You can enjoy being with people and still long for time when nobody expects anything from you.

Many people feel this most on a walk. You head outside with a friend, a partner, or a family member, the whole hour fills with catching up, and you come home having noticed almost nothing around you. You enjoyed the company and still missed the quiet you went out for.

There is a way to have both. Agree to walk the first 20 minutes in silence, and let each of you notice the place in your own way. It works for a couple whose walks fill up with logistics, a parent and a teenager, an introvert and an extrovert, or a friend who is grieving and tired of talking.

A silent walk together gives you exercise, time with the living world, and company all at once. You are not alone on the path, which can make it feel more communal, and for some people, safer, than walking by yourself.

I learned this by guiding others. This September I walked the Le Puy Camino for the 7th time, guiding 4 people on a contemplative walking retreat across 7 days and about 95 miles from Le Puy-en-Velay to Conques. Silence and attention to the living world sat at the center of each day, and the week changed how I think about walking together.

Why I Have Always Walked Alone

My first Camino was with a guided group, and I found its expected togetherness difficult.

Walking with the group, gathering for 3 meals a day, and joining every conversation left little room for the quiet I had come for. I did not have the words to describe this at the time, and I was miserable without knowing why.

On later Caminos, I walked alone, at my own pace, free to stop for several minutes when something caught my attention, without having to explain why. I could still share dinner with other pilgrims and return to silence the next morning.

I began calling this solitude without isolation.

I have practiced it for the past few years on walks with my nephew, where we both find the silence we want without feeling alone.

When I planned a retreat for others, I asked whether a group could make room for the same freedom. I limited the retreat to 4 people, arranged private rooms (something rare on the Camino in France), and kept our lodging along the Camino itself. We shared a route, a rhythm, and times to gather, while each person had room for their own pilgrimage.

Four People, Four Different Pilgrimages

As the guide, I carry the practical details: where we are going, what to expect, where we will meet, and what anyone needs along the way.

I take those responsibilities seriously, and I also know their limit. I can introduce a practice, invite someone to slow down, or offer a question to carry along the trail, while what each person notices, remembers, or begins to love belongs to them. As a lifelong educator used to helping people understand things, I still find that hard.

When I passed someone on the trail, I offered a nod, a quiet hello, or a quick “Everything good?” It let them know I was nearby without pulling them out of their own walk. I wanted to give enough support to hold each person’s experience without making anyone feel they had to talk. This is the solitude without isolation I hoped to offer, and the one I have long wanted for myself.

Often the most useful thing I can offer is enough structure for someone to feel supported, followed by enough freedom for them to discover something I could never have planned. In 2027 I will walk 1 of the Camino paths alone in May, then guide 2 small contemplative walking retreats in August and September, built on this same balance of a shared path and personal silence, and the details are here.

Share

A Shared Path Without a Shared Experience

Walking outdoors with others brings a temptation to share everything.

Someone spots an unusual bird and calls everyone over, or sees a view and gathers the group for a photograph. Shared discoveries can deepen a friendship, and I enjoy them. They also redirect attention, so whatever I was beginning to notice on my own gives way to what someone else is seeing.

Silence gives each person room to meet the place in their own way.

On our final day, during the descent toward Conques, I was walking alone when a tree that had grown around a strand of barbed wire stopped me. I moved through the 4 movements of Earth-Based Lectio Divina with it: Receive, Ponder, Respond, and Belong. The encounter was complete without a witness, and I kept it to myself rather than turning it into a teaching for the group.

One of the most meaningful encounters of a group retreat happened in solitude, inside a week spent with others. Some of the best company asks nothing of us but our presence.

Talk About the Silence First

In a world this noisy, silence with another person can feel awkward at first, as though something has gone wrong between you.

A short conversation beforehand helps. Agree on how long you will walk without talking, that either of you can speak if something needs attention, and that you will share afterward only if you both want to.

We already share silence with others when we meditate together, practice yoga, or sit in worship, and a walk can hold it just as well.

The Practice: Walking Together in Silence

This week, try the balance I found on the Camino with someone close to home.

Silence works only when both people welcome it, so if either of you needs to speak, speak.

Companionship and solitude can share the same path, and you can discover that on your own street. This week, send this to someone you love and ask them to walk with you in silence for 20 minutes.

Have you ever walked with someone in comfortable silence, and what was different about it?

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The second cohort of the Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, begins in March 2027, and applications are now open. It offers a year with a small group focused on spiritual practice grounded in direct, reciprocal relationship with a specific place and its more-than-human inhabitants.

Contemplative Walking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Is there someone, or somewhere, you wish you could return to for a little while?

Perhaps you still think of things you would tell someone who has died. You hear a phrase they used, wonder what they would make of something, or pass a place you once visited together. Perhaps you miss the dog who made every walk a shared adventure, the tree you climbed as a child, or the meadow that has since been paved over.

These moments arrive in the middle of ordinary days. You notice, remember, and carry on, even when you wish you could stay with the memory a little longer.

This week, you might take that memory for a walk.

This Saturday is Halloween, and the days that follow are All Saints and All Souls. If you feel the pull of these days but have never had a simple way to mark them, a remembrance walk offers one: a short route, 1 name or memory, and a little time, in any tradition or none.

A Season That Makes Room for Memory

In the Northern Hemisphere, the dark arrives earlier, the leaves fall, and the year turns toward winter.

In Gaelic tradition, Samhain marked the beginning of winter, with celebrations on the evening before November 1, and Irish folk customs included welcoming the dead home. Western Christian traditions observe All Saints’ Day on November 1 and All Souls’ Day on November 2. In Mexico and many communities with Mexican roots, Día de los Muertos welcomes deceased loved ones with flowers, food, and offerings.

The traditions differ, and each gives remembrance a place in the calendar.

As an ordained Wild Guide and an NYU chaplain who has walked the Camino pilgrimage path 7 times, I find walking the simplest way I know to make room for those who have gone before us, including the more-than-human relationships and places whose absence I feel. You can bring your faith, your questions, or no particular belief.

3 Steps for a Remembrance Walk

A remembrance walk takes 3 simple steps, and you can take them in fields, along a hiking path, on a Camino, through a cemetery, or around your own block.

1. Choose a Name or Memory to Carry

Who or what have you been missing lately?

It might be a parent or grandparent, a friend, or someone whose absence still catches you by surprise. It might be a teacher or writer you never met, whose words helped you find your way, or an animal whose companionship changed the shape of your days.

You can understand “ancestor” generously here: ancestors of blood and bone, ancestors of ideas and influence, and the more-than-human beings and places that helped shape your life. A beloved animal, a childhood tree, a familiar stretch of woodland, or a meadow you can no longer visit can be part of this walk too. You might carry a name, an image, or simply your memory of being there.

If your family history is painful or unknown, you might begin with someone whose kindness helped you feel at home in the world, or a place where you felt you belonged.

This year, I will walk for family members and for my dogs who have died. I will also remember Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida, ancestors of ideas whose words continue to shape my thinking. Near the end of Song of Myself, Whitman writes:

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You do not need to remember everyone or everything at once. Start with 1 name or memory, and let others join along the way.

2. Choose Where to Walk

You might choose a cemetery, a churchyard, or somewhere you once walked together. You might visit a tree or landscape that brings a lost place to mind.

An ordinary route can hold this practice too: the park you visit each week, the streets around your home, a path you know by heart. You can remember somewhere you love from wherever you are now. Allow 20 to 30 minutes if you have them, and a few minutes around the block if you do not.

On the Camino, I also remember the pilgrims who walked these paths and kept them alive for a thousand years. Wherever you walk, you may find yourself thinking of those who made your own path possible.

3. Walk, Pause, and Remember

As you begin, bring your chosen person, animal, tree, or place to mind.

Let memories come at their own pace: a voice, a familiar gesture, something that still makes you laugh. You might remember the texture of bark beneath your hands, the smell of a meadow, or the sound of paws beside you. If nothing comes, keep walking, since you are still giving this time your attention.

When you reach a tree, a bench, or a turning in the path, pause. Say the name aloud or silently, and if there is no name, hold the memory for a moment.

You might offer thanks, if that feels true. You might speak a few words about what you miss, what has changed, or what you wish you could share, or you can simply stand quietly.

Then turn toward home and notice what meets you: the ground beneath your feet, a bird calling, the temperature of the air. If you tried the Earth-Based Examen I shared earlier this month, this movement may feel familiar, looking back and then attending to what is here.

You Can Begin as You Are

It is easy to wait until you can visit a distant grave, return to a meaningful place, or find more time.

A remembrance walk can fit into your life this week. Grief, gratitude, laughter, numbness, and unfinished feelings all belong on it. The walk may bring a vivid memory, or it may feel like an ordinary walk with a relationship held quietly in mind.

