why I want to tell you about two loud frogs in a pond outside Espalion.

A Morning I Nearly Walked Past

I had left the town about thirty minutes before, on a morning of light rain, the invigorating kind that wakes the smells of the path.

The trail along that stretch had been recently renovated, one of those local nature paths that are appearing more and more across rural France, built so the people who live there can walk out among their own fields and ponds. I saw the pond off the path. I noted it the way a walker notes things, and I would have kept going. I had many kilometers ahead and a rhythm to keep, and a pond is a pond.

Then the frogs started up, and they were not asking politely.

The calling was loud enough to stop me mid-stride, an urgent, ratcheting racket rising off the water, and I gently stepped off the path to find it. Two frogs, close together in the shallows, one seemingly on top of the other, calling with their whole bodies. A mating, I think, or the urgent business leading to one. I stood in the light rain at the edge of a small French pond and watched two frogs wholly consumed by the oldest work there is, entirely indifferent to the man with the pack standing a few meters away.

I stayed for a few minutes. I recorded the short video above because it seemed like something worth capturing, given how freely they were sharing. As I continued walking, a word came to mind that I hadn’t anticipated.

I felt honored.

Honored by Frogs

It is a strange word for it, and it is the accurate one.

Honored the way you feel when you witness something real that was not performed for you and did not require you. The frogs were not scenery arranged along my route. They were two particular beings in the middle of their own urgent morning, and the pond was theirs, and the rain was theirs, and I happened to be allowed at its edge. Nothing about the moment was large. It was two small lives in a puddle of a pond on a local trail, and it moved me more than any vista of that entire day’s walk.

Here is what I noticed in myself afterward, and this is the part I most want to share. Standing at that pond, I felt none of the heaviness. No grief, no helplessness, no watch-keeping over something vast and slipping. What I felt was delight, and interest, and that odd gratitude, the whole live current of feeling that my love of nature was supposed to contain and so rarely does anymore.

The frogs gave me back the feeling, and they did it by being small.

The Size of Things We Can Actually Love

You cannot hold a relationship with a planet.

You can grieve one, worry over one, sign petitions for one, and all of that matters. However, none of it feels like love because love is a relationship, and relationships occur between particular beings at particular times.

Two frogs can be met. A planet can only be mourned. When our care for the living world is conducted entirely at the scale of the whole Earth, it is conducted at the one scale where encounter is impossible, and a love with no encounters in it will eventually go numb, no matter how sincere it is.

The frogs were not a small version of loving the Earth. They were the actual thing. The love of the living world, when it is alive, is made of exactly such meetings, one pond, one morning, two loud particular beings, and a person willing to leave the path. The vast grief is real and has its place. It cannot be the whole diet. Kinship needs bodies, and bodies come one and two at a time.

I would have walked past. That is the detail I keep returning to. The pond was visible, and I saw it, and it took two frogs calling at full volume to actually stop me. The living world had to interrupt me to be met, and I am someone who walks hundreds of kilometers a year for precisely this. If it takes that much to stop me, I understand what it takes to stop anyone.

Your Pond Is Closer Than You Think

The frogs are not only in France.

Within a short walk of where you live, particular beings are going about their urgent business right now, in the strip of wet ground behind the parking lot, the pond in the local park, the hedge the sparrows argue in. The renovated trail I walked was built for exactly this, for local people to meet their own fields and water. Your equivalent exists. The question is only whether you are stoppable, whether one small loud life is allowed to interrupt your route and your rhythm and pull you three meters off the path.

If your love of the living world has gone heavy and abstract, I am not going to tell you to care less about the whole. I am telling you, the whole is not where the feeling lives. Go be honored by something small this week. Let it be busy and indifferent to you, and let it not need you at all, and see what comes back.

The grief is real. So are the frogs.

Where has a small life stopped you lately, and did you let it? I would be glad to hear about it in the comments.

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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is available to you wherever you are walking this week.

Where Insight Meets Earth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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There is a voice that grades your quiet moments.

You know the one. It rereads the email after you send it, hunting for the wrong word. It sits in the meeting, scoring your last comment while everyone else has moved on. If you are a student, it hovers over the finished essay, asking whether it was ever good enough to hand in. It follows you home, checks how the meditation is going while you meditate, watches you rest, and asks whether you are resting well. Long after the day’s audience has gone home, it stays on duty, narrating and scoring, and because it lives in your own head, there is nowhere it cannot follow you.

I want to name what that voice actually is, because for years I mistook it for awareness. It is a supervisor. Its work is control, keeping you performing to standard even when no one is there to perform for. A life supervised without relief, including in the hours you call rest, is a life short of freedom, however alone you manage to be.

I learned this from a stream in France, but first, I had to catch the supervisor traveling with me.

The Watcher I Carried onto the Camino

I walk the Camino alone each summer as a personal retreat, in silence, and you might think that settles it.

No conversation, no obligations, no one for hundreds of miles who knows my name. By the common measure of freedom, a person walking alone through rural France has as much of it as anyone alive. Yet in the first days of a walk, I can catch the old voice still at work. How is the retreat going? Am I present enough yet? Was that hour contemplative or merely tired? The supervisor had packed itself in my bag, and it was grading my solitude the way it grades everything else.

That is the honest and slightly embarrassing truth about self-monitoring. It needs no audience. It is the audience, portable and permanent, and even a pilgrimage can become one more performance reviewed from the inside.

Alone, in silence, on an ancient path, I remained short of fully free, because I was never actually alone. The watcher was there.

The Stream That Had No Opinion of Me

Partway through the final morning, the path crossed a stream, and I stopped beside it.

I had nowhere to be by any hour, so I stayed, longer than a rest needed. The water came down over the stones and went on under the trees, doing what it had been doing before I arrived and would keep doing after I left. It carried on entirely without reference to me. Nearly everything else in a day responds to us, people answer, screens measure, even the dog reads your mood, and the supervisor lives on all of it, combing every response for a verdict on how you are doing.

While I sat there, a cow came down the far bank and drank. The stream gave her what she came for and kept moving, the same sound over the same stones, unchanged by being needed. Even met directly by another life, it carried on, offering without tallying what it gave. I have never once managed to give that way, without some part of me recording the gift.

The stream withheld all of it. It offered no reaction to interpret, no progress to assess, no mirror at all. My attention went out to the water, and I found nothing there about me.

The voice went quiet. It had been given nothing to grade, and the supervisor, unemployed, sat down. What flooded into the vacancy was a kind of liberty I had almost forgotten, attention with no manager attached, the first unsupervised minutes I could remember in a long while.

What the Lightness Was Telling Me

The relief by the water was pleasant. What it revealed mattered more.

