I Am Four Days from a Pilgrimage and Falling Apart in Small Ways
For anyone preparing for a meaningful threshold and not feeling as ready as the photos suggest you should be
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I thought I would be calmer than this.
Four days from taking the train here in France to the starting place of my sixth Camino, my mind has been everywhere except settled. I imagined this week as quiet, contemplative, full of slow packing and intentional rest. The reality has been closer to managing a series of practical fires while my body and spirit try to catch up to what is about to happen.
Most writing about preparing for a significant threshold is calm. The serene packing. The still heart. The composed transition. That portrayal is dishonest, and it leaves the rest of us feeling like we are doing our own preparation wrong when life refuses to pause for it. If you are preparing for a meaningful threshold of your own, a pilgrimage, a move, a career change, a medical procedure, a difficult conversation, a creative leap, and your preparation week is not feeling sacred, you can likely relate with me here.
Not so you can be talked out of the scatter. So you can recognize your own ragged readiness in someone else's honest account, and stop waiting for a composure that may never come.
Why Your Preparation Week Probably Looks Nothing Like the Photos
The toenail I injured three weeks ago, unrelated to anything, is still not fully healed. I am alternating between worrying about whether it will hold up over seven days of walking and the deeper memory of last year, when blisters left me genuinely injured by the end of the route.
The heat in France right now is intense. Higher than I expected for late May. My mind keeps running scenarios about pacing, hydration, and the parts of the Aubrac that offer no shade.
My weight is, as always before a Camino, a quiet ongoing concern. I have not been in the shape I wanted to be in. The body I will carry across the GR65 is not the body I imagined I would carry. That is true every year, and every year it lands again as if for the first time.
One of my accommodations along the route, booked back in October, has fallen through. The paperwork failure was on their end, but the consequence is mine, and it also affects the small-group retreat I am guiding through the same stretch in September.
There is work happening in my apartment. There is regular work itself, which has not paused. The air conditioning needs to be connected so I can try to settle and be productive, which feels small until you consider that I am about to leave a Paris apartment closed up for nearly two weeks in the heat.
I imagined I would be still by now. Instead, I am scattered and still suffering from some jetlag.
What Real Threshold Preparation Actually Looks Like
The image of pilgrimage preparation that circulates online tends to be serene. Long quiet evenings. Slow, careful packing. A heart that has already arrived at the path before the body has even left home.
That is not what preparation actually looks like for most of us.
Real preparation is full of unfinished business. The body is not in the shape we hoped for. Something practical is broken, delayed, or unresolved. Old worries return. The mind does not cooperate with the schedule we set for it. The week before the threshold is rarely the calm doorway we imagined. More often, it is the part of the journey we forgot to count.
If you are preparing for a significant transition in your own life, a move, a new role, a difficult conversation, a return to school, a medical procedure, a creative leap, the start or end of a relationship, and the week before is not feeling sacred or settled, you are not doing it wrong.
You are doing it like the rest of us do it.
The threshold does not require perfect preparation. It only requires that you cross it.
What I Am Trusting When I Cannot Be Still
I am trusting that the moment I arrive in Le Puy-en-Velay on Friday, something will shift.
This has been true on every Camino I have walked. The scatter of the week before dissolves into the simplicity of the day before. The day before dissolves into the first morning of walking. The first morning of walking dissolves into the rhythm of the path itself. By the second day, the worry about the toenail, the weight, the heat, and the apartment has been overtaken by the act of walking through a living landscape that does not care about any of it.
The path takes over.
I am also trusting that I will not be walking alone, even when I am alone. In my pocket will be a folded paper carrying the prayer intentions of readers and friends who have sent me what they are carrying. Each morning at first light I will read them slowly. Each day, certain intentions will arise to mind as the path turns or the light shifts. Near the end of the walk, I will burn the paper and let what was carried return to the larger life of the world.
This is one of the gifts of pilgrimage that does not appear in the photographs. The transition from preparation to walking is not graceful. It is more like a release valve. You arrive carrying everything. The path quietly takes most of it from you in the first twenty-four hours, whether you were ready or not.
The intentions I carry travel through that same release. So does whatever is weighing on you, if you have sent something my way.
How to Arrive at a Threshold When You Are Not Ready
If you are also moving toward something significant this week or this month, here is what I would offer from inside my own scatter.
You do not need to arrive at the threshold calm. You need to arrive at it at all.
The preparation that matters is not the kind that looks composed. It is the kind that gets you to the door. Pack the bag imperfectly. Make the phone calls. Solve the practical problems that can be solved. Let the unresolved ones travel with you. Trust that the threshold itself will do work you cannot do in advance.
I am writing this from the same place I am asking you to stand. Not from across the threshold looking back. From four days out, with a sore toenail, an apartment still warming up, a fallen accommodation, and a heart that is not yet still.
I will see what the path does with all of it starting this Saturday.
If you have sent me an intention to carry, it is already on the list. The list closes Wednesday at the end of the day, May 27. If you have something you would like me to carry, a name, a worry, a hope, a grief, the form is here:
https://jeffreykeefer.com/form/camino-prayer-intentions-may-2026/
Religious, spiritual, and secular intentions are all welcome. Names are optional. Anonymous submissions are received with the same attention as named ones.
I will return in early June. Until then, please walk gently with whatever you are carrying. Sometimes the most honest preparation is admitting we are not yet ready, and going anyway.
Please share below if you are also moving toward something significant this week, calm or not. I am reading everything before I leave.
The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is fully available to begin today.
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For Memorial Day I share this poem by British nature writer and poet Edward Thomas, who speaks poignantly of war in the distance, and who died shortly after this was published, in the battle at Arras, France (WWI).
Roads
I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favorite gods.
Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.
On this earth 'tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:
The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.
They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only.
From dawn's twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.
The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
And black, may Hell conceal.
Often footsore, never
Yet of the road I weary,
Though long and steep and dreary,
As it winds on for ever.
Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
And the Mabinogion tales,
Is one of the true gods,
Abiding in the trees,
The threes and fours so wise,
The larger companies,
That by the roadside be,
And beneath the rafter
Else uninhabited
Excepting by the dead;
And it is her laughter
At morn and night I hear
When the thrush cock sings
Bright irrelevant things,
And when the chanticleer
Calls back to their own night
Troops that make loneliness
With their light footsteps’ press,
As Helen’s own are light.
Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:
Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,
Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
and their brief multitude. See less