If walking isn't possible, spend a few minutes outdoors or sit by a window with your chosen name or memory.

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The Practice: A Remembrance Walk

The whole walk fits into a short practice you can do on any of these 3 days, or whenever you can.

In the Southern Hemisphere, these days fall in spring, near Beltane, and new growth can hold remembrance too.

A short walk can hold the people, animals, trees, and places you miss. Sometime between Saturday evening, October 31, and Monday, November 2, or whenever you are able, give 1 of those relationships a little time.

Who or what came to mind as you read this, and where might you walk in remembrance?

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The second cohort of the Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, begins in March 2027, and applications are now open. It offers a year with a small group focused on spiritual practice grounded in direct, reciprocal relationship with a specific place and its more-than-human inhabitants.

Contemplative Walking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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You can spend an hour outdoors and still feel as though you were never there.

You finish a walk and realize you spent it thinking about work, replaying a conversation, or planning what comes next. If you want to connect with nature but do not know where to start, try spending 10 minutes with 1 tree. You do not need to know its name, enjoy hiking, or have any experience with meditation.

A tree beside your bus stop or outside your window is a fine place to begin.

Perhaps you have been looking for a spiritual connection with nature. Perhaps you simply want a few minutes when nobody needs anything from you. Either is a good reason to stop.

A Reader’s Question

A reader recently wrote to me about the woods at her retirement community.

A small group cares for them, removing invasive plants and planting native ones. Some of her neighbors value the woods, while others, she told me, do not know they are there. She wanted to help them find their way in.

Her question reaches well beyond that woodland.

How do we begin noticing the living world once it has become background, and how do we share a place we love with someone who has not yet found a reason to visit? As a guide who leads contemplative walking retreats, and as a Forest Bathing Guide and Forest Therapy Practitioner certified by the Forest Therapy Hub, I have found that the first step is smaller than most people expect. You can take it on your own or with a friend, even without knowing whether or how it works. Trees are all around us, so begin with whichever one is closest.

3 Steps for Your First Visit

A first visit with a tree takes only 3 simple steps, and none of them require experience, special words, dedicated equipment, or even a shift in worldview or belief system. You can follow them on your own, or read them aloud to someone you have brought along.

1. Choose a Tree Nearby

Choose somewhere convenient, such as a courtyard, a neighborhood park, a churchyard, or a street you already travel.

The tree can be young or old, plain or striking, alone on a sidewalk or at the edge of a woods. Choose one that catches your attention, or simply the one nearest a bench. You can stand or sit, and if getting outside is difficult, a tree you can see through your window works, too.

You do not need to know its species, since learning its name can come later.

2. Take a Moment to Arrive

You may reach the tree with your mind still busy with everything you were doing beforehand.

Forest bathing, a practice of slowing down and attending to the natural world through the senses, offers a simple way to arrive. Read this slowly, to yourself or to someone with you:

Stand or sit where you are, and let your eyes take in this place. [Pause] When you are ready, close your eyes or soften your gaze, and feel the ground or the seat holding you. [Pause] Notice the air on your face, and the breath moving in and out of your nose.

If your thoughts keep moving, let them, and when you remember, return to something you can see, hear, or feel.

3. Notice 1 Detail

Look at the tree long enough to notice something specific: a seam in the bark, a branch reaching toward the light, a bud, or the place where the trunk meets the ground.

Then choose 1 of these invitations:

• Find a word for the bark. Rest your fingertips lightly on it, or look closely without touching. Is it ridged, cool, smooth, or something else?

• Listen from where you stand. Leaves may be moving, a bird may be calling, or traffic may be passing behind you. On an ordinary street, the traffic is part of what you hear.

• Let a memory come. Does this tree remind you of one you have known before, perhaps outside a childhood home, beside a school, or along a familiar road?

If a memory carries you away for a while, look back at the tree in front of you before leaving and notice 1 thing about this tree, here today.

You may feel curious, settled, distracted, or awkward, or you may feel very little. Whatever you feel, you can visit again.

Where the Spiritual Connection Begins

The word spiritual can make a simple practice sound as though it requires a profound experience or a long commitment.

You can set that expectation aside and spend a few minutes noticing the tree’s own life: where new growth is appearing, what rests in its branches, how far its roots might reach. For me, spiritual connection with nature begins with this willingness to meet the living world up close, where it already is. Over time, a familiar tree can become part of how you belong to a place.

Before leaving, you might offer a quiet thank you, and leave the bark, leaves, and branches where they are. The tree is alive, so you might also wish it good health.

When you are ready to go further, How to Read the Land the Way You Read a Sacred Text shows how Earth-Based Lectio Divina deepens this relationship. This short visit is a place to begin. My own began with a tree across the street, which I wrote about in The Tree I Was Invited to Cut Down.

If You Want to Bring a Friend

The same visit works just as well for 2, and it may be the easiest way to share a place you love.

Make the invitation specific and easy to accept: “Would you like to spend 10 minutes by the trees with me? There is a bench nearby.” Let your companion choose what interests them, and give each of you a little quiet before talking. When you love a place, it is tempting to explain why it matters before your companion has had time to notice anything themselves.

Afterward, ask, “What caught your attention?” If they tell you about the bark, listen to the bark story, and if they remember their grandmother’s garden, listen to that.

For my reader’s community, I suggested a short, regular walk with places to sit along the way, where each person spends time with 1 tree and shares a word or a memory before heading home.

The Practice: 1 Tree, 10 Minutes

The whole visit fits into a short practice you can save and try this week, on your own or with someone you would like to bring along.

The first step toward connecting with nature can be as small as 10 minutes and 1 tree. Choose a tree near you this week, and return another day to see what has changed.

What tree from your life comes to mind first, and where did it stand?

Leave a comment

The second cohort of the Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, begins in March 2027, and applications are now open. It offers a year with a small group focused on spiritual practice grounded in direct, reciprocal relationship with a specific place and its more-than-human inhabitants.

Contemplative Walking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Across the street from my house stands a tree I was advised to cut down.

The advice came from 2 people who know their work. The landscape gardener caring for my struggling apple trees suggested that removing her would give the apples more light. A tree service I had hired to prune some taller trees agreed that removing her would likely help the apples thrive.

For a while, I was convinced.

The reasoning made sense. The apple trees needed light, she was casting shade, and the decision was mine to make. I teach people to slow down with the living world, and still my first response was to accept the advice before spending time beside the tree herself.

Anyone who tends a garden, a yard, or a few trees eventually faces a version of this choice. What helped me decide was 2 weeks of watching her, and from those weeks came a simple practice of 3 visits for anyone weighing whether a living being on their land should be removed.

When the Body Disagrees With the Plan

Over the following days, the decision that made sense in my head began to weigh on my body.

I kept looking across the street at her. Her trunks rise so closely together from the base that I cannot see them as separate, and I am still unsure whether she is 1 tree with several trunks or several trees growing closely together. Whatever she is, she looked healthy and strong, and her leaves were turning spectacular autumn colors.

For 2 weeks I watched them change.

Each day the case for cutting her held up less well in my mind and pressed more heavily on my body. Some nights it kept me awake. I have learned to take that kind of disagreement between head and body seriously, since on the Camino my body kept walking long before my mind understood why.

Weighing the Apples Fairly

The apple trees have real problems, and light is the smallest of them.

This past year, we learned they were planted incorrectly, with the metal around the root balls never removed. Since then, insects that bore through their trunks have attacked them, and they are now being treated. They already receive hours of sun each day, and cutting her down might have given them perhaps 1 more.

More light would likely help the apple trees, though it would still be nowhere near enough to justify removing a healthy, thriving tree.

I still care about the apples. After 2 weeks of watching her, though, I could no longer consider their needs without considering her life as well. I decided to let her stand.

Crossing the Street

When I finally crossed the street to visit her, I stood beside her trunks and looked up into what remained of her color.

I asked if I could take a photograph of her up close to help me remember her beauty and majesty. The image at the top of this post is the one she allowed.

Her leaves are still falling as I write this.

What She Is Doing Right Now

Before her leaves fall, a tree is already preparing for what comes next.

As autumn days shorten, a deciduous tree begins reclaiming nutrients from her leaves, and much of their nitrogen returns to her woody tissues for future growth. A thin separation layer then forms at the base of each leaf stem, allowing the leaf to detach. The yellows and oranges we admire were present all summer, hidden by green chlorophyll, while many trees also produce fresh red pigments in autumn.

During the 2 weeks I spent deciding whether to let her go, she was letting go of her leaves and keeping what she would need for spring.

The Question Underneath the Advice

The gardener and the tree service gave sound advice about the light.

