For years I could not say what I was doing or why I was doing it.
People asked me what I did out there on the Camino for seven days alone. I would open my mouth and reach for whatever language was nearby. Walking meditation. Mindfulness. Hiking with intention. Connecting with the natural world. Clearing my mind of technology and the news. Each answer was close enough to pass and wrong enough to leave me quiet afterward, aware that I had described someone else’s practice and called it mine.
The problem was not that I lacked words. It was that the only words I had were those I heard others say or somehow seemed to make sense, and I tried those words out for myself. This is like the academic notion of “fake it till you make it,” otherwise known as doing your best by following the lead of others until you can stand on your own.
The problem was that the words I borrowed had been made for other experiences, and they carried those experiences with them. I could not yet express it clearly in my own words.
What the Sit Spot Already Taught Me
Anyone who has kept a sit spot knows the first visit is a disappointment. Perhaps also the second or third.
You choose a place, you sit, and very little happens. A bird, maybe. Some wind. You leave wondering whether you did it wrong. Nothing was wrong. The place had not yet decided you were staying.
By the fourth visit, the chipmunk resumes his route through the tree roots instead of freezing when you arrive. By the tenth, you know which tree drops its leaves first and which bird calls before the others wake. The place did not become more interesting. You became a known presence there, and it began to show you what was always occurring.
That is not a technique, but rather the way relationships work with anything alive.
I had taught this for years without recognizing that language obeys the same law.
Six Years of Returning
The words for what I do arrived the way the sit spot arrives.
Not through effort. I tried effort. I sat down more than once determined to define the thing, and produced paragraphs that were accurate and lifeless. What I got instead came from walking the same route across six summers and paying attention to which sentences survived the miles and which ones fell away somewhere past Aumont-Aubrac. No wonder the first time I walked this path I followed others also walking, only to realize fifteen minutes later I was following them on the wrong path, literally needing to back up and follow the one for me.
Some years gave me nothing that I could understand at the time. Some gave me a single phrase that turned out to be wrong the following June. Last summer, during the final stretch toward Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the words finally settled into a form that held, and I said them aloud for the first time in July, to a gathering of the Seminary of the Wild Earth and the Center for Wild Spirituality, where I trained and was ordained.
Contemplative Walking is walking slowly, in silence, with attention given to the living world.
Every word in that sentence took years to learn. Slowly, because the pace is the door. In silence, because silence is how we become quiet enough to be met. Attention given to the living world, because the direction of attention is the whole difference between this and the practices I had been borrowing names from. When we give that attention, we actually belong.
This is the essence of Lectio Divina when Nature is our sacred text.
I could not have written that sentence in year one. Not because I was not trying, but because the practice had not yet shown me enough of itself to be described.
Why This Publication Has a New Name
Which brings me to something you may have already noticed.
For years this publication was called Where Insight Meets Earth. That name was accurate, and I was fond of it. It was also less clear than it could have been, and a first-time reader had to work to understand what happens here.
The new name is Contemplative Walking. It arrived the same way the definition did, through writing and walking and the long relationship between them, until what I actually do became plain enough to hang on a shingle. The writing has not changed. The practices have not changed. The domain is the same and every older link still works.
The practice deepened, and eventually the name caught up.
This Week’s Practice
Wondering what this can mean for you? Here is something I invite you to try out for yourself.
Take a walk you already take this week, to the train, with the dog, around the block after dinner. Walk slowly enough that you could stop at any moment. Let something living invite your interest, and when it does, stay.
Visit with this being, without judgment or even understanding. Stay a little while and simply notice. The color, the size, the texture. How it lives and does what it does in the best way it can, regardless of what you want or believe about it.
Then ask it a question about itself. A dandelion, a twig, a petal on the sidewalk. Ask what its life is like, or what it knows about this season, or anything you would ask a neighbor you had never spoken to. This may be the first time anyone has addressed it as someone rather than something.
Be open to whatever happens.
Something may come, or nothing may come. You may feel odd and awkward, since the reply will not arrive in human terms, but reply it will. Journal it or sit with it as you return to your day.
Whatever comes of the encounter, it is a good thing.
If You Do Not Have the Words Yet
You may be practicing something you cannot name. A way of being outdoors that is not quite what the books describe. A relationship with a particular tree or field or stretch of shoreline that sounds foolish when you try to explain it, or perhaps is outside your traditional philosophical, spiritual, or religious paradigm.
You are not failing at description. You have simply not returned enough times yet.
Keep going back. Say nothing about it for now. The words come the way everything living comes, at their own pace, and they arrive most reliably to people who stopped demanding they arrive.
On Friday I take the train south. On Saturday I begin guiding four people in a retreat along the Le Puy route, the same path where these words came to me, and I will invite them to do exactly what I described above: to walk slowly, in silence, and to let something living stop them. I do not know what any of them will find. I do know that whatever it is will take longer to name than the walking takes, and that this is not a flaw in the process.
It is the process.
If you find this useful, please like or leave a comment.
If you try the practice I offered, I welcome hearing how it goes for you.
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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