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.

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 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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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.

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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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You have walked the Camino.

Maybe once, maybe several times. You have the blisters, the stories, the credentials, the photographs of the route across France, Portugal, or Spain. You have done the thing that people who have not done it assume must be transformative.

Something is still missing.

If that sentence lands, this post is written for you. It is for pilgrims who have walked the Camino and know, somewhere in the body, that the pilgrimage opened something the ordinary weeks back home are not holding. What follows is the practice that extends what the Camino gave you into the rest of your life.

Perhaps this post is for you.

What Earth Day Cannot Do, and What the Camino Cannot Do Alone

Earth Day passed yesterday. Many of us marked it. Many of us felt the familiar cycle of awareness, concern, and return to the normal current of the week. Yesterday was “Go, Earth!” and today is the status quo of human concerns on Thursday.

If you have walked the Camino, you already know that a single day of attention cannot substitute for a sustained relationship with the living world. You have walked far enough, quietly enough, and long enough to know what the difference feels like in your body.

Here is the harder truth, one I had to learn across multiple walks: even the Camino does not automatically produce kinship with the Earth. Walking through a landscape is not the same as being in relationship with it.

My first Camino did not shift anything at a deep level. I was carrying too much in my head. I was trying to make sense of my life, process things, arrive somewhere internally, and have a magical Camino experience focused solely on my internal changes. The landscape was there the whole time, offering what it has always offered. I was too full of my own noise to receive it.

My second walk was different, not because the landscape had changed, but because I had become quieter enough to notice it.

Why Walking Alone Is Not Enough

Nature is often the backdrop to our lives, even as we move through it.

You can walk hundreds of miles on a pilgrimage and still be mostly inside your own mind. You can pass through woodland, cross rivers, climb into villages at dusk, and register almost none of it as presence. The landscape remains scenery. The living world remains out there, somewhere beyond the thinking.

What kinship requires is not more walking. It is internal slowing. It is the willingness to step out of the human-only noise of phones, commentary, planning, interpretation, and problem-solving long enough for the living world to speak.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, writes that attention is the first act of love. She is not describing effort. She is describing the kind of stillness that lets something other than ourselves register.

The Camino gave me that stillness because it removed almost everything else. No meetings. No social media. No decisions beyond where to break for rest, eating, and sleeping. Just walking, weather, landscape, and the internal quiet that eventually arrived because there was nothing else competing for the space.

That is what pilgrimage walking does when it works. It silences everything that is not the walk itself, and in that silence, the living world becomes something you can enter into a relationship with rather than something you are moving through.

The Practice That Extends the Camino Into Ordinary Life

You do not need to return to Spain, Portugal, or France to practice what the Camino taught you. You need a version of the same silencing, on a smaller scale, closer to home, and returned to regularly.

This is what I now call a nature wander.

A wander is not a hike. A hike has a destination, a distance to cover, a summit to reach, or a pace to maintain. A wander has none of those. It is a spiritual practice of walking without arriving anywhere, where the walking itself is the silencing, and the slowing is the point. You are not covering ground. You are letting the ground cover you. Any effort to get somewhere pulls the mind back into the human noise the wander is meant to release.

You choose a familiar place, such as a park, a section of woodland, a stretch of river path, or a route you already know. You leave your phone in your pocket. You walk slowly enough that the living world can arrive. You follow what draws you rather than a plan. See what invites your curiosity, and spend some time with it.

Don’t get lost in trying to understand why this being or that one; instead, when you feel something attracting you, just spend the time with it. Let what happens, happen.

Then you return. Next week, or the week after, you walk the same route again. Not because repetition is disciplined, but because the relationship with the living world reveals itself across visits, not within a single one.

For experienced Camino walkers, this is the practice that extends what the pilgrimage began. A Camino happens once or twice a year at most (and often, even less than that). A weekly wander, repeated across seasons, happens fifty-two times. It is the Camino in miniature, available without flights or time off, producing what an annual pilgrimage cannot: a sustained, specific, ordinary relationship with one piece of the living world.

An Invitation to Those Who Have Already Walked

If you have walked the Camino and something in you is still hungry, this may be what you have been hungry for.

Not another pilgrimage. Not a longer route. Not a more challenging stage. A practice that extends what the Camino gave you into the ordinary weeks between walks, across the months and years when these ancient European paths are unreachable.

The same silencing, the same openness, the same willingness to let the living world speak. Applied to a park near your home, a familiar trail, a tree you pass on the way to work.

Earth Day was yesterday. The Camino is every day, if you let it be.

Begin this week. Choose a route you already know. Walk it slowly, without a destination, with enough internal quiet to let the living world register as more than backdrop. Return next week and notice what the second walk holds that the first one could not.

The Camino taught you how to walk this way. The practice is portable. Carry it home.

Please share below if you have walked the Camino and felt this same hunger for what comes next. I am reading everything.

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This practice is the foundation of the Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary where I teach, and is also woven into every day of the September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat on the Le Puy Camino I am leading along seven days of returning to the same living landscape until it becomes something more than scenery. No retreat required to begin. Start outside today.

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Every year it arrives. Every year it leaves.

Earth Day comes on April 22 with genuine intention. People share posts, attend events, sign petitions, plant something, and feel something real. For a brief moment, the culture agrees that the Earth matters and that this agreement is worth marking.

Then the day passes, the news cycle shifts, and the living world returns to the background of our lives.

You already know this. That is what makes it quietly exhausting and what brings you here in the first place.

Why One Day of Care Is Not Holding You

This is not a criticism of Earth Day. It is an honest look at what one day can and cannot do.

If you are reading this, you likely already care. You follow the science, understand what is happening, and feel its weight. Most days, that awareness does not translate into anything that feels steady or sustaining.

Instead, it moves in a familiar cycle: a moment of attention, a surge of concern, and then a return to a kind of low-level background anxiety that changes nothing and costs something.

The issue is not your level of care, but rather the structure you have to hold it.

Awareness Is Not the Same as Relationship

Earth Day is built on awareness, but awareness alone cannot hold what you are feeling.

Awareness is general. Relationship is specific. Awareness says the Earth is in crisis. Relationship says this particular place matters to me, and I know why, because I have been coming back to it across seasons, and something has passed between us.

When care remains at the level of awareness, it has nowhere to land. It turns into overwhelm, helplessness, or a form of grief that never fully moves. This is not a personal failure.

It is what happens when awareness exists without a practice to support it.

What Most Ecologically Aware People Are Actually Missing

The people I work with as a contemplative walking guide and university chaplain are not indifferent to the natural world.

If anything, they are too aware. They carry ecological concern alongside everything else this moment asks them to hold. What they almost always lack is not more information but a way to be in actual contact with what they care about.