Their advice addressed 1 condition the apple trees needed, and it was offered in good faith. Watching her brought another relationship into my decision. Cutting her down would have answered the smallest of the apples’ problems at the cost of her whole life.

I keep returning to 1 question. Which lives do we decide are expendable for a better harvest, and how well do we know them before we decide?

Encounter by Day, Review by Night

Looking back, those 2 weeks held both practices I have shared here, in an order I never planned.

By day I watched her from across the street, staying with 1 being long enough for an encounter to deepen, which is the heart of Earth-Based Lectio Divina. By night, lying awake, I went back over what I had seen. Without knowing it, I was moving through the 4 movements of the Earth-Based Examen I shared last week.

• Thank. I had received her strength and her color, there across the street every day I looked.

• Remember. I kept returning to her trunks, so joined at the base that I could not see them as separate.

• Discern. The advice had treated her as standing wood in the way of a better harvest, while what I was living with was a relationship.

• Turn. I crossed the street, asked her permission for a photograph, and let her stand.

I recognized the pattern only afterward.

The Practice: Visit Before You Decide

The 3 visits below gather what those 2 weeks taught me into a form you can use with any living being whose removal is under consideration.

In the Northern Hemisphere, autumn and winter are when much tree work gets scheduled. In the Southern Hemisphere, spring clearing and planting raise the same question.

If something living on your land or in your care is marked for removal this season, visit it 3 times before the work begins. For me, 2 weeks of watching ended with a tree still standing.

Have you ever considered removing a tree, or another living being, that you had come to know? What did you decide?

Leave a comment

The second cohort of the Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, begins in March 2027, and applications are now open. It offers a year with a small group focused on spiritual practice grounded in direct, reciprocal relationship with a specific place and its more-than-human inhabitants.

Contemplative Walking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Some evenings I walk backward through my day while my feet carry me forward.

As the light goes, I return in memory to the morning and work my way through the hours that followed. I remember where I went, what occupied me, and what I noticed along the way. More and more, I also remember what slipped past me: the weather, a tree on the corner, an animal I barely registered, the light changing outside a window.

Underneath all of it sits 1 question: How did I live today as part of the living world?

This post shares the practice that has grown from that question, an Earth-Based Examen in 4 movements. Where Earth-Based Lectio Divina slows you down with 1 presence in the moment, this practice looks back across an entire day, including the hours spent indoors.

This is a working version. I initially shared Earth-Based Lectio Divina in April and refined it in July after the practice itself showed me what needed to change. I expect something similar to happen here.

How This Practice Found Me

I came to most of my work by doing it before I understood it.

On my first Camino I kept walking without knowing why, and the understanding arrived later. It was the first time I had done anything in that order, and it has shaped how I build every practice since. I try the practice on foot first and give it a name only after it has earned one.

This practice followed the same path.

When I wrote the guide for my 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat from Le Puy to Conques in September, each evening page asked the walkers a question about the day behind them and closed with a single line: What did you notice today? As the guide, I answered the same questions each evening alongside the walkers, and they deepened my own practice.

Looking back, that guide was asking for an Examen without using the word.

Since returning home, I have been asking those same questions of ordinary days, the ones spent at a desk instead of on the trail.

I first encountered the Examen many years ago during my graduate studies in religious studies. I met it again during my training in spiritual direction, where it became a way to look back over a day and notice what had been moving beneath the surface.

When I connected what I was doing with the Examen of Ignatius of Loyola, the practice gained a lineage nearly 500 years old. That lineage is longer still, and it is worth telling.

A Very Old Habit of Looking Back

Reviewing the day before sleep predates Christianity. A Pythagorean tradition preserved in the Golden Verses instructs practitioners to examine the day before sleeping, asking what they did, where they went wrong, and what they left undone. Cicero, writing in the 1st century BCE, referred to recalling one's words and actions in the evening as a Pythagorean custom. Seneca, writing in the 1st century CE, described a similar nightly discipline in On Anger, reviewing what he had said and done and asking where he had resisted a fault and become better. These were practices of ethical formation, meant to shape how the next day was lived.

Ignatius of Loyola gave the habit the shape most people know today.

Ignatius was a Basque soldier whose leg was shattered by a cannonball at Pamplona in 1521. During his long recovery, he began noticing which thoughts left him consoled and which left him empty. Over the next years, he refined the notes that became the Spiritual Exercises, published in 1548.

The Examen appears there as a daily review with 5 points.

The person praying gives thanks for what has been received, asks for the grace to see clearly, and reviews the day from the hour of rising. Then they ask pardon for faults and resolve to live differently with God’s help.

From Conscience to Consciousness

Over time, the Examen was often taught with a strong emphasis on examining faults and preparing for confession.

In 1972, Jesuit George Aschenbrenner reframed the practice as an “examen of consciousness.” The emphasis shifted toward what had been moving within a person during the day and where God had been present, with gratitude at the center of the prayer.

In 1994, Dennis Hamm gave the practice the phrase that stopped me: “Praying Backward Through Your Day.”

Hamm built his version around feelings, treating them as signs of where the real movement of the day had been. He also described the felt experience of a day as the meeting place between the creatures we are and everything else held in existence.

That language opened an ecological possibility for me.

The Examen Turns Toward Creation

Others have carried the Examen toward the living world before me.

In 2014, Jesuit Joseph Carver published an ecological Examen that keeps the Ignatian form while turning attention toward creation. He asks where we became aware of creation’s gifts, where we failed to care for them, and how we might respond with greater commitment. He describes its larger movement as awareness, appreciation, and commitment.

A later Ecological Examen developed within the Ignatian community moves further toward ecological justice. It asks practitioners to consider how their choices affect creation and vulnerable people, where reconciliation is needed, and how they might respond in solidarity.

Those practices helped me see what the Examen could become when creation enters the review of the day.

My question begins slightly earlier, with how I lived today as a member of the living world, before I ask how my actions affected it.

I begin with relationship itself: what sustained me, what I noticed, what I missed, and what those encounters ask of me now.

I also take the practice on foot and use language that people of any tradition, or of none, can enter.

The Living World Was Present All Day

Most of us reach the evening convinced there was little nature in the day.

You may have gone from home to a car or train, then into an office, classroom, or store and spent hours with email and screens. Through all of it, you breathed thousands of times, drank water, and ate food that depended on soil, rain, sunlight, fungi, and human hands.

Weather moved around every building you entered, trees stood along the streets, and your own animal body carried you through each hour.

Your participation in the living world continued all day, and what faded was your awareness of it.

The Examen gives each unnoticed encounter a second chance.

An Earth-Based Examen in 4 Movements

This is the form I practice now at the end of the day, either through an evening walk or quiet reflection before bed.

Its language grew clearer after many evenings of practicing looser versions at the end of my own days. I know it is not finished, and I am choosing to share it before it is. Part of how I develop a practice is by living with it long enough to see what it reveals, then letting other people try it and tell me what becomes clearer, where it catches, and what I may not have seen on my own.

I think of this as learning in public. The practice is formed enough to use, but still open enough to change with experience, including yours.

Each movement ends with 1 question to carry with you.

1. Thank

Begin by giving thanks for what you received today.

Ask what sustained you, fed you, sheltered you, or accompanied you. Water may come to mind, or a meal, the rain, a tree casting shade, a dog waiting at the door, or the ground beneath the building where you worked.

Let each one be what it was without forcing significance onto it.

What did I receive from the living world today?

2. Remember

Move through the day in periods, from waking to this moment.

Morning, travel, work, meals, and evening each return in turn, with no need to recall every minute. Notice the encounters you recognized as they happened, and give particular attention to the ones you recognize only now.

Perhaps you heard a bird on the way to the train and never looked up, or ate lunch in front of a screen without thinking about where the food came from.

Where was the living world present in my day, including where I missed it at the time?

3. Discern

Return to the moments that still carry some energy.

Ask where you were attentive or grateful, and where you felt delight, grief, irritation, wonder, or indifference.

Ask where another being became scenery, where a place became only something to pass through, and where convenience hid a cost.

Aschenbrenner saw these inner movements as the heart of the practice because they reveal what a day was actually about.

What kind of relationship with the living world was I living today?

4. Turn

Turn toward tomorrow.

Ignatius closed his Examen with a resolution, and relationship asks something of us here as well.

You may want to return to a particular place, learn the name of a tree you pass every morning, or eat tomorrow’s lunch away from a screen.

Some evenings the turn is small: simple thanks, or a plan to notice the maple outside the office before you go through the door.

What does what I noticed today ask of me tomorrow?

The Common Mistake: Keeping Score

The most common way this practice goes wrong is turning Discern into an environmental scorecard.

