Why I Am Walking the Camino Alone Again This May
On returning to the same path, the difference between solitude and loneliness, and what the living world offers when no human voice is in the way
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In a few weeks, I will fly to France and walk the first section of the Le Puy Camino alone.
This will be my sixth Camino, and my second fully solo walk. I will not have a group or walking partner nearby, and that is by my own choice. I am returning to the same stretch I will guide a small group through this September, the section beginning in Le Puy-en-Velay and continuing southwest. It is the oldest documented section of the medieval pilgrimage routes, and by the shared judgment of those who have walked many of them, one of the most beautiful.
I am walking alone for a reason I want to name clearly.
Most people who consider a solo Camino are not asking whether they can complete the distance. They are asking something quieter and perhaps more difficult.
Will I be able to bear being alone for that long?
Why I Keep Returning to the Same Path
The honest answer is depth.
A new route offers novelty. The same route, walked across years, offers something else entirely. The animals remain where they have always been. The brooks follow their courses. The trees hold their places along the path. What changes is not the landscape, but what I am able to receive from it.
On my first walk, most of my attention went to logistics and orientation. On the second, to my own internal noise. By the third, fourth, and fifth, something began to shift.
The landscape started to register as presence rather than backdrop.
The wind on a particular hillside became familiar in the way a voice becomes familiar. The light moving through a stand of trees at a certain hour became something I anticipated rather than something I simply noticed. This is what return makes possible.
It removes the surface layer of the new and allows something deeper to come to the fore.
That depth is not available on a path I walk only once.
The Fear Most People Do Not Name Directly
The hardest part of my first solo walk was not the walking.
It was the days before. The mind fills the silence before you ever arrive. It imagines long empty stretches, heavy quiet, evenings that feel too long, and a kind of loneliness that might be difficult to shake. This fear is not irrational.
It is simply untested.
The fear also tends to take the shape of what-ifs that arrive in clusters. What if I get lost? What if I get hurt? What if I become genuinely lonely and have no one to turn to? These questions are reasonable, and they almost always have practical answers. I carry mapping applications and downloaded route data. I travel with appropriate travel insurance. I can call a friend at any hour, or fall in step with other walkers on the path who are almost always nearby. The what-ifs do not survive even modest contact with the actual conditions of the route, but they do consume an enormous amount of preparatory energy when left unexamined.
The deeper misconception is the assumption that walking alone means being alone the entire time.
This is not what solo walking actually looks like on a route like the Le Puy. You greet other pilgrims on the path. You share tables in the gîtes and chambres d’hôtes in the evenings. You speak with villagers in the small towns you pass through. You eat in shared dining rooms with people who have walked their own day on their own terms, and you exchange the kind of brief, warm conversation that pilgrims have always exchanged on these paths. Walking alone does not mean refusing companionship. It means choosing the rhythm of when you are silent and when you are in conversation.
I am monastic by temperament, not by opposition to community.
What I need from a solo Camino is not isolation. It is a stretch of time during which the busyness of the world can finally settle, and I can delve into myself rather than continuing to attend to everyone else. So much of my work involves supporting and helping others, as a chaplain, as a teacher, as an ecospiritual guide. That work matters to me, and it requires a particular kind of recharging that only sustained internal quiet can provide. A solo Camino is, for me, a personal retreat woven into a living landscape. The conversations along the way are part of the gift, not an interruption of it.
Once the walking begins, something else becomes clear.
The fear that lived so loudly in the weeks beforehand quietly disappears. The path takes over. The body adjusts. The mind settles in a way it could not settle anywhere else. What replaces the fear is not bravery. It is simply the lived experience that what you imagined would always be much heavier than what is actually there.
Solitude Without Isolation
The Le Puy route offers something that is increasingly rare in modern life.
You are alone, but you are not cut off. Villages appear at regular intervals. Other pilgrims pass through your day. Farmers greet you as you walk. Evenings are often shared at long tables with others who have walked their own miles. You are quiet, but you are still held within a human world.
This is what I mean by solitude without isolation.
Solitude is a chosen form of attention. It is what becomes possible when no one is asking for your immediate response. Loneliness is the absence of belonging. They are not the same. The Le Puy route offers the first while quietly protecting against the second, which is what makes it one of the few settings in modern life where this kind of aloneness can be practiced safely.
After the first day of walking, I recognized this immediately.
What Changes When You Walk Alone
Walking alone changes what the landscape can give.
In a group, even a quiet one, part of your attention remains oriented toward other people. There is always a subtle readiness to speak, to listen, to respond. The social mind remains active even when no one is talking.
When that channel finally closes, something else opens.
The landscape is no longer a setting. It becomes an encounter. The animals, the weather, the movement of light, the quality of the air. All of it begins to register differently. Not because the world has changed, but because your attention is no longer divided. This is the register the Camino was always meant to open.
It is difficult to reach it when the mind is still oriented toward conversation.
Why I Am Walking Alone Again
Six walks in, the answer is simple.
I am walking to deepen my relationship with a landscape I have come to know across years. I am walking alone because silence is the condition that allows that relationship to deepen. I am walking this section again because I will guide others through it in September, and I want to meet the path once more in solitude before I meet it again in fellowship.
This is what return at this depth requires.
If You Are Considering Walking Alone
If you are thinking about a solo Camino and are not sure you could bear it, this is what I want to say.
The bearing is not the hardest part. The imagining is. Once you take the first steps, the path begins to carry you in ways that are difficult to anticipate beforehand. What you find is not the loneliness you feared.
What you find is a kind of quiet that most contemporary lives do not allow, and a world that becomes more present once that quiet arrives.
A Quiet Invitation
If the idea of walking alone has been sitting with you, consider this a gentle threshold.
Not a commitment. Not a decision. Simply a recognition that the thing you are unsure you can bear may be the very condition that allows something essential to meet you.
The Camino does not ask you to be someone different.
It invites you to arrive.
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.
Please share below if you have walked alone and want to name what you found there, or if the idea is sitting with you and you want to ask what walking alone is actually like. I am reading everything.