Not a practice of doing more or staying more informed. A practice of contact: regular, specific, returned to contact with one place, one tree, one stretch of land or water.

Not scenery. Not a concept held at a comfortable distance. Something encountered over time.

Awareness of the whole can overwhelm. Relationship with the particular can sustain.

What to Do With Earth Day Instead of Observing It

A single day cannot create that kind of relationship. At best, it can point toward one.

As it is usually practiced, Earth Day functions as a destination. You arrive, participate, and leave. It works differently when you treat it as a threshold, a beginning rather than an end.

Go outside and choose one place you can return to. It does not need to be dramatic or distant. The tree outside your door, a corner of a familiar park, a stretch of ground you pass regularly. Any one of these is enough.

Spend ten minutes there. Stay long enough for your attention to settle and for something subtle to begin to register. Then come back next week, and the week after that.

Notice what happens when something becomes familiar. Notice when you begin to recognize rather than simply observe.

Attention slowly becomes relationship.

A Different Way to Hold What You Already Feel

The question is not whether you care about the Earth. You do.

The question is whether you have a way to stay in relationship with what you care about, something that holds across the weeks between annual observances, something the living world can actually receive.

One day of attention cannot hold what you already feel. One place, returned to over time, can begin to.

Begin today. Go outside. Choose one presence. Stay longer than feels necessary.

Come back next week and notice what the second visit reveals that the first one could not.

The Earth does not need your attention once a year. It needs your return.

This practice is the foundation of the Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary where I teach, and is also woven into every day of the September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat on the Le Puy Camino I am leading along seven days of returning to the same living landscape until it becomes something more than scenery. No retreat required to begin. Start outside today.

Please share what you notice when you go outside today. Don’t worry about doing too little, as the only way to do that is to do nothing at all.

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There is a moment in David Abram’s Becoming Animal where he catches a companion physically staggering backward at the sight of a rock face.

When the companion tries to dismiss the movement as merely internal, merely metaphorical, Abram will not let it go. A bird watching from the cottonwoods, he points out, would have seen a body moved by another body. The rock did not trigger a feeling. It effected a physical, material response in a breathing human animal. Two kinds of dynamism encountering each other. Two different ways of being Earth.

That passage (pg 55) stopped me when I first read it.

Not because it was new information. Because it named something I had been experiencing on the Camino for years without having language for it.

The Problem With Understanding Nature

Most people drawn to ecospirituality and nature-based practice arrive through their intellect.

They read Abram. They read Kimmerer. They follow the argument, understand the philosophy, and agree with the conclusion. The natural world is alive and relational. We are participants, not observers. The separation between self and world is a cultural story, not a biological fact.

They understand this completely.

Ironically, they continue to live almost entirely in their heads.

The intellectualizing comes from a good place. If you can understand something deeply enough, the thinking goes, you can then work with it, protect it, relate to it properly. Understanding precedes connection. Get the concepts right and the embodied experience will follow.

Abram’s work suggests this is exactly backward.

Trying to intellectualize what the living world offers does not increase empathy or kinship. It maintains the very separation it claims to be dissolving. You are still the thinking subject, and the natural world is still the object of your consideration, however sophisticated that consideration becomes. The mind remains the mediator between you and everything else.

What Abram is pointing toward is not a better understanding of nature. It is a different orientation of the self within it.

What the Body Already Knows

The rock moves you. Not as a metaphor, but rather in physics.

Abram draws a distinction that runs through all of his work, between cultures that speak about the natural world and cultures that speak directly to it, acknowledging animals, plants, and landforms as expressive subjects capable of communication. Not communication in words. Communication in song, in rhythm, in movement and gesture, in shifting shadow, and the quality of stillness.

Language, for traditionally oral peoples, is not a human possession. It is a property of the animate earth in which humans participate.

That framing is not romantic. It is descriptive of something the body already knows when the mind steps back far enough to let it.

You have felt it. The quality of attention that arrives when you sit in one place long enough. The way a landscape enters the body before the mind has finished deciding what to think about it. The way your breathing changes near water, near stone, near old trees, before you have consciously registered why.

That is not a metaphor, nor even in the mind alone. That is participation.

Why Contemplative Walking Is the Practice Abram Points Toward But Does Not Name

Reading Becoming Animal is a profound experience that changes almost nothing about how most readers actually move through the world.

This is not a criticism of the book. It is an observation about what books can and cannot do.

Abram can show you the argument for embodied ecological participation. He cannot give you the embodied ecological participation itself. That requires practice, and not necessarily comprehension. It requires showing up in a specific place, with a specific quality of attention, long enough for the body to begin responding to what is actually present rather than to what the mind has already decided is there.

Contemplative walking is that practice.

Not mindful walking, which trains you to observe your own internal states with greater clarity. Contemplative walking turns attention outward, toward the living world as a presence with its own agency, dynamism, and ways of communicating that do not require your interpretation to be real.

When you walk the GR65 Camino de Santiago route quietly, what becomes clear after the first day is that the trail possesses a certain essence. The landscape holds a distinct presence. The way light filters through a French morning at six o’clock in late May isn’t just a backdrop. It’s a message. You’re being communicated with in a language older than any word you know, and your body understands it before your mind has time to interpret.

That is what Abram means. That is what five Camino walks taught me in ways that reading his work alone never could.

Where to Begin If You Are Not Walking 500 Miles

You do not need the GR65 or the Camino Francés to begin this practice.

You need one place you can return to. One presence in the living world you are willing to sit with long enough for the intellectual layer to thin out and the body to begin its own kind of listening.

Abram describes the rock face as entering and altering a life through its very stillness. The stillness itself is the gesture. The silence becomes the activity.

That’s not a metaphor. It’s two types of dynamism interacting in the physical world.

That is the beginning of what Abram spent an entire book trying to point you toward.

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The shift Abram describes — from speaking about the natural world to speaking with it — is the foundation of the Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary that I teach. It is also what the September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat on the Le Puy Camino is built around: seven days of walking a living landscape as participants rather than observers. If you are new here, this week’s posts are a complete introduction to that practice. No retreat or course required to begin.

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There is a moment after a sit spot or a wander when something is still happening in you.

The encounter is over, but it is not finished. A sound lingers. An image will not settle. A feeling has not yet found language. You are back inside, or still on the bench outside, and there is a quiet question underneath everything else.

What do I do with what I am carrying?

Most people do nothing. The moment dissolves. The day continues. Earth journaling is the practice of catching what the Land gave you before it disappears.

Why Most Journaling Misses What You Are Actually Looking For

This post is for two kinds of people:

1. Those who already spend time in nature but feel like something is not being captured or held, and

2. Those who already journal but sense that their practice is somehow circling around themselves rather than reaching outward toward the living world.

If either of those describes you, the problem is probably a matter of direction, and not intention of commitment.