Counting how many responsible choices you made pulls you back into the same kind of accounting that later Ignatian writers tried to move beyond. This movement concerns relationship, which a tally cannot measure.

When you catch yourself grading the day, return to a single moment and ask what passed between you and that being.

The fourth movement grows more readily from that kind of attention than from a grade.

Why Belonging Has No Movement of Its Own

Readers of Earth-Based Lectio Divina will notice that Belong, its final movement, has no place on this list.

That is deliberate.

We may spend an entire day physically surrounded by the living world and still experience very little relationship with it. Breathing air, drinking water, passing trees, and eating food make us participants in ecological systems, but participation alone does not create belonging.

Belonging grows through relationship.

Lectio stays with 1 presence long enough for encounter to deepen. The Examen works differently. It looks back across a whole day for moments when relationship did happen, might have happened, or was missed altogether.

Remembering those moments gives us another chance to notice where relationship began, where it was absent, and where we might return tomorrow.

The 2 practices approach belonging from different directions, and both treat it as something that grows through relationship.

What I Am Testing

This is the first public version of the practice.

I am still watching whether 4 movements are enough, whether their names hold, and what changes when other people try it. The names in Earth-Based Lectio Divina shifted between April and July, and I expect this practice to teach me something similar through use.

After a season of walking with it, I plan to return to the form and show what changed and why.

For now, I am interested in what becomes visible when others walk it too.

Try It on 1 Ordinary Day

The easiest way to understand this working form is to practice it once and notice what happens.

Try the practice on 3 evenings this week and notice which movement asks the most of you. Since this is still a working form, pay attention too to anything that feels missing, unnecessary, or unclear. That is part of what I am learning from sharing the practice now rather than waiting until I think it is finished.

When you looked back through your day, what relationship with the living world did you recognize only afterward?

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If you love the living world and still feel like a visitor in it, this is a year is built for you.

This autumn, the founding cohort of the Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate is learning to read the land.

We began in March with a sit spot, 10 minutes a day in the same place, and a single nature ally each person returned to through the seasons. Since then we have worked with grief and with the body, and this autumn with ceremony and with practices for listening to the more-than-human world. Among them is my adaptation of a method for reading scripture that the Carthusian monk Guigo II described in the twelfth century, which I wrote about in How to Read the Land the Way You Read a Sacred Text.

The second cohort begins on March 10, 2027, and this post gathers what you need to decide whether it is for you.

What Is Rewilding the Soul?

Rewilding the Soul is a certificate program in ecospirituality, offered online through Cherry Hill Seminary. The cohort stays together for a full year, from March 2027 to February 2028, moving through 4 seasonal modules of live classes, small group Councils, reading, and practice in your own surroundings.

The classroom is where we gather. Most of the learning happens in your own place, with the trees along your street, the birds outside your window, and the seasonal changes you learn to notice by returning to the same spot.

What I Mean by Ecospirituality

In this program, ecospirituality means spiritual practice grounded in direct, reciprocal relationship with a specific place and the more-than-human beings who live there.

Through daily practice, deep listening, study, and ongoing relationship with nature allies, you come to know the plants, animals, waters, landforms, and seasonal cycles of your own bioregion. Over a year, they become kin. Ritual and ceremony grow out of those relationships rather than being taken from a fixed system.

The program is Earth-centered rather than tied to any single religious tradition. It welcomes practitioners of every spiritual background and religion, people without a clear tradition, and people shaping their own paths. You can bring your existing commitments and find out how relationship with the living world might deepen them.

How the Year Unfolds

The program follows the Celtic Wheel of the Year in the Northern Hemisphere, with a module for each season. If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, you are welcome to join, and your seasons will run opposite to the modules.

• Sacred Belonging to Place. Daily sit spot practice, study of your bioregion, land acknowledgment, and a first relationship with a nature ally.

• Embodying Earth Soul. Work with personal and ecological grief, nature as mirror, and personal healing ritual.

• Deepening Kinship with the Living World. Communication with the more-than-human world, ceremony you create and lead for others, and environmental justice as a spiritual calling.

• Sharing Earth Gifts. Teaching Earth connection, supporting others through ecological grief, and community Earth service.

The arc moves from belonging to your own place toward sharing what you have learned with others. Each season builds on the one before it, which is why the cohort stays together for the whole year.

When and How We Meet

• Dates. Wednesday, March 10, 2027, through Wednesday, February 23, 2028

• Time. Wednesdays, 12:00 p.m. U.S. Eastern, which is 9:00 a.m. Pacific

• Length. 90 minutes

• Format. Online via Zoom, with practice in your own place between meetings

• Rhythm. 24 live classes, 6 in each module, and 20 small group Council meetings on the alternate weeks

This is an experiential program, and it asks for live participation. Recordings help when you miss a session, though the work depends on being present with the cohort.

If you live outside the United States, check your local time against U.S. Eastern time, especially in the weeks when daylight saving changes on different dates.

What Happens in Council

Councils are small groups within the cohort that meet in the weeks between classes. They are where you bring what is happening in your practice, listen to others, and work through the experiences that come up between sessions.

A practice sustained across a year changes. Council gives you companions for that, and a way to learn from experiences beyond your own.

What We Read and Study

Reading accompanies the practice and gives it a wider frame. The program draws on 5 bodies of thought.

• Deep ecology, which holds that the living world has value apart from its usefulness to people

• Ecopsychology, which examines the relationship between people and the natural world

• The phenomenology of perception, especially its account of how our senses participate with the more-than-human world

• Indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge, approached with attribution and respect

• Systems thinking, which attends to the relationships and patterns within living systems

Each module centers on 1 book.

• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

• The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller

• The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram

• Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone

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What the Program Does Not Do

Knowing a program's edges helps you see whether it fits. Rewilding the Soul does not do the following.

• Teach ceremonial magic, deity work, or a formal ritual system. You design ritual and ceremony from your relationship with place, and practitioners of established traditions are welcome and may find their practice deepened.

• Teach or reproduce Indigenous ceremonies. You learn from Indigenous knowledge with attribution and develop practices rooted in your own place.

• Take place mainly in a classroom. Most of the learning happens in direct contact with your place, adapted to your body and your access.

• Provide therapy or professional chaplaincy training. The eco-grief support practiced in the program is peer support.

• Offer quick techniques. What it develops comes through sustained practice across the full year.

  ---

Who Might Find a Home Here

You may find a home here if you are drawn toward Earth-based spiritual practice and want support beginning it, if you want your spiritual life to involve your body and your daily surroundings, or if you carry ecological grief and want company in learning to respond to it. It may also suit people hoping to share Earth connection through their work, including spiritual directors, clergy, chaplains, educators, environmental professionals, and activists.

You can begin without knowing the names of the plants around you or having a settled spiritual practice. The year builds on curiosity and a willingness to keep returning to the same place.

What a Year Asks of You

Plan on a few hours a week. On meeting weeks that includes the 90 minutes of class or Council, along with reading, reflection, and daily practice.

The daily practice is short. A sit spot asks for 10 minutes in the same place and 5 minutes of journaling, and it fits into time you already have. A lunch break outside, a window at the start of the day, a bench in a nearby park. This is the part people tend to underestimate, because its depth comes from returning every day rather than from any single visit.

Some parts of the year ask for more. Preparing a ceremony for the cohort and carrying out a community service project both take time beyond the weekly rhythm, so leave room for them.

Tuition and Enrollment

Tuition is $1,800 for the full program, paid in 4 installments of $450 at the beginning of each module. The cohort runs with a minimum of 6 participants and a maximum of 12.

You can read more and apply through the Cherry Hill Seminary program page, or go directly to the application. The certificate FAQ covers format, schedule, cost, and books, and links to a brief syllabus for 2027 to 2028.

About Me

I am Jeffrey Keefer, an ecospirituality educator and ordained Wild Guide. I serve as Chaplain and Spiritual Life Advisor at New York University and as Professor of Research Methodology, and I am a certified spiritual director with a doctorate in educational research from Lancaster University.

I have walked 7 Caminos, along the Le Puy route in France and the Camino Francés in Spain. Much of what I teach emerged from those pilgrimages, from walking as spiritual discipline, from letting the land shape me, and from discovering that I was never separate from the living world around me.

If you are wondering whether the program fits your interests, schedule, or circumstances, write to me here on Substack or via email.

A Place to Begin

A year of returning to the same place changes what you notice there, and over time, how you belong to it. You can get a sense of that before March.

Where would your sit spot be, if you began this week?

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The Fall Equinox gave me a beautiful lunch hour, very close to home, and I came back better than I left, in ways that reached well beyond my time with the Land.

