Six Caminos In, I Finally Have Words for Why I Walk
After 98.9 miles on the Le Puy route, I finally have language for why I walk alone each year. It runs counter to what most of us were taught about going inward.
Last week, I finished walking 98.9 miles in 7 days.
The route was the Via Podiensis, the Le Puy section of the Camino de Santiago in France, a 159-kilometer stretch of ancient pilgrim path across the Aubrac plateau and down into the river valleys. This was my sixth Camino. I walked it alone and mostly in silence, as I do every year, a private retreat I take for one reason that took me years to put into words.
I was home less than a day before I missed it.
What I came home without
What I missed was the daily action of moving through the living world with nothing in between.
A week of walking hands you that without any effort at all. You rise, you walk, you watch the light cross a field where cattle are still settled in the grass, you stop where a stream runs over the path and drink in the sound of it, and slowly your mind releases the screens and the deadlines and the low constant noise of modern life. By the third day, the release happens on its own. The Aubrac in June is something to long for, yet the views were never the center of it.
The weather belongs to it too. One afternoon, the rain came sideways across the plateau, and I walked 4 hours soaked through, and the cold and the wet and the smell of the risen earth only pulled me further inside the world. Across the clouds and patches of fog, a stone village would appear down in the valley with its lights on, and the day would close the way a day is meant to close.
A week of that changes how I pay attention.
The daily practice, and its limit
I keep up the practice for the rest of the year, whether in cities or a more rural environment.
In Paris, I stop at particular trees and bushes on my way across the city and stand with them for a minute. In New York City, I find a few minutes in whatever pocket of green sits between the buildings. In rural upstate New York, where the land goes quiet, I sit outside and let the breeze move over me until I feel like part of what is moving. These minutes hold the thread. They keep it from breaking through the long run of ordinary days.
A minute with a tree holds the thread. A week on the trail braids it into something I can live from.
The continuous days reach what the minutes cannot. Walking hour after hour, the body sets a rhythm the mind eventually follows, and the company of the living world stops being a place I visit and becomes the medium I think inside. The daily minutes remind me of the connection. The week restores it.
Why I go out to go in
For me, the way inward runs outward first.
I have walked this route alone for years without being able to say plainly why. This year, somewhere on the Aubrac, the words finally arrived. I quiet my mind by walking into the middle of the living world until the part of me that performs and plans runs out of things to do. The forest never asks me to empty myself. It fills the space my worries usually occupy, and they find nowhere left to sit.
Going out is how I go in.
Where stillness stops working for me
Many contemplative traditions teach the opposite, and they teach it beautifully.
Sit. Be still. Draw the senses inward. Find the depth beneath the noise. For a great many people, that is the doorway home, and I would never talk anyone out of a practice that settles them into themselves. Seated stillness has carried more seekers across more centuries than I could count.
It does not carry me.
Held as my only practice, stillness in isolation works against its own promise. Sealed away from wind and bird and water, I do not sink toward anything deeper. I feel the living connections that feed me thinning out one by one, until the quiet begins to feel like separation rather than presence. The depth I am after is drawn from the relationship with what is alive around me. Close the door on the living world, and the source itself goes quiet.
If your practice has never quite fit you
You may have felt some version of this without ever having the words for it.
You were handed a practice, most likely stillness, and told it was the high road inward. You have tried. You sit, and rather than settling, you drift, or tense, or stand up, somehow lonelier than when you sat down. You decided the fault was yours. The mismatch may be simpler than that. You were shown one model and never offered another.
Here is the other one, the one I walk by.
Movement can be the way in. Attention to the living world can be the way in. You do not need 98.9 miles or a route across France. You need a tree you visit often enough to recognize, a strip of green between two buildings, a few minutes of wind on your skin with your attention turned fully outward. Begin where you already are, a city block or a back road, and let the walking and the watching do the work that sitting was supposed to do for you.
The practice bends to the life you have. A pilgrim road, a Paris sidewalk, and an upstate field at dusk all work. The setting matters far less than the willingness to stop monitoring yourself long enough to be met by something alive.
I came home from 98.9 miles, missing the daily walk, and the missing pointed straight at the thing I keep relearning. The deeper I want to go, the more fully I have to enter the living world to get there.
I go out so I can go in. You might find the same door standing open where you are.
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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is fully available to begin today.
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Beautiful, Jeffrey. You remind me of why I need to walk, and when I don't, that I feel less myself, more anxious, less connected. I have always loved walking, being attentive to birds and flowers, weather and water, forest and field. You are right, being outside brings me into my soul and spirit. Thank you.
Thank you so much for this Jeffrey. I have struggled with the sit still for years, faithfully showing up. Yesterday, with something weighing heavy on my heart, I took a long walk in one of my favorite woods, spent several minutes leading my forehead against a tree, and I was met. And then I read this. What a gift.