Journaling is one of the most widely practiced reflective tools in contemplative life, and for good reason. Writing helps us make sense of experience, slow the mind, and give formless feelings a shape we can return to. A personal journal nourishes the soul. There is nothing wrong with it, and I often suggest it for people who need to make sense of what is going on in their head.

The limitation is the lens.

Most journaling turns inward. It asks: what am I feeling, what am I thinking, what does this mean for me? That is valuable. But if what you are trying to develop is a genuine connection or kinship with the more-than-human world, it is incomplete. The living world appears as a backdrop, a trigger, and a mirror for your inner life.

Earth journaling asks a different question entirely.

Not, “What did the river make me feel,” but “What was the river actually doing today?” Not, “How did this tree with the twisted branches affect me,” but “What did I notice when I slowed down enough to match its stillness?” The shift is subtle. Its consequences are not. One sentence is about you. The other holds both of you. Earth journaling lives in that second sentence.

In many ways, Earth journaling takes the reflection that traditional journaling does so well and brings it back into the world, where we have the opportunity to connect our reflection with the other living beings around us.

If you have never tried it, I invite you to a new experience, or at least a new perspective on something else you already know.

How to Begin the Practice

Keep this simple. The practice has one non-negotiable: contact before writing. This is not the journaling you do quietly alone in a library or a comfy spot, at least not without first having some connection with the natural world.

Go outside first. Sit or spend time with one place or one presence, like your sit spot, a particular tree, the patch of ground outside your door, or a being who attracts your attention while you are on a wander in nature. Give it fifteen to thirty minutes. Let the Land give you something before you ask yourself what to write. You cannot Earth journal from memory alone.

Write in proximity to the encounter. Immediately after contact, the experience is most alive. Remain outside if you can, or return to a nearby space before the day reclaims you. The encounter is still present in the body. Write before it leaves.

Begin with description, not interpretation. Let the living world have the first word. What was the tree doing? Holding, dropping, reaching, going still? What changed in the light between when you arrived and when you left? What did the crow do next? Description first. Your reactions and meanings will come. Hold them back long enough for the Land to speak.

Let the prompt emerge from the encounter. You do not need a writing prompt from a book or a course. What stopped you during your time outside? What surprised you, unsettled you, or arrived quietly when you had stopped looking? What will not leave you alone? Those become the questions your journal explores, and possibly answers.

Write toward the relationship, not only toward yourself. The distinction matters more than it appears. Not “the river made me feel peaceful,” but “the river was moving at this pace, and I noticed my body eventually slowed to match it.” That second sentence holds both of you. That is where Earth journaling lives.

Close with one line of reciprocity. What are you carrying back from this encounter? What will you return to notice next time? One sentence is enough. It completes the relational cycle and sets the conditions for the next visit.

If you try this, I invite you to explore this as feels right to you, and not as a set of steps that must be done in exactly this way. That would defeat the point of spending some time writing about your relationship with the natural world. Thus, use these prompts as aids to help bridge this connective form of journaling from a previous experience of only writing about what is happening inside you.

What Builds Over Time

One entry is a moment. A month of entries is a pattern. A year of entries is a relationship.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that the grammar of animacy, speaking of other species as persons rather than objects, changes not just how we talk about the living world but how we relate to it. Earth journaling is where that shift becomes practiced and documented over time. You begin to notice how a particular tree holds itself differently across seasons. You can trace what a sit spot teaches you in October that it could not teach you in April. You start to recognize a place the way you recognize a friend, noticing when something is different, sensing what belongs and what does not.

That is when care for the Earth becomes personal.

Not abstract. Not conceptual. Relational. Because you are personally connected and personally affected, which is where all genuine ecological concern actually lives.

Jon Young, whose sit spot practice has shaped nature connection work for decades, describes the moment when a familiar place begins to reveal its deeper patterns, when you know a bird’s routine well enough to notice when something has disturbed it. That depth does not come from a single encounter. It comes from return, and from the writing that holds what return teaches.

Your Earth journal becomes a record of who you are in relationship with.

Write with the Earth

Most of us have learned how to write about ourselves. Very few of us have learned how to write with the world.

After your next time outside, do one thing before you check anything else: open a journal. Write what the Land gave you. Start with what you observed. Stay with it longer than feels necessary.

Then return next week and see what the second entry holds that the first one could not.

What is the Land giving you that you are not yet writing down?

Please share what you notice the first time you try this.

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New Mexico was not supposed to change anything.

I arrived at Ghost Ranch in June 2025, reluctant and already exhausted. Five days of in-person group work was not what I wanted, and I had just returned from the final leg of my Camino in France. I needed quiet, and I had agreed to very little of it.

What I did not anticipate was the Land itself.

The red rock formations at Ghost Ranch carry a quality of presence I had not planned for. The silence available in that landscape, even inside a group retreat, was different from anything I had known in Paris or on the pilgrimage paths of France. It was the silence of a place that has long held things, inviting me into its mysteries.

I found myself going still in a way that had nothing to do with technique.

That is when I understood, in my body rather than my mind, what I had been teaching about Earth-based Lectio Divina. The living world was not waiting for me to study it. It was waiting for me to stop.

Why Reading About Nature Is Not Solving Your Disconnection

Most people drawn to nature or ecospirituality share a particular problem.

They have read the right books, followed the right voices, and understand, intellectually, that the natural world is alive and relational. They value nature. They care about it deeply. They still feel the gap between themselves and connection.

More information won't close it.

Earth-based Lectio Divina is a practice, not a concept. Pagans and animistic practitioners have been working with this pattern for decades, and Julie Bond’s work on Druid, Pagan, and nature-based Lectio in Polytheistic Monasticism: Voices from Pagan Cloisters, edited by Janet Munin, traces it clearly within these traditions. The structure does not belong to any single religion or spirituality.

The practice takes its structure from Guigo II, a twelfth century Carthusian monk whose Ladder of Monks named the four movements still recognized today: Lectio, the slow reading until something stops you; Meditatio, staying with it until it moves through the body; Oratio, responding from whatever has surfaced; and Contemplatio, releasing all effort to simply rest in what is present. Guigo described it plainly: reading seeks, meditation finds, prayer asks, contemplation tastes. That sequence is the skeleton we are working with. The text has simply changed to something much older.

From this framework, we understand that nature is our holy book.

Everything within the natural world can be seen as words inviting Lectio Divina—stones, shells, leaves, twigs—each one a word in creation’s text. For those of us in animistic and nature-based traditions, the sacred is present in the natural world, which means the natural world is where this practice has always belonged.

We are not adapting someone else’s practice.

The traditional form of Lectio Divina discovered something that predates any single religion: that sustained, attentive engagement with any living presence can lead to transformation. For those of us working within animistic and nature-based traditions, the text has always been the oak, the crow, the wind moving through tall grass, the particular quality of light on a spring morning in the high desert.