That kind of day makes walking easy. The next few weeks will not. The light shortens, the paths turn to mud, and people who walked faithfully all summer quietly stop until spring. Most of them never decide to. They simply notice one day that they have stopped.

As an ordained Wild Guide who has walked the Camino 7 times, in rain as well as sun, I think these are the weeks when a walking practice becomes real. What follows is why the turning season is the truest test of connection with the living world, and how to keep walking through it, 20 minutes at a time.

The Question Underneath the Practice

The walking practice I teach, Earth-Based Lectio Divina, has 4 movements for meeting one living being at a time: Receive, Ponder, Respond, and Belong. In July, I set out the 3 premises beneath it: the living world has agency, encounter is mutual, and reciprocity is required.

The second premise is where autumn does its work. Mutual encounter means two parties, each with a life of its own. That challenges a very common and very comfortable version of nature connection, in which the forest exists to restore you and the birdsong exists to reward your attention.

In that version the living world is a service, and you are the customer.

A reader recently raised a version of this question in the comments, wondering how much of what we encounter outdoors is there for us. I have been turning it over ever since. My answer is that almost none of it is, and that this is the better news.

Nobody Arranged the Autumn for You

Summer makes the service version easy to believe.

The light is generous, the air is mild, and a walk returns exactly what you went out for. For months the living world seems to be cooperating with you. Then the weather changes.

The rain falls because the season has turned. The dark comes early because this half of the earth is leaning away from the sun. The mud on the path is water and soil doing what they have always done, and you happen to be walking through it.

None of it is about you.

That is what makes autumn useful. When nothing out there is arranged for your comfort, the only reason left to walk is the relationship itself. Summer walking can run on what it gives back, and October walking has to run on something steadier.

That is the sense in which the walking season starts when everyone else stops. From here on, a walk rests solely on the relationship.

Readers south of the equator are walking into longer days right now. The same question will be waiting for you in April.

What the Good Days Can and Cannot Carry

I do not want to talk down the good days.

Last Monday’s hour did me real good. A walk that restores you is a gift, and there is nothing wrong with being glad of it. The trouble begins when restoration becomes the reason you go.

Then, in the first cold, wet week, the practice lapses because the thing you were really visiting has stopped being offered quite as freely.

Kinship is what carries a practice through that. Kin are the ones you keep visiting when the visit costs you something, and the ones who see you in every season rather than only your best one.

How to Keep Walking Into the Dark Half

Shorten rather than stop.

Twenty minutes in the rain keeps a relationship going through weeks when an hour feels impossible. Go back to the same place, too, because a tree you visit through the dark months shows you its winter, and you show it yours. Returning is what turns a walk into a relationship.

Dress to stay rather than to pass through.

The fourth movement, Belong, asks you to remain after you have decided the encounter is finished, and nobody lingers while they are cold. A warm hat does more for that movement than any amount of good intention.

Bad weather does not keep the living world from reaching you. Some of the encounters I remember best came in rain, including 2 frogs in a pond outside Espalion who stopped me mid-stride on a wet June morning.

Who Is Out There in the Rain

The living world was never arranged for your comfort, and the dark half of the year is when you find that out. The relationship that survives it is the one worth having.

This week, pick a day with weather you would normally stay inside for, as long as it is safe to be out, and walk 20 minutes on a route you already know.

What weather usually keeps you indoors, and who do you think is out there in it?

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

If you try the practice I offered, I welcome hearing how it goes for you.

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I am celebrating the Fall Equinox today, Monday, over lunch.

The equinox itself arrives on Tuesday, September 22, at 8:05 in the evening Eastern time.

As a chaplain at New York University and an ordained Wild Guide who has walked the Camino 7 times, I have spent years with people who want to mark the turning of the year without signing up for anything. The question I hear most often is some version of whether they are doing it right. Underneath that is usually a worry about time, because the honest version of the question is whether an hour is enough when you cannot give a day.

An hour is enough. What follows is exactly how I am planning to celebrate it, written before I do it, so you can take it to your own ground this week and try what works for you.

The Moment and the Marker

The equinox is an instant rather than a day.

At 00:05 UTC on September 23, which is Tuesday evening where I live, the sun crosses the celestial equator heading south. Day and night are not actually equal at that moment, since the bending of light in our atmosphere and the width of the sun’s own disk push the true balance a few days later. The instant itself passes while many are cleaning up from dinner.

So I personally fix it on the 21st, and I know that is the wrong day most years.

I do this with all of the astronomical turnings. Thanksgiving is the same arrangement. Nobody remembers the date; everybody remembers the 4th Thursday, and the fixed marker is what makes the gathering happen at all. A moving target gets observed by almost no one.

There is a version of this on every long footpath. The Le Puy route through France is waymarked in red and white, and someone chose that rock and that fencepost. The marks are arbitrary. The path does not need them. Walkers do, and a waymark you can find is worth more than a precise position you cannot.

What I am after is a date I will keep.

What I Am Planning to Do

I am giving it a lunch hour.

I will go out without a destination and wander, a word I do not often use in my writing, because most of what I teach has a route. This one has an hour and no endpoint. Going out at all is a kind of agreement to be met.

I will walk slowly enough that something can reach me, and I will let that something choose me rather than the other way around.

When it does, I will run the 4 movements I have written about here before, adapted from Guigo II, the twelfth-century Carthusian monk whose Ladder of Monks set out 4 movements for reading scripture slowly. The living world stands in for the text.

Receive one being. Ponder what they offer. Respond with care. Stay long enough to Belong.

Nothing in that requires a forest or a free day. A city park works. So does a backyard, a canal path, a courtyard, or the grounds of the building where you work.

The Offering, and Why It Is Peanuts

I will have unsalted peanuts in the shell in my pocket.

If I am moved to leave something, that is what I will leave. They are unsalted because salt is hard on small animals, in the shell because the shell breaks down, and modest in quantity because a pile of food beside a path creates problems for everyone who walks it afterward. Care about what I leave behind is part of the offering rather than a qualification on it.

The reasoning underneath is simple. Something was received, so something is given. I am not performing a rite. I am completing an exchange that was already underway. All relationships need to be reciprocal to grow and last.

If peanuts are wrong for where you are, leave something else, including something you made, or leave nothing and say thank you instead. Departing with care is a real response.

What I Am Carrying in Case

A small journal is going in my bag.

If I am moved to write, I will sit down and write, most likely badly, and that will be fine. If I am moved to build something from what is already on the ground, leaves, stones, or seed heads arranged in a circle, I will do that instead and leave it for the weather to take apart. If I am moved to stay somewhere for 20 minutes longer than I planned, the rest of the hour can go.

None of that is a step. They are permissions, carried in case the hour asks for them.

Readers south of the equator are meeting the same instant from the other side, as their light lengthens rather than shortens. The practice holds either way. What changes is what you are marking.

The Common Mistakes

The first is treating the hour as a performance.

There is no correct way to walk out on the equinox, and no one is assessing it. If you find yourself checking whether you are doing the movements properly, you have stopped attending to anything outside your own head, which is the only way to actually get this wrong.

The second is concluding that nothing happened.

Some hours give you very little. You walk, the light is ordinary, nothing reaches out, and you come home with a pocket of peanuts and no story. That hour still counts. Practice is built on returning rather than on arrivals, and the walk that gives you nothing does the same work as the one that stops you in your tracks, which you will only discover later.

The third is waiting for 8:05 on Tuesday and then wondering why there is nothing magical or mystical happening. Waiting around with hope is not a plan.

Marking It Where You Are

Celebrating the turning of the year does not require a tradition, a belief, or a day off. It requires an hour and some willingness to be interrupted.

Go out this week, on whatever day you can keep. Give 1 hour to a route you already walk, let 1 living being reach you first, and carry something small in case you want to leave it behind.

Who reached you, and what did you leave?

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

If you try the practice I offered, I welcome hearing how it goes for you.

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At 2:15 in the afternoon on Friday, September 11, on the long descent toward Conques, a tree stopped me.

I had been walking for 7 days by then, most of them in silence, guiding 4 people along the Le Puy route of the Camino in France. As an ordained Wild Guide who has walked the Camino 7 times, I know that descent. I had passed this particular tree several times on earlier walks and had never once looked at it. Perhaps I had seen it, but only as background.

The tree had grown around a strand of barbed wire.

What follows is a single encounter, start to finish, in the practice I call Earth-Based Lectio Divina. Four movements adapted from Guigo II, the twelfth-century Carthusian monk who wrote about Lectio Divina, with the living world as the text in place of scripture. I wrote the movements out in July, and this is the first time I have shown one encounter running all the way through.

A Tree Everyone Walks Past

Everyone who walks to Conques along the GR65 Le Puy Camino route in France passes this tree.

