You Do Not Have to Walk in Step to Belong

For anyone who has mistaken kinship for sameness, especially when the sky turns grey

Yesterday morning, five tracks crossed the Aubrac plateau side by side in the same red earth.

I am on Day 5 of my sixth Camino de Santiago walking from Saint-Chély-d’Aubrac to Espalion along the GR65. The ruts looked like separate paths. They climbed the same rise, toward the same stand of beech, under the same low sky, with cloud gathering on the far horizon.

So much talk of belonging asks us to fall in line.

Match the pace. Hold the same beliefs. Walk in step, or walk away. Discount the difference, exile it, or force it to change.

The path teaches something quieter, and the gathering weather makes it urgent.

Two walkers moved ahead at their own speeds. The dry stone wall ran beside them, laid by hands long gone. The grass, the yellow flowers, the beech on the rise were all leaning the same way the rain was coming from. Even the herds of cattle kept to their own groups across the pasture.

None of it walked in step. All of it belonged to the same living direction.

That is the hope I carry toward the storm. A living planet does not survive by marching in unison. It survives by holding direction together, each in its own steps, whatever the weather.

So choose one. The oak that has weathered storms you will never see. The crow working the same field you cross. The walker whose pace is nothing like yours. Learn its name. Let it become someone, not something.

Stay open to where yours appears, because it rarely arrives where you went looking. It comes in the unearned moment, the gift beside the path you did not set out to find.

You are not building this kinship. You are waking to it.

All life is already connected. Your only task today is to answer.

Does this resonate?

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