We are recovering our own.

How to Practice Lectio Divina in the Living World

The four movements of this practice follow the same arc that Guigo II named in the twelfth century and that eco practitioners have been working with ever since: receive, deepen, respond, release. In the traditional form, those movements are called Lectio, Meditatio, Oratio, and Contemplatio—read, reflect, respond, rest. What changes in an earth-based practice is not the sequence but the orientation underneath it. The living world has agency. Encounter is mutual. Reciprocity is not optional. Those three premises transform each movement from a technique into a relationship.

Each moment below carries an inner posture, the interior orientation that makes the outward practice possible.

Arrive. Go outside. Let your attention settle on one presence, whatever draws you or whatever you choose. Not “it,” but rather this oak, this crow, or perhaps this river or that patch of moss by the wall. Stay with one being rather than scanning.

Inner posture: I do not extract meaning. I allow encounter.

Sense. Now the boundary softens. What is this presence doing, swaying, holding, decaying, emerging? What does it stir in your body or memory? Let associations arise naturally without forcing interpretation.

Inner posture: I am not separate from what I am noticing.

Respond. In animistic practice, what we receive from the living world creates an obligation. Speak aloud or inwardly, gratitude, apology, curiosity. Offer something small, such as breath, touch, water, or even a promise of return. If you have been holding a stone, a leaf, or a fallen branch, return it to the Earth at the close of your session. The object returns to the natural world carrying something of what passed between you. That exchange is not a metaphor. It is the practice completing its own cycle.

Inner posture: I am in relationship, not observation.

Rest. Finally, release all effort. Sit or stand in stillness. Let awareness widen. Allow yourself to be held by the place rather than holding yourself apart from it.

Inner posture: Nothing to do. I belong here.

Why There Is No Wrong Way to Begin

Here is what I most want you to hear: there is no right way to do this practice.

Most people who come to ecospirituality carry an anxiety about doing it correctly, about whether they are spiritual enough, knowledgeable enough, or sufficiently attuned to the natural world. They are waiting for permission that no one is in a position to give them. The living world does not require expertise.

It requires presence.

What the practice asks is not that you arrive correctly. It asks that you arrive at all, then stay, then return. Repetition is where depth lives, not technique. The text of creation is inexhaustible; you will never run out of words to meet. A single encounter is an introduction.

Relationship requires sustained presence across seasons.

The tree you visit once is a stranger. The tree you visit across a full year becomes something else entirely: a teacher, a witness, a presence that holds your seasons the way you hold its. This is what Ghost Ranch gave me in that landscape of red rock and vast silence.

Not a new idea. A reminder.

The living world has been speaking the entire time.

This practice is not about understanding it more clearly. It is about stopping long enough to hear what has always been present. Carry it with you simply: Arrive. Sense. Respond. Rest. Return.

Or shorter still, closer to the bone: read the land, feel the relationship, offer your response, rest in belonging.

Begin this week. Go outside. Find one presence that draws your attention. Stay longer than feels natural. Notice what notices you back.

That is the whole practice.

Please share questions, anything you learned, or perhaps something you tried as a result of this practice.

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Do You Want to Walk Together?

Spring is on the path. The route is waiting.

If this opens something you want to keep exploring, go outside today and sit in one spot for ten minutes. Return tomorrow and sit again. Notice what becomes visible on the second visit that the first one could not hold.

If you want something more structured, the September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat on the Le Puy Camino in France is built around this exact principle. The practice is not scheduled alongside the walk. It is woven into every step of it. Seven days of walking the GR65 in a small group, with enough silence and enough return to let the path teach what it actually has to offer.

Start outside. Start today.

The earth is not waiting for you to enroll anywhere.

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On my first Camino I carried a laptop.

I also carried extra layers for weather that might turn, backup items for problems that might arise, and contingencies for situations I could not fully name. By the time I lifted the pack onto my back at the start, I had prepared myself for every version of the walk except the one I was actually about to take.

The laptop came out once.

The weight was with me every single day.

If you are standing at the edge of a new chapter, perhaps a career shift, a relationship ending, a spiritual practice that no longer fits, an identity you are trying to leave behind, and something feels heavier than it should, I am speaking to you.

Not because you have done anything wrong. Because most of us were never taught the difference between preparation and the fear of letting go. The two feel identical from the inside until you have to carry them uphill for fifteen miles.

You Only Notice the Dead Weight When You Cannot Put It Down

There is nothing like walking a pilgrimage route day after day to clarify what you actually need.

Everything in your pack that does not earn its weight makes itself known. Not on day one, when the novelty of beginning carries you forward. On day three, when your shoulders have had two nights to register what they are bearing, and your feet have begun to negotiate with the terrain. By day five, the unnecessary things have become something close to enemies.

Dead weight becomes undeniable only when you must carry it every single day.

This is as true of what we carry in our lives as it is of what we put in our packs. The guilt about a relationship that ended badly. The stress about decisions that cannot be undone. The shoulda, coulda, woulda of a past that is finished, regardless of how much attention we continue to give it. These do not reveal themselves when we are moving fast enough to outpace them. They reveal themselves when the path slows us down, and the weight becomes impossible to ignore.

The question worth sitting with is not how much you are carrying. It is whether what you are carrying belongs to the life you are actually living now.

Just in Case Is Usually a Story From the Past

Most overpacked bags are not the result of poor planning.

They are the result of “what if.” What if the weather turns, and I do not have the right layer? What if I need something I left behind? What if the new situation requires more of me than I currently have?

This feels like responsibility. It presents itself as wisdom and careful preparation.

Look at it directly, though, and something else comes into focus. The “what if” is almost never about the future. It is about a past situation that went wrong, and the attempt to prevent that particular version of wrong from happening again. We carry the solutions to problems we have already survived into situations that have entirely different requirements.

This is how we unknowingly carry an old life into a new one.

We force the logic of a previous version of ourselves into an experience that is asking something entirely different. We suffer because we are carrying a life that no longer exists into a life that has not yet been given room to begin. The wonder and the awe of walking somewhere genuinely new get strangled before they have a chance to arrive. We are too weighted down by what was to feel what is.

Why New Chapters Feel Strangely Like Old Ones

In years of walking pilgrimage routes and companioning people through significant transitions as a chaplain at NYU, I have watched what people carry and what carrying it costs them.

The physical pack is almost always a mirror of the interior one.

People arrive at the Camino ready for change but still carrying guilt, shame, unfinished identities, and stories they have not yet released. Guilt about family relationships that have frayed. Guilt about friends they no longer speak to. The weight of a version of themselves they have outgrown but have not yet been willing to set down. They come specifically to close the door on a previous life, to walk far enough and long enough that a new chapter becomes possible.