That lightness was diagnostic. It was the feel of being uncontrolled, and the strangeness of the feeling told me how constant the control had been. You do not notice a weight you have carried for years until something lifts it, and then the lightness itself becomes the measure of the load. Sitting by water that asked nothing of me, I could finally feel how much of my ordinary attention goes to management, the constant quiet work of watching myself on behalf of standards no one present was holding me to.

This, I think, is also why the silence of walking matters so much to me, and why, on this same Camino, a cow in a field could meet my eyes and reach me. The supervisor has to go off duty before anything living can get through. Freedom from the watcher is more than rest. It is the condition for being met.

Company That Asks Nothing of You

You do not need a stream in France, though I recommend one if it ever offers itself.

You need something nearby that carries on without reference to you. Moving water is the classic company, a creek, a fountain, rain working down a gutter, though wind in a single tree will do it just as well. Sit near it without a task. Let your attention go out to it and stay there a while. Then notice, without turning it into one more evaluation, what the voice does when there is nothing for it to score.

You may find, as I did, that the quiet arriving in that moment is your own company as it feels when no one is supervising it, including you.

The stream was still running when I shouldered my pack. It had never once looked up.

Where do you go when you need to be somewhere that asks nothing of you, and what happens to the grading voice when you get there? I would be glad to hear about it in the comments.

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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is available to you wherever you are walking this week.

Where Insight Meets Earth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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One morning on the Camino, in a field bright with summer flowers, a cow turned her head and looked into my eyes.

I stopped.

We stood only a few feet apart, close enough that I could see the long lashes framing her dark eye, and close enough to see my own small reflection looking back at me beneath the grey French sky. For a long moment, neither of us moved. She held my gaze with a calm, unhurried attention that matched my own.

I have been seen by people who were looking right through me.

That morning, in a quiet field along the Camino, a cow looked at me, and I felt actually seen. I asked quietly if I might take her picture, and she held still. The image above is that exact moment, real and unedited.

The encounter stayed with me for the rest of the day. It also showed me something I had been learning over hundreds of miles of pilgrimage: walking long enough and quietly enough changes not only what you notice. It changes your capacity to be met.

The Ache I Want to Name

You can believe the living world is full of fellow beings and still go years without feeling one look back at you.

Many of us hold the conviction sincerely. The crow is someone. The old tree is someone. The cow in the field is a life rather than a thing. We would defend those beliefs without hesitation, and yet, if we are honest, many of us cannot remember the last time another living being met us eye to eye, and we felt it land.

A conviction you never get to experience thins over time into an opinion you merely hold.

That morning, the distance between believing and experiencing closed.

A Meeting, Not a Revelation

I have known for a long time that a cow is someone, not something.

Long enough that I stopped eating them more than twenty years ago. This is not the story of discovering that animals have inner lives. I never doubted that. What happened in the field was a meeting, the kind I had believed was possible for decades but had rarely been still enough to receive.

I had simply never been this near, in this way, at this pace.

What the Camino Had Been Loosening

I had been walking alone since early morning.

If you have never walked a pilgrimage like the Camino, one of its quiet gifts is how it strips away the constant narration of daily life. After hours on foot without conversation, without notifications, without rushing toward the next obligation, something inside begins to settle. You stop composing your day and begin receiving it.

By midmorning, I was moving through open pastures, surrounded by wildflowers and grazing cattle. I was not looking for an insight or a memorable moment. I was walking, and that was all.

That openness, I now think, was the true gift of the walk.

Close Enough to See My Own Reflection

One of the cows stood near the path, and as I came level with her, she turned her head.

We looked at one another. I could see the wet darkness of her eye, and within it my own small reflection beneath the grey sky. I was inside her looking as she was inside mine. There was no fear in her gaze and no dullness, only a quiet and steady attention that met my own.

For a minute or two, nothing more was needed.

What the Silence Had Made Room For

I do not think this meeting would have happened a few hours earlier, or on a different kind of day.

The cow would have been no less present. She was wholly herself before I arrived and after I left. The difference was in me. Had I walked near that pasture talking, checking my phone, or hurrying toward the next village, I would have seen only another brown shape in the grass. The hours of silence had made me available.

She offered the look. The quiet in me allowed me to receive it as the gift it was.

As I walked on, I found myself meeting everything around me with the same attention. The pastures looked fuller, and the birdsongs came clearer, though nothing in the landscape had changed. I had.

Perhaps that is one of pilgrimage’s deepest invitations, to become someone able to receive a world that has been greeting us the whole time.

The Part You Can Bring

I cannot give you the closeness I met that morning, since that part was given rather than arranged.

The openness, though, is something each of us can practice. Whether you are walking a pilgrimage across France, sitting beneath a familiar tree near home, or pausing to meet the gaze of a dog or a crow or a neighborhood cat, the invitation is much the same. The belief that they are someone carries you most of the way. The step that remains is presence, going slow, growing quiet, and staying long enough that when another life turns toward you, you are there to receive the greeting.

How About You?

Have you ever had a moment when another living being seemed to truly meet your gaze? Where were you, and how did it change you, even briefly? I would be glad to hear your story in the comments.

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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is available to you wherever you are walking this week.

Where Insight Meets Earth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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The destination is the least important part of a pilgrimage, and likely the least important part of most things worth doing.

We are taught the opposite. Reach the goal, arrive, finish, and the meaning will be waiting there. It rarely is. The meaning was in the walking the whole time, and one hidden village on the Aubrac made it impossible for me to forget.

Coming Down off the Plateau

The village was not there, and then it was.

For hours I had walked the Aubrac Plateau in steady rain, the plateau stretching grey and treeless in every direction, the trail dropping at last into a wooded valley where the Boralde runs down toward the Lot River. I came through the beech wood with the river loud somewhere below me before I could see it, and then the path turned and Saint-Chély-d’Aubrac was in front of me, rooftops in a clearing, a stone bridge, the whole end of the day arriving at once.

I had not been walking toward it. I had been walking down.

Some villages on the Camino announce themselves from a long way off. You catch a church tower or a cluster of pale stone across a valley, and you walk toward that point for an hour while it grows slowly larger. The approach becomes a measurement. How much farther, how many more turns, your eyes fixed on the place you have not yet reached, while your feet do the work of closing the gap.

You know this kind of approach, I think. The thing you can see coming for a long time, and the way the waiting for it can quietly empty the hours in between.

The Bridge That Has Waited 600 Years

You cross into the village over the Pont des Pèlerins, the Pilgrims’ Bridge.