It stands shortly before Saint-Marcel, on ground that thousands of pilgrims cover every season, and I have been one of them. I had come down that path several times before, with a pack on my back and Conques somewhere ahead. The tree held its wire through all of it.

The tree had not changed. My pace had.

The Practice in 4 Words

Lectio Divina involves reading a sacred text and internalizing it. Earth-Based Lectio Divina connects us with the sacredness of life that is all around us, and brings us into kinship.

Receive is the moment something stops you, one presence rather than the whole view. Ponder is staying with what stopped you and letting it work on you before you go looking for what it means. Respond is answering what you met, aloud or in silence, and putting back anything you picked up.

Belong is staying past the point where you have decided the encounter is finished, and it is the movement most of us skip. Nothing appears to be happening because we are still moving at our speed, and the encounter completes itself only when we slow to the speed of what stopped us.

The 4 names describe what already happens when you give a living being your sustained attention. They are there to help you recognize where you are, rather than to be worked through in order.

1. Receive

Something stops you, and you do not choose it.

I was walking alone, mid-stride, and then I was standing still. The wire ran into the trunk on one side and came out the other, and the bark had swelled and closed over it in a long vertical seam. I had been watching the path in front of my shoes for 7 days, which may be why I finally saw something beside it.

The inner posture: I allow encounter, and I let meaning come as it will. No judgments and no explanations or wondering why this, now.

2. Ponder

The tree looked well.

It was in leaf, upright, holding a full crown under a blue September sky. Something manufactured to separate had been attached to its side years ago and ran straight through its middle. The tree had answered by growing. My first thought was that it had overcome the wire.

Trees do not close their wounds the way human bodies do. They wall off the damage and lay new growth around it, a process the plant pathologist Alex Shigo called compartmentalization.

The wire is still in there, and it will still be in there when this tree is 200 years old.

The tree built a life that permanently includes the wire and continued growing at full strength.

The inner posture: I am part of what I am noticing.

3. Respond

What you receive from the living world asks something of you.

I spoke to the tree about the wire and about what it had cost. I spoke to it about carrying on as well as it could with something inside it that was never meant to be there. I told it I knew something about that, and left it there. I had nothing to offer, so I thanked it, which was what I had.

The inner posture: I am in relationship here.

4. Belong

I asked the tree whether I could put my hand on the seam.

Then I did, over the place where the bark had closed around the wire, and I stayed. What arrived while I stood there was recognition. I have carried things I did not choose and grown around them, and the growing never removed them, and here was another life that had done the same, standing in the sun on a Friday afternoon in September.

I had never experienced belonging in this way before.

The inner posture: nothing to do, I belong here.

What 7 Days of Silence Actually Changed

The practice did not find me a remarkable tree.

The tree was ordinary, public, and already known to me. What the silence changed was my speed, and with it my availability. Contemplative walking asks us to deepen at a pace that is not the one we arrive with, and by that final afternoon I had been at that slower pace long enough for something beside the path to reach me.

The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat is now complete, and I am keeping a list of people who would like to hear about the two I am starting to develop for next year, including a return to this same path.

What made this possible was repetition and pace, and both of those are available on any route you take often enough to stop seeing.

What Is Waiting on Your Own Route

Something on the route you already walk has been standing there through every pass you have made, holding whatever it holds. It has been waiting for the week you are slow enough to be stopped by it.

Walk your familiar route this week and give one presence on it the 4 movements. Receive one being, Ponder what they offer, Respond with care, and stay long enough to Belong.

What is on your regular route that you have passed a hundred times and never once stopped for? Go and look this week, then tell me what you found.

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

If you try the practice I offered, I welcome hearing how it goes for you.

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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort, and planning for 2027 is nearly complete. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is available to you wherever you are walking this week.

Contemplative Walking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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I wrote this before I left.

From September 5 through September 11, I am walking along the Camino in France from Le Puy-en-Velay to Conques with the 4 people on my Contemplative Walking Retreat, and I am fully out of touch while we are on the route.

Here is what I will be doing out there, in the form I actually use when there is a pack on my back and a long day ahead.

Where This Comes From

A twelfth century Carthusian monk named Guigo II described four movements for reading scripture slowly, one at a time, until the words worked their way into the body. His sequence has served contemplatives for 900 years.

I use it outdoors, with the living world as the text.

The sequence stays. What changes is that the text can answer back. A book holds still for you, and an oak does not. It has its own life underway, and it registers your arrival whether or not you notice that it has. I wrote the full practice out a few weeks ago in How to Read the Land the Way You Read a Sacred Text, including the three premises it rests on and a worked example from a rainy morning outside Espalion.

This post is the portable version.

The Practice in Four Words

Receive one being, ponder what they offer, respond with care, and stay long enough to belong.

Four words: Receive, Ponder, Respond, Belong. Everything below is commentary.

The Four Movements, Walking Version

Receive. Something stops you. One presence rather than the view: a beech at the field edge, a slug crossing the track, water moving under a stone bridge. Let the many recede and stay with the one.

Ponder. Stay with it and let it work on you. What is it doing? Let whatever rises in your body arrive before you go looking for what it means. Do this without judgment, as whatever attracts your attention is good.

Respond. Answer what you met. Thank it, ask it something, apologize, promise care. Ask how it is doing. Wish it long life and good energies. Aloud or silently. If you have picked something up, put it back before you go.

Belong. Stay past the point where you have decided the encounter is finished. This is the movement worth stopping for, and it is the one most of us skip because it looks like nothing is happening. The Land moves slower than thought, and often slower than people do. Give it the extra minute and something usually shifts.

Why This Works on a Long Walk

A full day of walking gives you more encounters than any of them can hold your attention.

The practice is not a schedule. Most of the miles will pass with my mind elsewhere, which is ordinary and not a failure. What matters is that when something does draw my attention, and it always does, I have 4 words to fall into rather than a decision to make about whether to stop.

The Aubrac will offer cattle, weather, and plenty of open ground. Your version this week may be a street tree, a canal path, or even a hedge behind a car park. The practice does not distinguish between them, and neither, in my experience, does whatever living being is looking back.

While I Am Gone

Comments stay open, and I will read every one and comment back when I come down off the route in mid-September.

Tell me what stopped you this week, and how long you managed to stay.

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

If you try the practice I offered, I welcome hearing how it goes for you.

Leave a comment

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

Contemplative Walking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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For years I could not say what I was doing or why I was doing it.

People asked me what I did out there on the Camino for seven days alone. I would open my mouth and reach for whatever language was nearby. Walking meditation. Mindfulness. Hiking with intention. Connecting with the natural world. Clearing my mind of technology and the news. Each answer was close enough to pass and wrong enough to leave me quiet afterward, aware that I had described someone else’s practice and called it mine.

The problem was not that I lacked words. It was that the only words I had were those I heard others say or somehow seemed to make sense, and I tried those words out for myself. This is like the academic notion of “fake it till you make it,” otherwise known as doing your best by following the lead of others until you can stand on your own.

The problem was that the words I borrowed had been made for other experiences, and they carried those experiences with them. I could not yet express it clearly in my own words.

What the Sit Spot Already Taught Me

Anyone who has kept a sit spot knows the first visit is a disappointment. Perhaps also the second or third.

You choose a place, you sit, and very little happens. A bird, maybe. Some wind. You leave wondering whether you did it wrong. Nothing was wrong. The place had not yet decided you were staying.

By the fourth visit, the chipmunk resumes his route through the tree roots instead of freezing when you arrive. By the tenth, you know which tree drops its leaves first and which bird calls before the others wake. The place did not become more interesting. You became a known presence there, and it began to show you what was always occurring.

That is not a technique, but rather the way relationships work with anything alive.

I had taught this for years without recognizing that language obeys the same law.

Six Years of Returning

The words for what I do arrived the way the sit spot arrives.

Not through effort. I tried effort. I sat down more than once determined to define the thing, and produced paragraphs that were accurate and lifeless. What I got instead came from walking the same route across six summers and paying attention to which sentences survived the miles and which ones fell away somewhere past Aumont-Aubrac. No wonder the first time I walked this path I followed others also walking, only to realize fifteen minutes later I was following them on the wrong path, literally needing to back up and follow the one for me.

Some years gave me nothing that I could understand at the time. Some gave me a single phrase that turned out to be wrong the following June. Last summer, during the final stretch toward Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the words finally settled into a form that held, and I said them aloud for the first time in July, to a gathering of the Seminary of the Wild Earth and the Center for Wild Spirituality, where I trained and was ordained.

Contemplative Walking is walking slowly, in silence, with attention given to the living world.