Overpacking keeps them tethered to the very thing they came to leave behind.

Not intentionally. Not consciously. But every time they lift that pack and feel the weight of what they brought just in case, they are shouldering the old life one more time. The new chapter never quite gets to begin. Not because it is unavailable. Because there is not yet space for it.

Packing Light Is Not Minimalism. It Is Honesty.

To walk lightly is not about owning less.

It is about telling the truth about what the new situation actually requires, as opposed to what the past trained you to fear. There is an old saying on the Camino: the path provides. Not in a magical sense. In a practical one. What you actually need tends to be available if you are not so weighted down by imagined needs that you cannot recognize what is already here.

The same is true of every genuine new beginning.

What we need for the new chapter will be available. But only if we arrive light enough to receive it, open enough to recognize it, and honest enough to admit that the equipment we brought from the last chapter may not be what this one requires.

What Letting Go Actually Asks

Setting down what you do not need is not a dramatic act.

It is a quiet one. It requires admitting that the past is no longer happening, that its problems and its logic and its defenses do not travel with you unless you choose to carry them, and that continuing to carry them is a choice rather than a necessity.

This is harder than it sounds because the weight is familiar. We have carried it long enough that it feels like part of us. Without it, a question surfaces: who am I if I am not managing, preparing, and protecting against what has already happened?

The answer is not something you think your way into. It is something you experience your way into by walking, by returning to a practice without performing it, by putting the pack down and noticing that you are still standing.

Someone lighter. Someone with hands free for what is actually here.

One Practice Worth Trying Before Your Next Step

You do not need a pilgrimage route to begin this.

Before your next significant step—a decision, a transition, or simply tomorrow morning—pause and ask what you are carrying that belongs to a version of your life that is already complete. Write it down without editing. Then ask honestly whether what you have named is something you genuinely need for what is ahead, or something you are afraid to set down.

You do not need to release everything at once. You need to notice what you are carrying and why.

That noticing is where the weight begins to lift.

What the Path Is Actually Asking

On the Camino, you feel the cost of carrying too much within days.

In life, you can carry it for years without realizing.

Until something in you quietly asks: what if this next chapter is not asking more of me? What if it is asking less?

In May, I will carry 97 miles worth of what I actually need on the GR65. Nothing from a previous version of that walk. Nothing just in case. What the path requires, honestly chosen, honestly carried.

The walk ahead is a new situation. I have learned to pack for it honestly, meaning honestly to myself.

What are you carrying into your next chapter that belongs to the last one?

Please share questions, anything you learned, or perhaps something you tried as a result of this experience.

Leave a comment

Do You Want to Walk Together?

Spring is on the path. The route is waiting.

If this opens something you want to keep exploring, go outside today and sit in one spot for ten minutes. Return tomorrow and sit again. Notice what becomes visible on the second visit that the first one could not hold.

If you want something more structured, the September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat on the Le Puy Camino in France is built around this exact principle. The practice is not scheduled alongside the walk. It is woven into every step of it. Seven days of walking the GR65 in a small group, with enough silence and enough return to let the path teach what it actually has to offer.

Start outside. Start today.

The earth is not waiting for you to enroll anywhere.

Subscribe now

In May, I’m walking the first section of the oldest Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in France again: the GR65.

Not a new section. Not further along. The same beginning I walked on my first French pilgrimage, starting again from Le Puy-en-Velay, the same ancient city where I stood four years ago, quietly wondering if I could do this at all.

I have walked this route multiple times. I know what is coming. I am going back to the beginning anyway.

This is not nostalgia. It is something more demanding than that.

If you feel restless unless you are moving toward a goal, if your spiritual practices keep getting upgraded but you do not feel changed, if you find yourself collecting evidence of growth rather than inhabiting it, this post is for you. Not because something is wrong with you. Because most of us were shaped in systems where approval was the currency of safety: school, work, family, and even religion. We carry that pattern into spiritual life without noticing.

We perform progress rather than pursue understanding. The two feel almost identical from the inside, at least at the beginning. The difference reveals itself over time in the quality of what accumulates.

Why Forward Progress Is Not the Same as Depth

The pilgrimage world celebrates accumulation.

More miles. New sections. Further along the route, further toward Santiago, further from wherever you started. There are apps that track your progress along the entire Camino de Santiago. Certificates awarded for completing defined distances. Social media feeds full of arrival photographs at destinations that mark another stage complete.

I understand the appeal. Forward movement is visible. It is shareable. It produces evidence that something is happening.

What it does not reliably produce is depth.

Depth requires something that actively works against forward motion. It requires returning to the same ground long enough for the surface version of the experience to exhaust itself and for something underneath to become accessible. You cannot accumulate your way there. You can only stay long enough, return often enough, release the need to be further along than you currently are.

Most pilgrimage content does not say this because it does not produce shareable content. A photograph of someone standing at the beginning of a path they have already walked does not perform as well as a photograph of arrival.

The beginning of a familiar path is where the interesting work actually lives.

What the Second Walk Through a Familiar Place Reveals

The first time I walked from Le Puy, I was managing anxiety.

Could I do this? Was I prepared enough? Would my feet hold? Was I walking correctly, eating correctly, carrying the right things? The questions were constant, consuming a significant portion of the attention that should have been on the path itself.

That anxiety was not weakness, but rather what a first walk requires. You do not yet know you can do it, so part of your energy goes toward proving you can.

The second walk through the same ground is different.

The proof has been established. The body knows it has done this before. The particular anxiety of beginning dissolves, and in the space it leaves behind, the path itself becomes visible in ways it could not be the first time through. The forest. The stone underfoot. The pace of villages. The way silence has texture. The way the land teaches without explaining itself.

There is never a going back in the sentimental sense. The person returning to Le Puy in May is not the person who first stood there. He is older, more practiced, carrying different questions, different griefs, and a different understanding of what the route is for. The path is the same. The walking is entirely new.

This is what return offers that progress cannot.

The Doctoral Program I Finally Finished

I started doctoral programs five times before I completed one.

Five different programs, five different moments of beginning, four exits before the eventual finish. For years, I told myself the issue was the programs, the fit, the timing, the circumstances. These things were partly true. But the deeper truth, which took me longer to reach, was that I was focused entirely on what completing a doctorate would mean, what I would do with it, and how it would be received.

I was performing the pursuit of a degree rather than inhabiting the actual work of learning.

The program I finished was the one where I stopped focusing on finishing. I stopped asking what the credential would signal to others and started asking what the research itself was teaching me. The pressure of the destination lifted. The experience became rich in ways the previous attempts never had. Learning became the point, and when it did, the degree came with it almost as an afterthought.