It spans the Boralde in two stone arches, narrow and worn, built in the 1300s and crossed since then by every pilgrim who has come down off the plateau on the way to Santiago. On its parapet stands a small cross of the same age, carved with the figure of a pilgrim, one hand resting on his staff, a rosary held in the other. Six centuries of weather have softened his face nearly to nothing. The cross was placed there to give heart to tired walkers at the end of the descent, which is to say it was made for the exact condition I was in, soaked and emptied out and glad past words to see a roof.

I have come into this village more than once. The photograph that illustrates its Wikipedia page is one I made here in 2022, on an earlier Camino, which is its own quiet lesson in returning to the same places until they begin to know you.

Stand on that bridge a moment with me. Whatever you are walking through right now, tired or hopeful or unsure, you are not the first to come down off a hard height and cross here glad of a welcome. The worn pilgrim has watched the soaked and the weary arrive for 600 years. You are somewhere in that long company, and so am I.

Why a Village Out of Sight Changes the Walk

Here is what the hidden village taught me.

When you can see the destination, you walk toward it, and the seeing pulls you out of the miles you are actually in. The path becomes the distance between you and the thing you want, ground to be covered rather than ground to be met. A village you cannot see offers you nothing to aim at. There is only the descent, the rain on the beech leaves, the sound of a river you have not yet found, and the connection with the natural world along the path. Saint-Chély withholds itself, and in withholding it keeps you inside the walk, because the walk is the only thing on offer until the village chooses to appear.

Then it appears, and because you were never allowed to want it from a distance, it arrives as a gift rather than as a goal you finally reached.

Sit with your own attention for a moment. Where are your eyes fixed today, on the ground under you, or on some point out ahead you have not yet reached? If you have been straining toward that point for a while now, what has been passing by unnoticed while you stared at it?

I do not ask in order to hand you an answer. The question is the practice. Pilgrimage works this way in miniature. The learning lives in the walking, in what the path does to you across the long hours, and the arrival is one more thing the path hands you along the way, not the reward waiting at the finish.

What Arrives When You Stop Watching for It

You do not need a plateau or an old stone bridge for this.

Most of what is worth doing slowly works the way that descent worked. You fix on the outcome, the finished thing, the place you are trying to reach, and the fixing quietly robs you of the days you are passing through to get there. The hours stop being where you live and turn into the gap before you arrive. A walk teaches the correction in the most physical way I know. Ease off the straining toward the end, stay in the ground under your feet, and what you were rushing toward tends to arrive on its own, often in the moment you have finally stopped watching for it.

The best arrivals are the ones you could not have walked straight toward.

I came down off the Aubrac that afternoon wanting nothing but to be dry, and the village met me before I knew it was near, the way the good things often do. The cross stood waiting where it has waited for 600 years. The bridge carried me over the Boralde as it has carried the soaked and the weary for longer than my own country has had a name. I was not at the end of anything. I was still walking, and the village was simply one more gift of the walking.

So I leave you where the path leaves all of us, still in the middle of it. Wherever you are headed this week, let your eyes come back to the ground you are on. What you are walking through is the pilgrimage.

I would like to hear from you. What are you walking toward right now, and what might you be missing while your eyes stay fixed on it? Leave it below, and I will read every one.

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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is available to you wherever you are walking this week.

Where Insight Meets Earth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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One of the longest walking days of my recent Camino came in the rain.

Not drizzle, and not a passing shower. Gentle, steady rain, hours of it, falling on me the whole day. I walked from morning into afternoon, soaked through, and I have been turning that day over in my mind since I came home, because it gave me something I did not expect.

I thought I would remember it as a day to get through.

How the rain changed the day

The rain did not ruin the day. It rearranged which parts of me were doing the walking.

On a clear day, I walk mostly with my eyes. The long views across the plateau, the trail ahead, the sky doing its work above. In the rain, the view closed in and softened, the far hills went to grey, and my sight pulled back to what was near: a single wet stone, the grass bent under the weight of the water, drops gathering and falling from the brim of my hood. The world shrank to a few feet around me, and inside that smaller world I noticed more, not less.

Then the other senses came forward to fill the space my eyes had given up.

The smell arrived first and strongest. Wet earth has a depth that dry ground keeps hidden, and by mid-morning, the whole landscape was giving it up, the grass, trees, bushes, soil, and the stones all breathing out at once. Sound came next and came near. Rain on my hood, rain on the leaves, water running in the ruts and the ditches and down the rocky stretches of the path, the whole day murmuring around me from every side. The feel of it never left. Cool against my face, steady on my shoulders, the particular weight of soaked wool and wet skin that stays with you hour after hour and keeps reminding you that you are here, in this, now.

By afternoon, I was not enduring the rain. I was inside the day in a way a dry afternoon rarely manages.

Why I keep returning to it

I have walked clear days on the Camino that I can barely call back, and I will remember this soaked one for a long time.

That is the part worth sitting with. The day I would have called a loss became one of the fullest of the walk, and it became full through the very thing I would have wished away. The rain shut down my easy sense and woke the others, and four awake senses gave me more of the day than two comfortable ones ever had. The plateau reached me through skin, nose, and ear because the rain made the usual path, my eyes, the least of it.

The fullest day was not the fairest one. It was the one I had to meet with my whole body, and it invited me to deepen how I meet and connect with the world.

How this connects with Sunday, the Summer Solstice

The Solstice arrives in two days, the longest day of the year.

We picture it as the brightest, the sun high and the light stretched long, and we half wait for it to feel like something. Most of us will meet it in ordinary life, though, at a desk, on a sidewalk, in a kitchen with the window open. No plateau, no trail, no ceremony. The day can pass entirely unmarked, the most daylight of the whole year spent without our once looking up into it.

My day in the rain changed what I want to bring to this one.

Not the most light, but rather the most attention. The longest day offers itself fully whatever the sky is doing, grey or gold, on a pilgrim road or a city block, and the only real question is how completely I am willing to meet it. The rain taught me I do not need fair conditions to be reached. I need to show up to the day with more than my eyes.

Meeting the longest day, wherever you stand in it

You do not need a route across France or Spain for this, nor do you need good weather.

On Sunday, wherever you are, give the longest day a few minutes of your whole attention. Step outside. Notice what your eyes show you, then let the other senses come forward the way they do in the rain: what the air smells like, what you can hear underneath the traffic or the quiet, what the day feels like on your skin. Let the season reach you through more than sight. The solstice is not asking you to travel anywhere. It is asking you to be fully present to the longest day you will be given this year.

A day of rain along this year’s Camino taught me that fullness has little to do with the conditions and everything to do with how completely you enter them.

Meet this Solstice with your whole self, whatever the sky decides. The light is high. Stand out in it.