Every word in that sentence took years to learn. Slowly, because the pace is the door. In silence, because silence is how we become quiet enough to be met. Attention given to the living world, because the direction of attention is the whole difference between this and the practices I had been borrowing names from. When we give that attention, we actually belong.

This is the essence of Lectio Divina when Nature is our sacred text.

I could not have written that sentence in year one. Not because I was not trying, but because the practice had not yet shown me enough of itself to be described.

Why This Publication Has a New Name

Which brings me to something you may have already noticed.

For years this publication was called Where Insight Meets Earth. That name was accurate, and I was fond of it. It was also less clear than it could have been, and a first-time reader had to work to understand what happens here.

The new name is Contemplative Walking. It arrived the same way the definition did, through writing and walking and the long relationship between them, until what I actually do became plain enough to hang on a shingle. The writing has not changed. The practices have not changed. The domain is the same and every older link still works.

The practice deepened, and eventually the name caught up.

If You Do Not Have the Words Yet

You may be practicing something you cannot name. A way of being outdoors that is not quite what the books describe. A relationship with a particular tree or field or stretch of shoreline that sounds foolish when you try to explain it, or perhaps is outside your traditional philosophical, spiritual, or religious paradigm.

You are not failing at description. You have simply not returned enough times yet.

Keep going back. Say nothing about it for now. The words come the way everything living comes, at their own pace, and they arrive most reliably to people who stopped demanding they arrive.

On Friday I take the train south. On Saturday I begin guiding four people in a retreat along the Le Puy route, the same path where these words came to me, and I will invite them to do exactly what I described above: to walk slowly, in silence, and to let something living stop them. I do not know what any of them will find. I do know that whatever it is will take longer to name than the walking takes, and that this is not a flaw in the process.

It is the process.

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

If you try the practice I offered, I welcome hearing how it goes for you.

Leave a comment

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

Contemplative Walking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Eight days before I begin guiding a walking retreat from Le Puy-en-Velay, I went looking for miles in Paris.

I found them on the Coulée verte René-Dumont, a linear park that follows nearly 3 miles of an old railway line through the 12th arrondissement.

The trains stopped running in 1969, and the park opened in 1993. What once carried railway carriages now holds roses, bamboo, mature lime trees, and birds happily living their lives, all of it 30 feet above the traffic and largely unnoticed by people passing underneath.

I came for the walking. My legs need the miles before the retreat begins on September 5. After a while, though, the distinction between training and practice began to disappear.

I had been thinking of these days in Paris as preparation for the real walking ahead. The Camino will give us distance, history, and the daily rhythm of getting up and following the route.

What it will not manufacture for us is attention.

That part can begin anywhere.

What Makes Walking Contemplative

Most of the time, walking is a way to get somewhere. The body moves while the mind runs ahead, toward the next appointment, the unfinished work, or whatever waits at the other end.

Contemplative walking invites us into something different. It asks you to let the place you are passing through interrupt your purposes.

The Aubrac Plateau (one focus along the retreat) does that. So does a viaduct in the 12th arrondissement, between a bakery and a rose bed.

The spiritual quality of the walk comes from something other than distance or the route's age. It begins when I stop treating the world around me as scenery. The lime tree overhead is living its own particular life, and so is the wren in the hedge, whether or not I ever look up.

Attention is how the relationship starts.

Almost every city has a place where this can happen. A park, a greenway, a canal path, a cemetery with old trees, a quiet street with something growing along it.

These places do not have to be grand. They need something living in them, and enough room for you to notice it.

Try This Where You Are

Find the nearest place with something living in it. It does not need to be picture-perfect, only alive. Fifteen or twenty minutes is enough.

Walk without music or a podcast. For these few minutes, choose no destination that matters. Let your pace fall below the one you use to get places, but walk as you feel comfortable.

Wait to be interested in life beyond yourself.

Resist searching for something profound or worthy of your attention, because looking too hard becomes another form of hurry or control. Allow something to draw your attention on its own.

It will usually be small and particular. One tree rather than the trees. One bird rather than the birdsong. One plant growing where you had never noticed it before.

When that happens, gently pause.

Stay longer than feels necessary. A minute is a long time when you are not trying to fill it. Notice what the living being is doing, which is never nothing. This being is always living its life as best it can. Like you.

You do not have to interpret it. No insight needs to arrive, and there is nothing here to accomplish.

Then walk on. That is the entire practice.

Next week I will do this on the route out of Le Puy. This week it was available 30 feet above the traffic in Paris.

The wren in the hedge does not know it is in Paris.

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

Leave a comment

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

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

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I arrived in Paris this morning.

The plane landed. My suitcase is here. The clock says it is evening.

My body is less certain. It wants to sleep and eat at the wrong times. My attention keeps drifting back toward the desk I left behind, to emails I could send, classes I could plan, and small tasks that seemed urgent at home and have no place here at all.

You can cross an ocean in a matter of hours and still take several days to arrive.

If you have recently started something new and cannot understand why you do not yet feel like yourself inside it, this is the same thing.

A Different Kind of Preparation

Last week I wrote about preparing for the Camino: condition the body, test the gear, clear the desk. Do your part, and then let the walk do what only the walk can do.

That was preparation from the viewpoint of a task list. Some things can be completed. A bag gets packed. Shoes get tested. Work gets handed off.

This morning I am noticing the part that cannot be checked off.

On September 5, the 4 people joining my 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat and I will step out of Le Puy-en-Velay. That date is fixed. There will be a cathedral door, a morning blessing, and the first waymark leading us out of town through the Saturday market.

The movement toward that morning has already started, unevenly, without waiting for my permission. My body needs to find the time zone. My mind needs to stop reaching back toward work. The pace at which I eat, walk, and notice things needs to change, and none of that happens because I have landed.

The calendar names the day one season ends, and another begins. Nevertheless, the rest of me moves at its own speed.

The Body Keeps Its Own Calendar

I have walked this route 6 times, and I know what it will ask of me.

The way out of Le Puy begins with climbing. The days that follow involve long distances with some weight on my back. At home, I walk daily with my pugs, and while those walks are real, they are not 5- or 6-hour days on a trail.

My working life happens mostly at a desk. Teaching, writing, meetings, planning, all of it trains my body to stay in one place while my attention travels elsewhere.

Now I am asking it to do the opposite. For the next few weeks, my body will move across the landscape while my attention learns to stay close. This hill. This breath. This bird, cow, or tree watching me walk by.

That reversal cannot be rushed. A body does not reorganize itself because the mind has made a decision.

What Paris Does

These 12 days are not an attempt to recover the training my working life had no room for. Several weeks of long walks do not compress into 12 days, and trying would cost me more than it would return.

What I can do here is let ordinary life change my pace.

I walk because walking is how I move through this city. If I need something, I walk to get it. The miles accumulate without becoming a workout, and without my measuring whether they are enough.

The city is not the whole of it. I am also planning to get out for some hiking in the region over these days, into the forests and river valleys within reach of Paris, where the ground is uneven, the miles are quieter, and nobody is selling anything. Pavement teaches the legs one thing. A forest floor teaches the ankles, and the attention something else, and both of them will be asked for on the Aubrac.

The walking does something else, and this is the part I did not expect when I first noticed it. Contemplative walking asks you to let the world around you have your attention, rather than to arrive somewhere with your attention already spent. That practice does not require a trail. A plane tree on the boulevard is available for it. So is the pigeon working the edge of a café terrace, and the particular quality of light this city has in late August. The practice I will be guiding on the Aubrac is the same practice I can do on the way to buy a plug adapter or shop at the market, and doing it here is how my attention finds its way back into the body that carried it across the ocean.

Meals happen at a table instead of beside a computer. Food arrives at recognizable times and gets eaten slowly. Sleep moves toward the local clock on its own schedule.

Walking, eating, sleeping, errands. Nothing dramatic. I am not trying to become a conditioned walker before I reach Le Puy. I am trying to inhabit my body again.

By the time I board the train, I want my legs to have remembered something and my attention to be less divided. The route will take care of what remains.

Arriving After the Beginning

We speak of beginnings as though they happen all at once.

A job starts on Monday. The house changes hands on a particular day. A plane lands. The date is exact, and our arrival rarely is.

You may already have entered a new season while some part of you remains in the old one. The circumstances have changed, while your habits and attention keep working from older information.

That lag can feel like reluctance. Most of the time, it is the ordinary duration of becoming present to a life that has already started.

The Camino makes this visible because the transition happens through the body. The first days always finish the preparation. Feet adjust. Shoulders learn the pack. A pace emerges, and the mind stops looking elsewhere.

The walk asks nobody to arrive as a finished version of themselves. It receives the person who actually appears, which is the only kind of readiness available to any of us.