The Camino has taught me the same thing repeatedly, and I have had to learn it repeatedly, which is perhaps the nature of things worth learning.

The destination gives you a direction to walk toward. Arriving there is not the point. Everything that happens between the beginning and the end is the point, and most of us know this and spend considerable energy pretending otherwise.

The Approval Problem

Most people who say they want to go deeper in their spiritual practice are actually doing something else entirely.

This seems to relate less to sincerity and more to the fact that seeking approval has been how they survived.

They are trying to do it correctly in ways that others will recognize and affirm. They are collecting the right teachers, the right practices, the right vocabulary, the right credentials of seriousness. They are building a version of spiritual life that performs well in the communities they want to belong to.

This is not depth, but fluency in appearing to go deep.

Seeking approval accumulates evidence. Depth accumulates understanding. Evidence can be shown to others. Understanding changes how you see.

I am heading back to Le Puy in May because the path has more to show me than I was able to receive the first time through, and because leading others along it in September requires that I know it from the inside rather than from memory. The forest bathing I will slow for along the way, the rituals I will perform at particular points on the route, the hours of silence on a path I no longer need to prove myself on. None of this will produce evidence of anything.

It will deepen my understanding of a path I thought I already knew.

That is the only reason to go back to the beginning.

What Returning Actually Asks

Going back to a beginning you have already passed requires releasing something specific.

It requires releasing the version of yourself that is oriented toward being further along. The self that measures progress against others on the same path. The self that wants the credential of having covered more ground. The self that needs the outer world to confirm inner change.

The mature and experienced walker returning to Le Puy is not the same person who first stood there. He is also not superior to that person, not further along in any way that matters. He is simply different, carrying different things, capable now of a different quality of attention.

The beginning of a familiar path does not ask you to pretend you have not walked it before. It asks you to notice what you missed.

One Practice Worth Trying This Week

You do not need a pilgrimage route to practice return.

Choose one practice, place, or routine you have been upgrading or avoiding rather than simply doing. Return to it this week without optimizing it, tracking it, or performing it for anyone. Stay with it long enough for the restlessness to settle, because it will settle if you stay. Then ask yourself two questions honestly:

• What have I been trying to prove here, and

• What am I actually learning?

Write one sentence in response before you close the notebook.

Do it once. If it opens something, return tomorrow.

Please share questions, anything you learned, or perhaps something you tried as a result of this experience.

Leave a comment

Do You Want to Walk Together?

Spring is on the path. The route is waiting.

If this opens something you want to keep exploring, go outside today and sit in one spot for ten minutes. Return tomorrow and sit again. Notice what becomes visible on the second visit that the first one could not hold.

If you want something more structured, the September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat on the Le Puy Camino in France is built around this exact principle. The practice is not scheduled alongside the walk. It is woven into every step of it. Seven days of walking the GR65 in a small group, with enough silence and enough return to let the path teach what it actually has to offer.

Start outside. Start today.

The earth is not waiting for you to enroll anywhere.

Subscribe now

A new pair of shoes arrived this week (yes, those are them in the picture above).

Topo Athletic Traverse thru-hiking shoes—thin, light, breathable, with excellent traction and a metal rock plate to protect against the stones and roots that line the GR65 path of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela across rural France. I will walk 97 miles in them in May, and then lead a small group along the same route in September.

I have done this before each of my previous five Camino walks. New shoes, broken in before departure, chosen not for what the reviews say but for what my feet have taught me over years of getting it wrong.

Being intentional about footwear on the Camino is really a microcosm of life.

What My First Camino Taught Me About My Feet

On my first Camino, I wore waterproof shoes.

This seemed sensible. The GR65 crosses rivers, passes through mud, and moves through weather that does not consult your itinerary. Waterproof seemed like the responsible choice.

By day three, my feet were destroyed.

Waterproof shoes trap heat. When you walk long distances in warmer months, your feet sweat. When your feet sweat inside a waterproof shoe, the moisture cannot escape. What was designed to keep water out also keeps water in. The resulting blisters were among the most instructive experiences of my first pilgrimage, though not in the way I had hoped.

Now I walk in non-waterproof shoes that breathe. When they get wet, they dry. When my feet sweat, the moisture moves through the fabric rather than pooling against my skin. I also buy a size larger than my everyday shoes to account for foot expansion over long walking days, and I choose a wider toe box because my feet need room to spread.

No review told me any of this. My feet did.

The Perfect Shoe Does Not Exist

Here is what most first-time pilgrims get wrong about footwear.

They search for the perfect shoe.

The perfect shoe does not exist. What exists is the shoe that fits your specific feet, your specific terrain, your honest assessment of your season and conditions, and your equally honest reckoning with what has punished you before and what has not.

We all have feet. However, they do not all react the same way to 97 miles of walking (which is what I have planned for this year). Some people thrive in trail runners. Some need the ankle support of a boot. Some find waterproof essential and some, like me, find it damaging. The only way to know which category you fall into is to have walked enough to find out, and to be honest about what you learned.

Good enough, chosen honestly, beats perfect, chosen theoretically, every time.

What the Shoes Are Actually Asking Of You

Buying the right shoes is only the beginning of what preparation requires.

You cannot arrive at the Camino in new shoes and expect them to carry you through seven days of walking. The shoes need breaking in. Your feet need conditioning. Your body needs to know what sustained daily walking asks of it before the route begins asking it of you in earnest.

This means training before departure. Walking in the shoes regularly, in the weeks before you leave, with enough time remaining to identify problems and address them. Nothing replaces this step. No amount of research or quality gear substitutes for the honest feedback of your own body in motion.

This is where self-care enters the planning process, not as an afterthought but as its foundation. Knowing what your feet need. Knowing how your body responds. Knowing when something is working and when it is not, and being willing to act on that knowledge rather than push through and hope.

The Camino will teach you all of this eventually.

You will simply walk more comfortably if you arrive having already done that homework.

A Microcosm of Everything Preparation Requires

I look at these shoes and see more than just footwear.

I see five previous walks and everything they taught me about my own needs. I see the blister on day three of my first Camino that I could have avoided if I had been more honest about what my feet required rather than what seemed reasonable from the outside. I see the gradual process of replacing assumption with self-knowledge that every Camino has continued.

I also see this coming September, when I will walk this same route with a small group of four, each of whom will arrive with their own feet, their own needs, their own version of the lessons I had to learn the hard way.

The shoe choice is a microcosm of all of it. Know yourself. Be honest about your needs. Choose good enough over perfect. Do the work before departure so the route can teach you something more interesting than what you should have prepared.

Spring is here. The GR65, and indeed all Camino pilgrimage paths, are waiting.

I have new shoes, and they come from years of learning more about myself.

Please share questions, anything you learned, or perhaps something you tried as a result of this experience.

Leave a comment

Do You Want to Walk Together?