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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is fully available to begin today.

Where Insight Meets Earth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Last week, I finished walking 98.9 miles in 7 days.

The route was the Via Podiensis, the Le Puy section of the Camino de Santiago in France, a 159-kilometer stretch of ancient pilgrim path across the Aubrac plateau and down into the river valleys. This was my sixth Camino. I walked it alone and mostly in silence, as I do every year, a private retreat I take for one reason that took me years to put into words.

I was home less than a day before I missed it.

What I came home without

What I missed was the daily action of moving through the living world with nothing in between.

A week of walking hands you that without any effort at all. You rise, you walk, you watch the light cross a field where cattle are still settled in the grass, you stop where a stream runs over the path and drink in the sound of it, and slowly your mind releases the screens and the deadlines and the low constant noise of modern life. By the third day, the release happens on its own. The Aubrac in June is something to long for, yet the views were never the center of it.

The weather belongs to it too. One afternoon, the rain came sideways across the plateau, and I walked 4 hours soaked through, and the cold and the wet and the smell of the risen earth only pulled me further inside the world. Across the clouds and patches of fog, a stone village would appear down in the valley with its lights on, and the day would close the way a day is meant to close.

A week of that changes how I pay attention.

The daily practice, and its limit

I keep up the practice for the rest of the year, whether in cities or a more rural environment.

In Paris, I stop at particular trees and bushes on my way across the city and stand with them for a minute. In New York City, I find a few minutes in whatever pocket of green sits between the buildings. In rural upstate New York, where the land goes quiet, I sit outside and let the breeze move over me until I feel like part of what is moving. These minutes hold the thread. They keep it from breaking through the long run of ordinary days.

A minute with a tree holds the thread. A week on the trail braids it into something I can live from.

The continuous days reach what the minutes cannot. Walking hour after hour, the body sets a rhythm the mind eventually follows, and the company of the living world stops being a place I visit and becomes the medium I think inside. The daily minutes remind me of the connection. The week restores it.

Why I go out to go in

For me, the way inward runs outward first.

I have walked this route alone for years without being able to say plainly why. This year, somewhere on the Aubrac, the words finally arrived. I quiet my mind by walking into the middle of the living world until the part of me that performs and plans runs out of things to do. The forest never asks me to empty myself. It fills the space my worries usually occupy, and they find nowhere left to sit.

Going out is how I go in.

Where stillness stops working for me

Many contemplative traditions teach the opposite, and they teach it beautifully.

Sit. Be still. Draw the senses inward. Find the depth beneath the noise. For a great many people, that is the doorway home, and I would never talk anyone out of a practice that settles them into themselves. Seated stillness has carried more seekers across more centuries than I could count.

It does not carry me.

Held as my only practice, stillness in isolation works against its own promise. Sealed away from wind and bird and water, I do not sink toward anything deeper. I feel the living connections that feed me thinning out one by one, until the quiet begins to feel like separation rather than presence. The depth I am after is drawn from the relationship with what is alive around me. Close the door on the living world, and the source itself goes quiet.

If your practice has never quite fit you

You may have felt some version of this without ever having the words for it.

You were handed a practice, most likely stillness, and told it was the high road inward. You have tried. You sit, and rather than settling, you drift, or tense, or stand up, somehow lonelier than when you sat down. You decided the fault was yours. The mismatch may be simpler than that. You were shown one model and never offered another.

Here is the other one, the one I walk by.

Movement can be the way in. Attention to the living world can be the way in. You do not need 98.9 miles or a route across France. You need a tree you visit often enough to recognize, a strip of green between two buildings, a few minutes of wind on your skin with your attention turned fully outward. Begin where you already are, a city block or a back road, and let the walking and the watching do the work that sitting was supposed to do for you.

The practice bends to the life you have. A pilgrim road, a Paris sidewalk, and an upstate field at dusk all work. The setting matters far less than the willingness to stop monitoring yourself long enough to be met by something alive.

I came home from 98.9 miles, missing the daily walk, and the missing pointed straight at the thing I keep relearning. The deeper I want to go, the more fully I have to enter the living world to get there.

I go out so I can go in. You might find the same door standing open where you are.

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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is fully available to begin today.

Where Insight Meets Earth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Yesterday morning, five tracks crossed the Aubrac plateau side by side in the same red earth.

I am on Day 5 of my sixth Camino de Santiago walking from Saint-Chély-d’Aubrac to Espalion along the GR65. The ruts looked like separate paths. They climbed the same rise, toward the same stand of beech, under the same low sky, with cloud gathering on the far horizon.

So much talk of belonging asks us to fall in line.

Match the pace. Hold the same beliefs. Walk in step, or walk away. Discount the difference, exile it, or force it to change.

The path teaches something quieter, and the gathering weather makes it urgent.

Two walkers moved ahead at their own speeds. The dry stone wall ran beside them, laid by hands long gone. The grass, the yellow flowers, the beech on the rise were all leaning the same way the rain was coming from. Even the herds of cattle kept to their own groups across the pasture.

None of it walked in step. All of it belonged to the same living direction.

That is the hope I carry toward the storm. A living planet does not survive by marching in unison. It survives by holding direction together, each in its own steps, whatever the weather.

So choose one. The oak that has weathered storms you will never see. The crow working the same field you cross. The walker whose pace is nothing like yours. Learn its name. Let it become someone, not something.

Stay open to where yours appears, because it rarely arrives where you went looking. It comes in the unearned moment, the gift beside the path you did not set out to find.

You are not building this kinship. You are waking to it.

All life is already connected. Your only task today is to answer.

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My TGV is stopped on a track in the middle of the French countryside, and this is the first time in days I have been still.

We are eight days into a heatwave gripping much of Europe, over 90F / 32C, and everyone is on edge and dragging, myself included.

If your own week refuses to behave, if the calm you planned keeps getting interrupted by things that actually matter, you already know this terrain. The week I had set aside for a quiet departure to the Camino de Santiago went elsewhere. An electrical problem I could not ignore. A stretch of caregiving for someone who matters to me and needed me close. Neither was planned. Both were worth every hour they asked of me, and I would choose them again without hesitation.

Step four of my Rule of Life is to hold space for service. This week those words stopped being a phrase and became two choices with real cost, made gladly. One was a caregiving need for someone whose wellbeing was worth far more than my tidy schedule. The other was an electrical problem that was not only mine to solve, a safety issue that could have put others at risk had I left it for later. Both were right. What they revealed together was humbling. There is a gap between what I commit to, what I believe I can finish, and what a single week can actually hold.

I am walking into the Camino with that gap held open rather than closed. Maybe the path is not asking me to do more. Maybe it is asking me to be honest about what is mine to carry.

