I Met Her Eyes in the Field
A cow looked back at me on the Camino, and I was quiet enough for her greeting.
One morning on the Camino, in a field bright with summer flowers, a cow turned her head and looked into my eyes.
I stopped.
We stood only a few feet apart, close enough that I could see the long lashes framing her dark eye, and close enough to see my own small reflection looking back at me beneath the grey French sky. For a long moment, neither of us moved. She held my gaze with a calm, unhurried attention that matched my own.
I have been seen by people who were looking right through me.
That morning, in a quiet field along the Camino, a cow looked at me, and I felt actually seen. I asked quietly if I might take her picture, and she held still. The image above is that exact moment, real and unedited.
The encounter stayed with me for the rest of the day. It also showed me something I had been learning over hundreds of miles of pilgrimage: walking long enough and quietly enough changes not only what you notice. It changes your capacity to be met.
The Ache I Want to Name
You can believe the living world is full of fellow beings and still go years without feeling one look back at you.
Many of us hold the conviction sincerely. The crow is someone. The old tree is someone. The cow in the field is a life rather than a thing. We would defend those beliefs without hesitation, and yet, if we are honest, many of us cannot remember the last time another living being met us eye to eye, and we felt it land.
A conviction you never get to experience thins over time into an opinion you merely hold.
That morning, the distance between believing and experiencing closed.
A Meeting, Not a Revelation
I have known for a long time that a cow is someone, not something.
Long enough that I stopped eating them more than twenty years ago. This is not the story of discovering that animals have inner lives. I never doubted that. What happened in the field was a meeting, the kind I had believed was possible for decades but had rarely been still enough to receive.
I had simply never been this near, in this way, at this pace.
What the Camino Had Been Loosening
I had been walking alone since early morning.
If you have never walked a pilgrimage like the Camino, one of its quiet gifts is how it strips away the constant narration of daily life. After hours on foot without conversation, without notifications, without rushing toward the next obligation, something inside begins to settle. You stop composing your day and begin receiving it.
By midmorning, I was moving through open pastures, surrounded by wildflowers and grazing cattle. I was not looking for an insight or a memorable moment. I was walking, and that was all.
That openness, I now think, was the true gift of the walk.
Close Enough to See My Own Reflection
One of the cows stood near the path, and as I came level with her, she turned her head.
We looked at one another. I could see the wet darkness of her eye, and within it my own small reflection beneath the grey sky. I was inside her looking as she was inside mine. There was no fear in her gaze and no dullness, only a quiet and steady attention that met my own.
For a minute or two, nothing more was needed.
What the Silence Had Made Room For
I do not think this meeting would have happened a few hours earlier, or on a different kind of day.
The cow would have been no less present. She was wholly herself before I arrived and after I left. The difference was in me. Had I walked near that pasture talking, checking my phone, or hurrying toward the next village, I would have seen only another brown shape in the grass. The hours of silence had made me available.
She offered the look. The quiet in me allowed me to receive it as the gift it was.
As I walked on, I found myself meeting everything around me with the same attention. The pastures looked fuller, and the birdsongs came clearer, though nothing in the landscape had changed. I had.
Perhaps that is one of pilgrimage’s deepest invitations, to become someone able to receive a world that has been greeting us the whole time.
The Part You Can Bring
I cannot give you the closeness I met that morning, since that part was given rather than arranged.
The openness, though, is something each of us can practice. Whether you are walking a pilgrimage across France, sitting beneath a familiar tree near home, or pausing to meet the gaze of a dog or a crow or a neighborhood cat, the invitation is much the same. The belief that they are someone carries you most of the way. The step that remains is presence, going slow, growing quiet, and staying long enough that when another life turns toward you, you are there to receive the greeting.
How About You?
Have you ever had a moment when another living being seemed to truly meet your gaze? Where were you, and how did it change you, even briefly? I would be glad to hear your story in the comments.
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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is available to you wherever you are walking this week.
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Ooooh Jeffrey. You have named something that (like so much of my Camino experience) I have struggled to name. Meeting, and not just that ... the capacity to be met. I totally understand this. I think that is why the last 3rd of the Frances was so inexplicably, ineffably ... see, I don't even have the word for it. I had been walking like this for WEEKS, and so had my fellow walkers, and we were so present with every single thing by then (and it was so worth being present for as well -- not always true when you are surrounded by strip malls, suburbia, urban sprawl). Everything around me and us felt so sacred, so holy, simply by existing. And that went for ourselves as well as our fellow walkers. Imagine being MET and SEEN by so many openhearted others ... when you yourself are in this state of transcendent awareness. It is a state so hard to explain but I think you did it here.
It validates a portion of my own experience and further explains to me why it was so hard and painful to reenter the everyday world, where most people look but do not see, and as you say, see right through you. I noticed though that for months, maybe even a year (!) after my return from my 2023 Camino, I seemed to be able to spark these deeply authentic connections with acquaintances who then became deeper friends, and even strangers. Even with a friend's dog. They seemed to linger with me and open up to me. Haha, I had never felt so charismatic (and was even told by a few people that I was! Mousy old me!). Something in us does seem to become out aglow, or maybe we are finally awake, to really see the divinity in all things. I think it is one of the things that calls us back, and that makes the Camino so hard to describe. I was even trying to explain to my husband today: "No, it is not 'just walking.'"
sounds like it was a very moooooooving moment