If that moment outside opens something you want to keep exploring, go back tomorrow and explore the same spot, or even a short distance away. You may be surprised at what you notice.

If you want something a little more structured, the September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat on the Le Puy Camino in France offers an even more immersive experience. Seven days of walking the GR65 in a small group, with the practice not scheduled alongside the route but woven into every step of it. This is a solo practice within a small group to help free yourself from the challenges of the world for some much-needed time away, physically walking in the natural world.

Start outside. Start today. The earth is not waiting for you to enroll anywhere.

Subscribe now

At some point on every contemplative walk, something happens that no amount of moving can produce.

You stop. You sit. You wait. The birds that fell silent when you arrived begin to call again. A fox emerges from the undergrowth. A spider resumes its work on a web you nearly walked through. The living world, which had registered you as another disturbance passing through, begins to forget you are there.

Or, perhaps it accepts you as a fellow living being.

This is the sit spot. It is the practice of becoming a regular, quiet presence in one specific place until that place begins to reveal itself to you. It is one of the oldest nature awareness practices known, drawn from Indigenous tracking and nature wisdom traditions, and brought into wide contemporary use by Jon Young and the Wilderness Awareness School.

This post is a comprehensive guide for anyone wanting to begin. You do not need experience. You do not need equipment. You do not need to know what you are doing.

You need a place and the willingness to return to it.

Where the Practice Comes From

The sit spot, in its contemporary form, was developed and popularised by Jon Young and the Wilderness Awareness School, drawing from his early mentoring and on Indigenous tracking and nature awareness traditions, in which sustained, attentive presence in a specific place was foundational to understanding the living world. These stories, amongst many others, can be found in Young’s wonderful text Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature.

In these traditions, a young person would be sent to sit in one place, regularly and over time, until they could read the language of the birds, track the movements of animals, and feel the rhythms of the land the way a farmer feels the weather. The knowledge that emerged was not abstract. It was relational. It came from being known by a place as much as knowing it.

Genuine knowledge of the natural world does not come from studying it at a distance. It comes from being received by it. From becoming, over time, a familiar and trusted presence in one place until that place opens dimensions of itself that a passing visitor never sees.

This is the spirit the contemporary sit spot practice carries forward.

You Probably Already Had a Sit Spot

Before we go further, consider this.

Think back through your life toward childhood. Was there a place you returned to regularly, such as a tree in a garden, a corner of a schoolyard, a patch of ground behind a building, a window ledge, or a spot by water, where you would go, sometimes without knowing why, and simply be?

Most people, when they pause to remember, find one.

A gnarled tree easy to climb. A gap in a hedge that opened onto a field. A particular bench in a park that caught the afternoon light. Children seem to find these places instinctively, without being told that they are doing something ancient and important. They are drawn to a place, and they return to it, and they make it their own in a way that no other place quite becomes.

The sit spot practice is, in large part, the conscious recovery of something most of us already knew how to do before we were taught to be busy.

What the Practice Actually Is

The sit spot is not birdwatching, though you will notice birds.

It is not nature journaling, though writing afterward can deepen what you observed. It is not meditation, though stillness is involved. It is not a spiritual exercise in the formal sense, though it will almost certainly change how you feel about the living world.

The sit spot is the practice of getting to know one place the way you know a close friend.

Not its surface. Its rhythms. Its regular inhabitants. Its responses to weather, season, and time of day. What is normal there, so that when something changes, you notice immediately. What creatures move through it and when. What the birds sound like when nothing is disturbing them, so that when their language shifts, you understand that something has changed before you see what it is.

This knowledge cannot be acquired through a single visit. It accumulates through return.

The essential attitude the practice asks for is one of childlike curiosity rather than disciplined effort. You are not trying to achieve anything. You are visiting a place you are coming to know, paying attention with the openness of someone who has not yet decided what is and is not worth noticing.

How to Choose Your Spot

The most common reason people do not begin a sit spot practice is that they cannot decide where to go. They want the perfect spot before they start.

It is not about the quality of the spot. It is about the quality of attention you bring to it.

With this established, here are five practical criteria that make a spot work well:

1. Within easy reach. The spot should be no more than five to ten minutes from your front door. If getting there requires effort or planning, you will not return consistently. Consistency is the entire practice. A mediocre spot you visit daily will teach you far more than an extraordinary spot you visit occasionally.

2. Outside and in contact with the living world. A park bench, a garden corner, a patch of ground near trees, a spot beside water. The key is that non-human life is present and observable. You need to be outside, not looking at a screen representation of outside.

3. Near water, shelter, and food sources for wildlife where possible. These three elements attract the most diverse and active non-human community. A spot near a pond, a stream, a bird feeder, a stand of berry-producing shrubs, or a dense hedge will offer more activity than an open lawn. Where possible, let this guide your choice. Where it is not possible, any spot will still work.

4. Somewhere you can return in every season. The same spot in January and July will teach you things that two different spots never could. Choose somewhere accessible year-round.

5. A place that draws you even slightly. You do not need a dramatic reason. Trust the small pull toward a particular place. It is rarely wrong.

A note for city dwellers:

Urban sit spots are not a compromise. An elderly woman in a Dallas retirement community finds her sit spot on her patio, watching birds feed, and butterflies emerge. City parks, canal paths, courtyards, balconies overlooking a single tree—all of these work. The birds that share our cities are among the most responsive creatures to human presence and absence. You will learn their language faster in a park than many people learn it in a forest.

If, after all of this guidance, you still cannot settle on a spot, just choose somewhere near and show up a few times. See how it feels, though by all means, begin.

What to Do When You Arrive

This is where most guides overcomplicate things.

The simple instruction is this:

Sit down. Be still. Look outward. Notice what is already happening.

That is the practice. Everything else supports it.

Practical guidance for beginners:

Duration. Begin with ten minutes. This is enough time for the initial disturbance of your arrival to settle and for the living world to resume its activities around you. You may naturally extend this as it feels inviting and right. Sunrise and sunset are especially generative times, when wildlife is most actively moving and the quality of light and sound shifts in ways that even a beginner will notice immediately.

Direction of attention. Look outward, not inward. This is the essential distinction between a sit spot and seated meditation. You are not monitoring your thoughts or observing your breath. You are noticing who and what is outside you. The birds. The movement of leaves. The insects on the ground. What is alive and active in the world beyond your own skin.

Expand your senses deliberately. Soften your gaze until you can see to the edges of your visual field without moving your eyes. This wide-angle or “owl eyes” vision is a tracking technique that expands peripheral awareness and signals to your nervous system that it can settle from alert scanning into receptive presence. Then close your eyes for two minutes and listen only, identifying every sound and its direction. Then open your eyes and notice what you missed while listening.