What do you think?

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I thought I would be calmer than this.

Four days from taking the train here in France to the starting place of my sixth Camino, my mind has been everywhere except settled. I imagined this week as quiet, contemplative, full of slow packing and intentional rest. The reality has been closer to managing a series of practical fires while my body and spirit try to catch up to what is about to happen.

Most writing about preparing for a significant threshold is calm. The serene packing. The still heart. The composed transition. That portrayal is dishonest, and it leaves the rest of us feeling like we are doing our own preparation wrong when life refuses to pause for it. If you are preparing for a meaningful threshold of your own, a pilgrimage, a move, a career change, a medical procedure, a difficult conversation, a creative leap, and your preparation week is not feeling sacred, you can likely relate with me here.

Not so you can be talked out of the scatter. So you can recognize your own ragged readiness in someone else's honest account, and stop waiting for a composure that may never come.

Why Your Preparation Week Probably Looks Nothing Like the Photos

The toenail I injured three weeks ago, unrelated to anything, is still not fully healed. I am alternating between worrying about whether it will hold up over seven days of walking and the deeper memory of last year, when blisters left me genuinely injured by the end of the route.

The heat in France right now is intense. Higher than I expected for late May. My mind keeps running scenarios about pacing, hydration, and the parts of the Aubrac that offer no shade.

My weight is, as always before a Camino, a quiet ongoing concern. I have not been in the shape I wanted to be in. The body I will carry across the GR65 is not the body I imagined I would carry. That is true every year, and every year it lands again as if for the first time.

One of my accommodations along the route, booked back in October, has fallen through. The paperwork failure was on their end, but the consequence is mine, and it also affects the small-group retreat I am guiding through the same stretch in September.

There is work happening in my apartment. There is regular work itself, which has not paused. The air conditioning needs to be connected so I can try to settle and be productive, which feels small until you consider that I am about to leave a Paris apartment closed up for nearly two weeks in the heat.

I imagined I would be still by now. Instead, I am scattered and still suffering from some jetlag.

What Real Threshold Preparation Actually Looks Like

The image of pilgrimage preparation that circulates online tends to be serene. Long quiet evenings. Slow, careful packing. A heart that has already arrived at the path before the body has even left home.

That is not what preparation actually looks like for most of us.

Real preparation is full of unfinished business. The body is not in the shape we hoped for. Something practical is broken, delayed, or unresolved. Old worries return. The mind does not cooperate with the schedule we set for it. The week before the threshold is rarely the calm doorway we imagined. More often, it is the part of the journey we forgot to count.

If you are preparing for a significant transition in your own life, a move, a new role, a difficult conversation, a return to school, a medical procedure, a creative leap, the start or end of a relationship, and the week before is not feeling sacred or settled, you are not doing it wrong.

You are doing it like the rest of us do it.

The threshold does not require perfect preparation. It only requires that you cross it.

What I Am Trusting When I Cannot Be Still

I am trusting that the moment I arrive in Le Puy-en-Velay on Friday, something will shift.

This has been true on every Camino I have walked. The scatter of the week before dissolves into the simplicity of the day before. The day before dissolves into the first morning of walking. The first morning of walking dissolves into the rhythm of the path itself. By the second day, the worry about the toenail, the weight, the heat, and the apartment has been overtaken by the act of walking through a living landscape that does not care about any of it.

The path takes over.

I am also trusting that I will not be walking alone, even when I am alone. In my pocket will be a folded paper carrying the prayer intentions of readers and friends who have sent me what they are carrying. Each morning at first light I will read them slowly. Each day, certain intentions will arise to mind as the path turns or the light shifts. Near the end of the walk, I will burn the paper and let what was carried return to the larger life of the world.

This is one of the gifts of pilgrimage that does not appear in the photographs. The transition from preparation to walking is not graceful. It is more like a release valve. You arrive carrying everything. The path quietly takes most of it from you in the first twenty-four hours, whether you were ready or not.

The intentions I carry travel through that same release. So does whatever is weighing on you, if you have sent something my way.

How to Arrive at a Threshold When You Are Not Ready

If you are also moving toward something significant this week or this month, here is what I would offer from inside my own scatter.

You do not need to arrive at the threshold calm. You need to arrive at it at all.

The preparation that matters is not the kind that looks composed. It is the kind that gets you to the door. Pack the bag imperfectly. Make the phone calls. Solve the practical problems that can be solved. Let the unresolved ones travel with you. Trust that the threshold itself will do work you cannot do in advance.

I am writing this from the same place I am asking you to stand. Not from across the threshold looking back. From four days out, with a sore toenail, an apartment still warming up, a fallen accommodation, and a heart that is not yet still.

I will see what the path does with all of it starting this Saturday.

If you have sent me an intention to carry, it is already on the list. The list closes Wednesday at the end of the day, May 27. If you have something you would like me to carry, a name, a worry, a hope, a grief, the form is here:

https://jeffreykeefer.com/form/camino-prayer-intentions-may-2026/

Religious, spiritual, and secular intentions are all welcome. Names are optional. Anonymous submissions are received with the same attention as named ones.

I will return in early June. Until then, please walk gently with whatever you are carrying. Sometimes the most honest preparation is admitting we are not yet ready, and going anyway.

Please share below if you are also moving toward something significant this week, calm or not. I am reading everything before I leave.

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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is fully available to begin today.

Where Insight Meets Earth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Spring is not about you. It never was.

The maple outside the window has been opening its leaves for two weeks now. The pace is not metaphorical. The leaves are not unfurling in order to teach anyone anything. They are doing what maples do in May, which is a long and specific kind of work involving sugar, water, light, and a hundred small calibrations against frost and wind.

Around the same time, my inbox filled with newsletters explaining what spring means for my personal growth. Bloom where you are planted. Shed what no longer serves you. Plant the seeds of who you are becoming. The language is so widespread by mid-May that it has the quality of weather. You walk through it whether or not you asked to.

The dissonance you may have felt this month is not precious or oversensitive. It is accurate. Something happening outside your window is being conscripted into a story about you, and the conscription is so casual that even careful spiritual writing does it without flinching. Spring becomes the season everyone agrees to use as a self-help framework. The maple is not consulted. The relationship runs one way, and one-way relationships, in nature as in everything else, do not deepen over time.

The grammar of who the season belongs to

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the grammar of animacy, the way our language defaults to treating other species as objects rather than as persons. The default carries into how we write about seasons. Spring becomes a backdrop, a metaphor source, a feeling I have, a lesson I extract. The actual beings doing the work of spring disappear into the scenery.