While I Am Walking

From September 5 through September 11, I will be on the route with the retreat participants and fully out of touch. That is part of the design.

There will still be something here on Mondays. It may have been written before I left. It may be brief. It may come from the walking once I return. The usual rhythm resumes with me in mid-September, carrying whatever the route provides.

For now, my work is modest. Walk where the errands lead. Eat. Sleep. Notice the city, and let my pace begin to change.

If you have recently entered something new and wonder why you do not yet feel settled there, the more useful question may not be what is wrong with you. Give the adjustment the days it actually takes. Walk somewhere this week with nothing to accomplish, and let whatever is around you have your attention for 20 minutes.

Then tell me what you noticed. What part of you is still traveling, and what has already arrived?

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

Leave a comment

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

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

Subscribe now

In 19 days I begin walking the Camino for the 7th time, and this walk has a shape none of the others had.

Contemplative walking is central to my work and my spirituality, and it has been present on every one of these walks. I have guided people along the Camino before, walking this way, and the practice threads through everything else I do, including my work as a certified forest bathing guide and forest therapy practitioner. What is different in September is that the contemplation is no longer the undercurrent. It is the explicit purpose.

This came about because people kept asking. Over the years, enough walkers and readers have wanted to know how to walk this way, and wanted it connected to the deep history of the Le Puy route in particular, that the retreat finally took form around the question. Four people will walk with me from Le Puy-en-Velay to Conques, 7 days and roughly 95 miles, on my 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat. The group filled months ago. Some of them may read this before we meet, which I am aware of as I write it.

You might expect the final weeks before something like this to look contemplative. Mine mostly do not.

What I Am Actually Doing

I am walking more.

The daily miles here in the Catskill Mountains of New York are lengthening, because the plainest preparation for walking 95 miles is walking, and the body does not accept substitutes. Alongside that, I am testing gear I have been trying all summer, a new pack and some clothing, on the same lengthening walks. You wear the thing, you walk, you notice what rubs, what does not hang right, or what is not easy to get on, off, or into.

I am also clearing my desk. For 7 days on the route, I will be out of touch, so these weeks are about finishing what can be finished and closing what can be closed. The ordinary work of making a hole in a calendar so the hole stays empty.

That is the honest inventory. Miles, a bag, and a desk.

Everyone Else Is Preparing Too

This is the season for it.

The university year begins in these same weeks, and I have watched enough Septembers arrive from inside a campus to know the feeling. Syllabi finishing. Rosters settling. Everyone from first-year students to senior faculty doing some version of what I am doing, closing summer down and provisioning for what opens next. The whole academic world is packing a bag right now.

Which makes this a reasonable moment to say the quiet thing about preparation seasons: most of the list is not yours. The weather on move-in day, whether the students are ready, whether the semester goes as planned. You can influence almost none of it. What is actually yours is a short list, and it is nearly always some version of mine. Condition the body. Test the gear. Clear the desk.

The Worries Come Anyway

There is always some nervousness, and I have stopped expecting it to skip a year.

Will I be in good enough shape? Did I prepare enough? Will the weather cooperate, will the flights be smooth, will the trains run on time? I could go on, though you get the picture. Six walks have taught me that this list never empties. It just stops being in charge. The worries arrive, I notice them, I attend to the one or two items I can actually affect, and I let the rest travel with me as far as the trailhead, where they have always, every time, been the first thing the walking takes.

Surrender to what you cannot control is a lesson the Camino teaches from the very first mile. It turns out the lesson starts before you leave. The forecast you refresh and cannot change, the train schedule, the body you have trained as well as time allowed: this is the pilgrimage already underway, 19 days early, wearing the costume of logistics.

Walking Beside, Not Above

The 4 people coming are a mix of first-time Camino walkers and seasoned pilgrims looking for a quieter, more contemplative way through.

What they share is the shape of the retreat itself. This is a private retreat that takes place in a small group. Silence, reflection, and introspection are supported rather than scheduled away, and most of each day people will walk on their own, individually, at their own pace. We gather at thresholds, and I invite deepening into the experience while supporting the participants, individually, as needed. The miles between belong to each walker and to the Land.

My role in that is smaller than the word “guide” suggests, and that smallness is deliberate. I have walked this route 6 times, which makes me the one who has walked with the teacher the longest, rather than the teacher. The Camino and the living Landscape teach. I hold the structure, carry the practical knowledge, and walk beside.

I do this work as a Wild Guide, ordained to help people reconnect with the natural world as something more than objective living stuff out there. My forest therapy training points in the same direction. That reconnection asks for patience, and it asks us to reframe how we talk about and refer to the beings around us. A week of quiet walking through the Aubrac is one of the better classrooms I know for that reframing, and it requires no instruction from me once it begins. It requires that I get out of the way at the right moments, which is preparation in itself.

What the 7th Time Knows

Before my 1st Camino, I prepared for a year and arrived exhausted from preparing. Surprisingly, what did not work for me was preparing for something that only later experience could provide.

Before this one, I am walking my miles, testing a bag, finishing my work, and letting the worry list ride along uncharged. The difference is not that I care less. The difference is that 6 walks taught me where the transformation actually happens, and it is nowhere in the run-up.

So, as your own September approaches, whatever you are provisioning for—a semester, a season, a walk of your own—sort the list once. Do your part and let the rest go. That was never yours to carry.

To the 4 of you who may be reading this: I will see you in Le Puy. Bring less than you think you need.

What are you preparing for as summer closes, and how much of the list is actually yours?

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

Leave a comment

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

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

Subscribe now

Offices are half empty. Email goes unanswered for days without consequence. Whoever you were going to hear from is on a beach somewhere and will get back to you. Eventually.

Almost nobody rests during this time.

Because September is already visible from here. The supply lists are out. The syllabus is due. The fall calendar has started filling from the far end. You can see the whole thing coming, and seeing it is enough to keep you from putting anything down.

That is the particular condition of this week. Not busyness per se, but anticipation, which does the same work as busyness while producing nothing.

The garden is doing something else. My pepper plants are still setting fruit and have no information about September. Not one thing in the yard is preparing. The light shortens a little each evening, and the plants respond to the light itself rather than to a forecast of it.

I am not going to tell you that is wisdom. Plants cannot worry, so their calm costs them nothing.

But there is something available here that will not be available in three weeks, and it is not more time. It is a week with little scheduled in it, which is the rarest thing you get all year, and it disappears whether or not you use it.

Go outside this week while the world is briefly not asking.

September will still arrive.

What does this week look like where you are? I am curious whether anyone has managed to actually rest in it, or whether September is pulling at you the way it is pulling at me.

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

Leave a comment

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

That distinction has changed how the food tastes.

The Plant Cooperated

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

I made conditions. The pepper made peppers.

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

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

The Garden Is Still Working

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

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

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

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

Worrying About the Walk Does Not Get You Closer to Walking

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

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

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

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

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

The Thing In My Drawer

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

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

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

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

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

What Comes In Early Is What Gets Given

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

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

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

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

What to Watch For

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

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

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

A Practice for the First Harvest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What has come in for you?

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

Leave a comment

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

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

Subscribe now

‎⁨A book will hold still for you.

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

The text notices you back.

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

Four Movements, Nine Hundred Years Old

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

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

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

My adaptation rests on three premises:

1. The living world has agency.

2. Encounter is mutual.

3. Reciprocity is required.

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

Where Arriving and Returning Belong

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

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

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

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

The 4 Steps in Earth-Based Lectio Divina

1. Receive

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

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

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

2. Ponder

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

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

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

3. Respond

What you receive from the living world creates an obligation.

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

Inner posture: I am in relationship here.

4. Belong

Everything before this was preparation.

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

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

Inner posture: Nothing to do. I belong here.

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

Four Movements, One Morning in France

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

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

The frogs had read me first.

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

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

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

Begin Where You Already Walk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Willpower Loses to the Inbox

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

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

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

The First Two Hours Tell the Truth

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

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

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

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

The Living World Rests, and I Am Part of It

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

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

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

Who the Week Actually Belongs To

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

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

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

Rest Beyond the Reach of Argument

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Direction Nobody Asks About

Most conversations about meditation focus on posture and place.

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

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

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

Two Definitions, Six Years in the Making

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

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

Here is the first, the practice itself:

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

Here is the second, the larger claim:

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

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

What the Old Monks Knew

This distinction is older than it sounds.

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

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

One Being at a Time

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

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

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

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

Any Path Will Do

You do not need a route across France.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Faded, Honestly

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

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

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

The Walk Keeps Sending Word

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

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

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

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

The Ordinary Mornings Themselves

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

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

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

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

The Meaning Arrives in Installments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

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

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

Subscribe now