Learn the baseline. The most important concept in nature awareness is baseline: what does normal look and sound like in this specific place? The birds singing without alarm. The ordinary movement of leaves. The regular paths that small animals use through the undergrowth. You cannot read disturbance until you know what undisturbed looks like. Building your baseline is the primary work of the first weeks of a sit spot practice.

No phones. Not because technology is the enemy, but because the screen pulls attention inward and backward into the human information world. The practice asks for outward attention to the more-than-human world. Leave it in your pocket or at home.

No agenda. You are not trying to identify species, reach a state of peace, or have a spiritual experience. You are visiting a place you are coming to know. Arrive with curiosity rather than intention.

What to bring:

1. Warm enough clothing to sit still comfortably

2. A small notebook for writing afterward, not during

3. Nothing else

What Happens Over Time

A single sit spot visit will give you something. Regular return visits will give you something entirely different.

Here is what the practice builds across time:

Week one. Restlessness, distraction, the feeling that nothing is happening. This is normal and it is the first teaching. Your nervous system is accustomed to constant input. Sitting still without a task feels strange. Stay anyway.

Weeks two and three. The birds begin to return faster after you arrive. You start to recognise individuals. You notice which creatures use the same paths through your spot. The place begins to feel familiar. You are beginning to build your baseline.

The first month. You begin to notice what is different each time. What has changed since yesterday. What is absent that was present before. What has arrived that was not there last week. The place is no longer the background. It is a community you are becoming part of.

The first season. The spot becomes a relationship. You notice how it responds to weather, to the changing light, to the presence of other humans nearby. You notice that you respond differently to it depending on what you carry in your body that day. The place has begun to know you as a regular presence. What it reveals to a regular presence is different from what it shows a passing stranger.

At a certain point, something shifts that practitioners of this tradition describe as hitting cruise control. The practice generates its own momentum. You find yourself going to your spot not because you planned to, but because something in you is drawn there. When that happens, the formal instruction falls away. You simply go, and the place continues to teach you in ways that would take pages to describe.

This is kinship with the living world. It is built entirely through return.

How to Work With Restlessness and Discomfort

Most people who abandon a sit spot practice do so in the first two weeks, during the period when nothing seems to be happening.

Here is what is actually happening during that period.

Your presence is being assessed. The birds within earshot have a sophisticated alarm system that registers every human who enters their territory. When you arrive, they go quiet or move away. When you sit still long enough and consistently enough, they begin to recalibrate. You stop registering as a threat. The living world resumes around you, and a dimension of your landscape that was previously hidden opens.

Wild animals know the patterns of human activity. They move to the edges of it, safely out of sight. Sitting still long enough and quietly enough initiates you into their world, a world that plays by different rules than the human one. You are applying for membership in a community that will take its time before admitting you.

This process cannot be hurried. It asks for patience our culture rarely develops.

If you feel restless: Shift your gaze slowly to the furthest point you can see, then bring it gradually back to the nearest thing. Repeat slowly. Count the species you can hear without being able to see them. Notice the layer of life closest to the ground that you would normally overlook entirely.

If you feel that you are doing it wrong: You are not. There is no wrong way to sit outside and pay attention. The only way to miss the practice is to not show up, or to spend the entire time on a screen. If you are outside, sitting still, and looking at the world around you, you are doing it exactly right. The quality of attention will deepen with time. It does not need to be perfect now.

Be as gentle with yourself as you would be with a child learning to be still for the first time. The practice is not a performance. It is a visit.

These experiences, reactions, responses, and moments of disquiet can become fruitful journaling opportunities to help you make sense of your sit spot afterward. Try not to journal while at the sit spot, instead, notice the living world. You will have plenty of time to write later.

Why Spring Is the Right Time to Begin

Every season offers something different to a sit spot practitioner.

Spring offers the most generous welcome to beginners.

The living world is in visible, audible transition right now. Birds are establishing territories and singing at full volume to defend them. Plants are emerging from the ground that looked dead two weeks ago. Insects are returning. The pace of change is fast enough that even a beginner will notice clear differences between visits.

Spring is also the season when bird language is most readable. Territorial behavior makes every call and every movement legible to a patient observer. You do not need to know species names to begin reading what the birds are communicating. You need only sit still long enough and often enough to learn the difference between a bird going about its ordinary life and a bird responding to something unusual.

That learning begins the first time you sit still long enough for the birds to return.

If you have been waiting for the right time to begin, this week is it, even if you begin during the summer, fall, or winter!

A Simple 7-Day Practice to Begin

You do not need a month-long commitment to begin. You need seven days and a willingness to return.

Day 1: Choose your spot. Sit for ten minutes. Notice three things you would normally have walked past.

Day 2: Return to the exact same spot. Sit for ten minutes. Notice what is different from yesterday.

Day 3: Return. Sit for ten minutes. Close your eyes for two minutes and listen only. Then open them and notice what you missed while watching.

Day 4: Return. Sit for ten minutes. Practice wide-angle vision. Look outward to the edges of what you can see without moving your eyes.

Day 5: Return. Sit for ten minutes. Write three sentences in a notebook afterward about what you noticed, not what you felt, but what you observed in the world beyond you.

Day 6: Return. Sit for as long as feels right. Notice whether arriving feels different than it did on day one.

Day 7: Return. Sit. Before you stand to leave, ask yourself one question: what did this place show me this week that I could not have seen without returning?

After seven days, the spot will have begun to know you. You will have begun to know it. That is the beginning of a relationship with the living world that no amount of reading about nature can replicate.

One Final Word About Doing It Right

Several students in my Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate named their fear of doing the sit spot incorrectly as a reason for hesitation.

This fear is understandable, and it is also the only real obstacle the practice presents.

There is no correct sit spot experience. There is no required insight, no minimum number of species to observe, no spiritual state to achieve, no tradition to perform correctly. The practice asks only that you show up, sit down, look outward, and return.

Doing it is doing it right.

The living world has been going about its life alongside you for years, just beyond the edge of your attention. The sit spot is simply the practice of turning toward it consistently enough that it stops treating you as a passing disturbance and begins to include you.

Go outside this week. Find your spot. Sit down.

Come back tomorrow.

Until then, please share questions, anything you learned, or perhaps something you tried through this practice.

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Do You Want to Walk Together?

If that moment outside opens something you want to keep exploring, go back tomorrow and explore the same spot, or even a short distance away. You may be surprised at what you notice.

If you want something a little more structured, the September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat on the Le Puy Camino in France offers an even more immersive experience. Seven days of walking the GR65 in a small group, with the practice not scheduled alongside the route but woven into every step of it. This is a solo practice within a small group to help free yourself from the challenges of the world for some much-needed time away, physically walking in the natural world.

Start outside. Start today. The earth is not waiting for you to enroll anywhere.

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