A different grammar is available. It begins with a question I have been asking myself this May: Who is spring actually for?

The answer is specific and humbling. Spring is for the maple, which is spending enormous metabolic resources to grow this year’s leaves. Spring is for the goldfinches who are eating dandelion seeds that the lawn care industry has spent decades teaching us to poison. Spring is for the moss on the north side of the pavers on the walkway, which is doing its slow patient photosynthesis in the cool damp before summer arrives. Spring is for the bees, who are working from the moment the temperature crosses some threshold none of us can feel. Spring is for ten thousand beings within a hundred yards of wherever you are sitting.

You are welcome to witness it. You are not the audience.

What changes when you stop extracting

Most spring-metaphor language operates like a vending machine. The reader watches the season, takes what it offers, and walks away with insight. The season is treated as a source of personal meaning to be mined.

If you have been doing ecospiritual practice for any length of time, you already know the limit of that arrangement. It does not deepen. It produces the same lessons every May, slightly rephrased. The bloom-where-you-are-planted reader in 2024 receives the same content in 2026.

Another practice is available, and it is the same one the Earth Journaling piece pointed to. You stop asking the season what it has for you. You start asking what the season is doing.

Try it this week with one being. One maple, one patch of clover, one specific bird who is currently in your yard, your park, or the median strip of the street where you live. Watch what that being is actually doing right now in mid-May. Not what it represents. Not what it teaches. What it is doing. Where it puts its energy. What it has not yet started doing that you can predict will arrive in the next two weeks. What it has finished that was happening three weeks ago.

The consequences of this shift are larger than the size of the shift would suggest.

The reciprocity that becomes available

When you stop using spring as a mirror, something else becomes possible. You begin to notice that the maple has been here a long time. That this particular goldfinch is part of a population that has nested in this particular place for generations. That the soil under your feet is older than every spiritual tradition any of us has read.

You begin to register, faintly at first, that the relationship runs both ways. The maple is not noticing you the way you are noticing it. The reciprocity is not symmetrical. The maple is, however, part of an ecosystem you are also part of, and your attention is one of the few offerings you can make that costs the maple nothing.

This is what my Gaulish hearth repeatedly points me back to. The land is kin. Not metaphor kin. Not as if kin. Kin in the older sense, where you have obligations to a being you did not choose and cannot fully understand.

Spring is not about you because spring is about everyone. Including the maple. Including the goldfinch. Including the moss.

You happen to be present for it. That is already a remarkable inheritance.

One small invitation

This week, before you read another newsletter telling you what spring means for your inner work, go outside.

Find one being. Watch what that being is doing for fifteen minutes. Even five minutes if life is too busy. Do not journal yet. Do not extract a lesson. Do not turn it into a metaphor for your own becoming. Just watch.

If you have a sit spot, return to it. If you do not, the bench in your park works, or the patch outside your front door, or the tree you pass on your commute. Specificity matters more than location.

Notice what is happening that has nothing to do with you.

That is where the relationship begins.

Tell me, in the comments: what is one being near you doing right now that has nothing to do with your personal growth? I read every response.

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Carrying your intentions on the Camino

At the end of this month, I begin a solo seven day walk on the GR65, the Le Puy route of the Camino de Santiago in rural France. I will carry a folded piece of paper in my pocket.

If there is a name, a situation, or a quiet request you would like carried with me along the path, you are welcome to send it through the form on my website. Religious, spiritual, and secular intentions are all welcome.

I will print the full list at the end of the day on Wednesday, May 27, and carry it with me beginning May 30. The window is short. Once I leave, the list is set.

Related reading

If this piece pulled at you, two earlier posts go deeper into the same animistic premise.

Earth Journaling: The Practice of Writing What the Earth Gives You offers a writing practice rooted in contact with the more-than-human world rather than reflection about it.

The Sit Spot: The One Practice That Teaches What Walking Cannot is a comprehensive guide to returning to one specific place until that place begins to reveal itself to you.

The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is fully available to begin today.

Where Insight Meets Earth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If this post resonates with you, please like or leave a comment.

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In a few weeks, on May 30, I will begin walking the first section of the Le Puy Camino alone.

This will be my sixth Camino. It will be my second fully solo walk.

Before I leave, I will print the list of intentions on a single sheet of paper, fold it, and carry it in my pocket for the seven days of the walk. Some intentions will arrive with the sender’s name. Others will arrive anonymously. Both are equally welcome, and both will be carried with the same attention.

Some of what I carry will come from people I love. Most will come from readers, friends, and others I have never met, all of them with something they would like another person to think of, quietly and steadily, for an entire week in a place far from ordinary life.

If something has been weighing on you, or someone you love is going through something hard, you do not have to face it alone. For seven days, you and what you are facing will be in my thoughts as I walk through a landscape that has received the weight of pilgrims for over a thousand years.

Why I Carry Intentions While Walking Alone

A solo Camino is often described as a personal retreat.

It is that. It is also, in a quieter way, one of the most relational practices I know.

Walking alone creates a kind of silence that is difficult to find elsewhere. There is very little to manage once the walking begins. The path unfolds. The villages appear when they need to. The cows look up from their grazing as you pass. The wind moves through the beech trees on the high ridges of the Aubrac. The day has its own rhythm, and the living world keeps its own time alongside it.

Within that rhythm, something becomes available.

There are long stretches of hours when my attention is not being asked for anything in particular. That attention does not disappear. It opens.

Carrying intentions is a way of placing that open attention in service of others.

I am not making a claim about outcomes. I am not promising what prayer accomplishes or what the world will do with what is carried. I am saying something simpler. For seven days, in a landscape that has received pilgrims for over a thousand years, I will carry a folded piece of paper in my pocket, and the people I am thinking of will travel with me through fields, woods, and quiet villages, held in the same attention the path itself draws out of me.

The path becomes different when you walk this way.

You are not only walking for yourself.

A Practice Older Than Any One Walk

Pilgrims have carried the intentions of others for as long as pilgrimage has existed.

Those who could not walk sent their concerns with those who could. The journey became something shared. One body walked, but it did not walk alone in purpose.

I am not interested in idealising that history. What matters is what remains available now.

The understanding that walking can be done on behalf of others is still alive in the rhythm of the route itself. When I cross the Aubrac plateau, with its low stone walls and grazing cattle, or move through the river valleys west of Le Puy en Velay, I am stepping into that continuity in a small and human way. The paths have been walked by countless others for these reasons. The land remembers what it has been asked to hold.

The distance is the same. The meaning is not.

How I Carry What Is Given

The practice itself is simple.

