The First Ordinary Monday After the Threshold
For those who crossed into the new year and woke up wondering where the magic went
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about what it shifted in you.
You crossed a threshold. Now everything feels strangely flat.
If you marked the Solstice, it has passed. If you celebrated Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, those candles are extinguished. If you stayed up for the New Year, that clock has struck. The ceremony is over. The heightened feeling has faded. What remains is the first Monday morning, likely back to work, with an inbox, and the same life you had before.
This flatness is not failure.
I have crossed many thresholds. 5 times I have walked the Camino de Santiago, covering hundreds of miles on ancient pilgrimage paths through rural France and Spain. Each time, the walking itself felt sacred. The rhythm of step after step, the silence, the slow revelation of landscape, the way time stretched and contracted. All of it felt like ceremony.
Then I came home.
The first morning after a pilgrimage is disorienting. You wake in your own bed, surrounded by familiar objects, and something feels wrong. The sacred container has dissolved. The path that held you for weeks is gone. You are back in ordinary time, and ordinary time feels unbearably flat.
I used to think this flatness meant I had lost something.
Now I understand differently. The flatness is not loss. The flatness is where integration begins. The threshold was the invitation. The ordinary days are where we actually practice what the threshold revealed.
This is what I want to explore with you today. Not how to recreate the peak, but how to tend the ordinary. Because the ordinary is where transformation actually takes root.
What My First Morning After the Camino Taught Me
The first time I returned from the Camino, I made a mistake.
I tried to hold onto the feeling. I wanted to preserve the peace I had found on the path, to bottle it somehow and keep it from dissipating. I resisted ordinary life. I resented the emails, the meetings, the noise. I kept comparing everything to the simplicity of walking.
This resistance made the transition harder, not easier.
By my third Camino, I had discovered something different. The morning after I returned, I did not try to hold onto the pilgrimage. Instead, I went for a walk. Not a pilgrimage. Not a meaningful journey. Just a walk around my neighborhood in ordinary clothes, on ordinary sidewalks, with no destination and no ceremony.
That walk changed my perspective.
It was not sacred in any obvious way. No ancient path, no fellow pilgrims, no dramatic landscape. Just pavement and traffic and the same buildings I had passed a thousand times before. Yet something in the walking itself carried forward. The rhythm was still there. The attention was still there.
The practice had come home with me.
The threshold had opened something. The ordinary walk let me keep it. We do not need another pilgrimage to maintain what the pilgrimage gave us. We need to bring the practice into the days that follow.
Why the Flatness Is Actually Good News
If you are reading this on January 5th, you are probably feeling that flatness right now.
The new year energy has faded. The resolutions you made, if you made any, already feel distant. The holidays, with their rituals, gatherings, and heightened emotions, are behind you. What remains is the ordinary. What remains is today.
This is not a problem to solve.
This is the invitation.
Every spiritual tradition I have studied understands this. The monks return to their cells after the high liturgy. The pilgrims return to their villages after Santiago. The retreat ends, and you drive back down the mountain. The threshold opens, and then we must walk through into what comes after.
What comes after is where the real work happens.
I think of it this way. The threshold shakes something loose. It opens a door, creates a crack, shifts something that had been stuck. But the threshold itself is not the transformation. The transformation happens in the days and weeks that follow, as we integrate what the threshold revealed.
The ordinary days are not the absence of the sacred.
The ordinary days are where the sacred takes root.
Domain 1 Begins Here
This year, I am not setting goals.
I wrote about this on December 31st. Goal setting stopped working for me, so I am doing something different. Instead of goals, I am tending 3 domains of attention.
Walking as Spiritual Practice. Guiding Contemplative Pilgrimage. Teaching and Writing.
These are not achievements to unlock. They are areas of my life that deserve sustained attention. They are practices to tend, not projects to complete.
Walking as Spiritual Practice is the foundation. It is my personal practice, the source that feeds everything else. What I discover on the path informs what I teach and write. What I notice while walking prepares me to guide others.
Domain 1—Walking as Spiritual Practice—begins today.
On the first ordinary day. Not with a pilgrimage. Not with a dramatic gesture. Just with a walk.
A Practice for the First Ordinary Day
If you have crossed a threshold recently, here is what I invite you to try today.
Go for a walk. A short one. 20 minutes, 15, even 10. It does not matter.
Do not make it special. Do not call it a pilgrimage, a meditation, or a practice. Just walk. Ordinary clothes, ordinary route, no ceremony. As you walk, notice what remains from whatever threshold you crossed. Notice what the ordinary reveals that the extraordinary could not.
Notice how your feet still know how to carry you, even when the path has no particular destination.
The threshold was the invitation.
This walk is where the practice begins.
This is the first in a series exploring what I am calling domains of attention. On Wednesday, I will share more about this alternative to goal setting. If this resonates, I would love to hear what threshold you have recently crossed and how the ordinary is meeting you.
Walk With Me
If this resonates, I invite you to subscribe to Where Insight Meets Earth, my weekly reflections on contemplative walking, ecospirituality, and embodied practices for navigating what overwhelms us.
If you want to delve more deeply into this, I am launching the Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary in March 2026—a year-long journey exploring Earth kinship through contemplative practice. Learn more here.
In September 2026, I’m leading a contemplative walking retreat on France’s ancient Le Puy Camino, seven days of silence, movement, and practices for metabolizing what sitting cannot, in the most beautiful landscape you can imagine, on a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage path. Details here.
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~ Jeffrey
This is such a great way to handle the flatness after the magic fades!! Definitely going on a walk today now!