At the beginning of each day, usually at first light, I unfold the paper and read what is written there, slowly. I do not try to change anything or direct anything. I let each intention register, the way you might think of a friend before the day begins.

Then I fold the paper, place it back in my pocket, and walk.

Throughout the day, certain intentions return on their own. A change in the wind. A break in the trees where the morning light comes through. A pause beneath a chestnut at midday. A cow looking up from a hedgerow. Someone or something rises into mind, gently, without effort. I do not force this. I allow it.

At the end of the walk, I find a quiet place outside, away from buildings, and I burn the paper. The smoke carries what was written into the air. The ash returns to the earth.

What has been carried is released back into the larger life of the world.

An Invitation, If You Have Something to Send

If there is a name, a situation, or a quiet request you would like carried, you are welcome to send it.

Religious, spiritual, and secular intentions are all welcome. Nothing specific is required.

You can submit your intention through the form on my website here.

I will print the full list at the end of the day on Wednesday, May 27, and carry it with me beginning May 30.

If you are reading this and feel a small pull to send something, I encourage you to follow it. The window is short, and once I leave, the list is set.

If you prefer not to send anything, that is also complete in itself. Pausing to notice what you might have named is already a form of participation.

What Solo Walking Actually Is

Solo walking is often described as solitary. That has not been my experience.

I leave alone. I walk alone. Yet the paper in my pocket connects me, step by step, to a quiet community of people who have entrusted me with something real. The trees know I am carrying something. The wind moves through what I am holding. The streams alongside the path receive the names as I pass.

That, too, is solitude without isolation.

The path holds the one who walks, and it also holds what they carry for others. The living world walks with me and receives what I bring, the way it has received the carrying of pilgrims for over a thousand years.

If you would like me to carry something for you, the form will remain open through Wednesday, May 27. If you have practiced something similar in your own way, I would be glad to hear about it.

If this post resonates with you, please like or leave a comment.

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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is fully available to begin today.

Where Insight Meets Earth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If this post resonates with you, please like or leave a comment.

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If something in you has felt different this week, lighter, more open, harder to ignore, you are not imagining it.

If you have noticed the brightness lingering longer, the trees moving more fully into leaf, the birds louder in the morning, you are already responding to something real. This post is for you.

It is also for those who have heard of Beltaine and quietly set it aside, assuming it belonged to a tradition that was not theirs.

You may be closer to this day than you think.

What Today Actually Marks

Beltaine falls on May 1. It marks one of the four cross-quarter days, the midpoints between the equinoxes and solstices.

This isn’t symbolic; it’s astronomical.

The sun has reached a precise position between spring and summer. The light has shifted enough that the living world responds in visible, physical ways. Plants know. Birds know.

Your body often knows before your mind names it.

This Is Not Only a Celtic Holiday

Beltaine is the Celtic name for this midpoint, and the version of the day that has reached us through European traditions.

The recognition itself is much older and much wider. Cultures across the world have marked these turning points for as long as people have paid attention to the sky and the land. The names differ. The practices differ.

The noticing is shared.

This day isn’t tied to any single tradition. It is about the connection between the Earth and the Sun. As living beings, we all take part in this.

Why You Might Be Feeling It Without Knowing Why

Most of us are not taught to track the year this way.

We are taught dates, not shifts. So when something changes in the season, we often feel it without context. A restlessness. A lift in energy. A sense that something that was closed before has opened.

Beltaine is one of the days that gives that feeling a place to land.

It names what is already happening in you and around you.

How I Am Meeting This Day

My practice today is simple.

I stepped outside, greeted the sun, the birds, and the energies of the Earth, and then paused to listen. Later today, there will be a short wander and likely a sit spot. No formal structure beyond attention.

That is enough.

What You Can Do Today

You do not need to adopt a belief or follow a tradition to honor this day.

Step outside, even briefly. Pause long enough to notice what has changed since last week, what feels more alive, what draws your attention without effort.

Let the day register.

That is the beginning of practice.

A Different Way to Understand Beltaine

Beltaine is not asking you to become someone new. It is asking you to notice that something new is already happening.

Today is one of the oldest invitations the living world offers. It arrives whether or not we name it.

The question is whether you will meet it.

Wherever you are today, step outside, even for a few minutes, and notice what the season is doing. You may find that what you thought was unfamiliar has been quietly speaking to you all along.

Please share below if Beltaine has been part of your practice for a long time, or if today is the first time you have heard of it, and the season has been speaking to you anyway. I welcome you to share your experience however you wish.

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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is fully available to begin today.

If this post resonates with you, please like or leave a comment.

Leave a comment

In a few weeks, I will fly to France and walk the first section of the Le Puy Camino alone.

This will be my sixth Camino, and my second fully solo walk. I will not have a group or walking partner nearby, and that is by my own choice. I am returning to the same stretch I will guide a small group through this September, the section beginning in Le Puy-en-Velay and continuing southwest. It is the oldest documented section of the medieval pilgrimage routes, and by the shared judgment of those who have walked many of them, one of the most beautiful.

I am walking alone for a reason I want to name clearly.

Most people who consider a solo Camino are not asking whether they can complete the distance. They are asking something quieter and perhaps more difficult.

Will I be able to bear being alone for that long?

Why I Keep Returning to the Same Path

The honest answer is depth.

A new route offers novelty. The same route, walked across years, offers something else entirely. The animals remain where they have always been. The brooks follow their courses. The trees hold their places along the path. What changes is not the landscape, but what I am able to receive from it.

On my first walk, most of my attention went to logistics and orientation. On the second, to my own internal noise. By the third, fourth, and fifth, something began to shift.

The landscape started to register as presence rather than backdrop.

The wind on a particular hillside became familiar in the way a voice becomes familiar. The light moving through a stand of trees at a certain hour became something I anticipated rather than something I simply noticed. This is what return makes possible.

It removes the surface layer of the new and allows something deeper to come to the fore.

That depth is not available on a path I walk only once.

The Fear Most People Do Not Name Directly

The hardest part of my first solo walk was not the walking.

It was the days before. The mind fills the silence before you ever arrive. It imagines long empty stretches, heavy quiet, evenings that feel too long, and a kind of loneliness that might be difficult to shake. This fear is not irrational.

It is simply untested.

The fear also tends to take the shape of what-ifs that arrive in clusters. What if I get lost? What if I get hurt? What if I become genuinely lonely and have no one to turn to? These questions are reasonable, and they almost always have practical answers. I carry mapping applications and downloaded route data. I travel with appropriate travel insurance. I can call a friend at any hour, or fall in step with other walkers on the path who are almost always nearby. The what-ifs do not survive even modest contact with the actual conditions of the route, but they do consume an enormous amount of preparatory energy when left unexamined.

The deeper misconception is the assumption that walking alone means being alone the entire time.

This is not what solo walking actually looks like on a route like the Le Puy. You greet other pilgrims on the path. You share tables in the gîtes and chambres d’hôtes in the evenings. You speak with villagers in the small towns you pass through. You eat in shared dining rooms with people who have walked their own day on their own terms, and you exchange the kind of brief, warm conversation that pilgrims have always exchanged on these paths. Walking alone does not mean refusing companionship. It means choosing the rhythm of when you are silent and when you are in conversation.

I am monastic by temperament, not by opposition to community.

What I need from a solo Camino is not isolation. It is a stretch of time during which the busyness of the world can finally settle, and I can delve into myself rather than continuing to attend to everyone else. So much of my work involves supporting and helping others, as a chaplain, as a teacher, as an ecospiritual guide. That work matters to me, and it requires a particular kind of recharging that only sustained internal quiet can provide. A solo Camino is, for me, a personal retreat woven into a living landscape. The conversations along the way are part of the gift, not an interruption of it.

Once the walking begins, something else becomes clear.

The fear that lived so loudly in the weeks beforehand quietly disappears. The path takes over. The body adjusts. The mind settles in a way it could not settle anywhere else. What replaces the fear is not bravery. It is simply the lived experience that what you imagined would always be much heavier than what is actually there.

Solitude Without Isolation

The Le Puy route offers something that is increasingly rare in modern life.

You are alone, but you are not cut off. Villages appear at regular intervals. Other pilgrims pass through your day. Farmers greet you as you walk. Evenings are often shared at long tables with others who have walked their own miles. You are quiet, but you are still held within a human world.

This is what I mean by solitude without isolation.

Solitude is a chosen form of attention. It is what becomes possible when no one is asking for your immediate response. Loneliness is the absence of belonging. They are not the same. The Le Puy route offers the first while quietly protecting against the second, which is what makes it one of the few settings in modern life where this kind of aloneness can be practiced safely.

After the first day of walking, I recognized this immediately.

What Changes When You Walk Alone

Walking alone changes what the landscape can give.

In a group, even a quiet one, part of your attention remains oriented toward other people. There is always a subtle readiness to speak, to listen, to respond. The social mind remains active even when no one is talking.

When that channel finally closes, something else opens.

The landscape is no longer a setting. It becomes an encounter. The animals, the weather, the movement of light, the quality of the air. All of it begins to register differently. Not because the world has changed, but because your attention is no longer divided. This is the register the Camino was always meant to open.

It is difficult to reach it when the mind is still oriented toward conversation.

Why I Am Walking Alone Again

Six walks in, the answer is simple.

I am walking to deepen my relationship with a landscape I have come to know across years. I am walking alone because silence is the condition that allows that relationship to deepen. I am walking this section again because I will guide others through it in September, and I want to meet the path once more in solitude before I meet it again in fellowship.

This is what return at this depth requires.

If You Are Considering Walking Alone

If you are thinking about a solo Camino and are not sure you could bear it, this is what I want to say.

The bearing is not the hardest part. The imagining is. Once you take the first steps, the path begins to carry you in ways that are difficult to anticipate beforehand. What you find is not the loneliness you feared.

What you find is a kind of quiet that most contemporary lives do not allow, and a world that becomes more present once that quiet arrives.

A Quiet Invitation

If the idea of walking alone has been sitting with you, consider this a gentle threshold.

Not a commitment. Not a decision. Simply a recognition that the thing you are unsure you can bear may be the very condition that allows something essential to meet you.

The Camino does not ask you to be someone different.

It invites you to arrive.

The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is fully available to begin today.

Please share below if you have walked alone and want to name what you found there, or if the idea is sitting with you and you want to ask what walking alone is actually like. I am reading everything.

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If you have been a spiritual seeker for more than about five years, this post is for you.

I write as someone who has been one. I write as someone who has watched many others be one, some for decades. I am not writing from above this pattern. I am writing from having lived inside it long enough to notice what it does.

Most of us who arrived here arrived here honestly. The seeking began as a real response to a real longing. What I want to name is what happens when the seeking continues long after it has stopped serving us, and most of us do not notice the shift when it occurs.

When Openness Quietly Becomes Identity

The seeker identity begins as a virtue. You remain open. You do not foreclose on any tradition. You move between teachers, practices, books, and frameworks, gathering what resonates and setting aside what does not. You call yourself spiritual but not religious, or eclectic, or a perpetual student, and you mean it kindly. The openness feels like integrity, because at first it is.

Then, quietly, something shifts.

The openness stops being a posture and becomes an identity. Seeking stops being a phase and becomes a practice. You are still moving, still reading, still exploring, still sampling the buffet, but you have not actually committed to anything in so long that the noncommitment has quietly become your commitment.

You have become a permanent guest in your own spiritual life.

The hardest part is that this shift happens without announcement. Nobody tells you when you crossed from exploring into avoiding. The habits that once opened you now keep you moving past the places you were meant to land.

Why Perpetual Seeking Cannot Shape You

This isn’t a moral failing. It’s a structural issue, and an increasingly common one.

Identity does not come from openness alone. Identity comes from taking a stand, even a provisional one, and letting your life organize around that stand long enough for the stand to shape you. Perpetual seeking cannot do this. It keeps every door open, which sounds generous, but it also keeps you permanently unshaped. You remain a subject considering possibilities rather than a person formed by a particular path.

The living world is not waiting for you to finish researching.

The tree outside your door does not require you to have settled your theology before you sit beneath it. Contemplative walking does not ask whether you have reconciled every tradition you have studied. A weekly sit spot does not care what books you are still weighing.

What they all require is a commitment specific enough to produce return.

What Return Actually Asks of You

Return is the thing.

Relationship with the living world, with a practice, with a tradition, with a place, cannot be built by sampling. It can only be built by showing up to the same thing, again and again, long enough for the thing to shape you. A seeker who never commits is a reader who never finishes a book.

If you have been seeking for many years, the honest question is not where to look next. The honest question, held gently but honestly, is whether some of your seeking has become a way to avoid the cost of actually belonging to something.

Most of us do not ask this question because we do not want the answer. I understand. I was there too, for longer than I am proud of.

How to Begin Again With Commitment

Pick something. Anything that is genuinely calling you. Commit to it for a full cycle of seasons. Walk the same route. Return to the same tradition. Sit beneath the same tree. Let your commitment come with a price, because commitment without any cost is not true commitment—it’s just a preference.

Then see what happens to your seeking when you have finally given it somewhere to land.

Sometimes the most faithful spiritual act is to stop looking and start staying.

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