Today it would hold my belongings.

When I climbed out of the moving truck and walked toward the entrance, the scent of lilacs brought me back to the last days of school when I was a kid, walking home past two streets lined with lilac bushes. I saw a chipmunk run across the deck, and then out of the corner of my eye, a deer in the woods.

I had been here fifteen minutes.

I arrived with the U-Haul two hours before the men I hired to unpack the truck. I walked through the empty rooms alone.

I decided to use the time and sweep the floors before anything was brought in. When I finished, I found myself staring out a window at the peonies ready to burst.

The movers pulled up.

We carefully lifted the door to the packed truck and watched as items fell to the ground. The three bikes were tangled together. I looked away when they got to work. I didn’t want to witness them getting scratched or banged up.

The movers felt more like friends helping out. They checked their phones. They asked a lot of questions about my move. I found myself watching the clock and also telling them things.

This was the first of many conversations that showed up over those first three days. Neighbors dropping by. People scheduled to cut the grass or clean the deck. I kept finding myself in long conversations with new acquaintances about the neighbors, where to get lawn service, who is married to who and for how long.

I was amused. Years ago I shared a home with my best friend a few blocks from our church. It was the place people stopped by after church for coffee, during the week to say hello or share a meal. It was our home but it felt like it belonged to the larger community. I remember those five years as some of the fullest.

So many boxes

Most of my belongings had been in a storage unit for two years. If you had asked me what was in there, I could only make a list of maybe thirty percent of it. The rest would have been lost to me.

And yet I cannot stop thinking about the two floor pillows I bought in Morocco, which I still haven’t found.

I opened a box of clothing. At the time I packed it, I was training for a marathon — the early wakeups, Sunday two hour runs in Rock Creek Park, sprint workouts on the National Mall. I was in the best shape of my adult life and I felt it. Strong. In my own body.

Running was where I put everything. My body was working, and for those hours I felt at home in it.

One Sunday morning I woke early, took the metro alone to the start line, and ran a half-marathon in the rain. I beat my hoped-for time. I didn’t ask anyone to come. I didn’t want to inconvenience them for my sake, didn’t want to spend the race wondering if they were bored or cold. And I wanted them there. I asked a stranger to take a celebratory photo of me at the finish line. I loved the running. Afterward, I felt sad.

I stood holding the running clothes, my mom a few feet away, hanging up a pile of clothes I knew I wasn’t going to wear but wasn’t ready to let go of just yet. An unglamorous job. The race came back. The rain. The stranger with the camera. There she was. My mom. In the same room.

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The last time I walked through my DC house, I went room to room to give thanks for what it had held. It was soil for me. I had put my heart into making it beautiful, making it a place that held me, a refuge.

When I walked down the stairs for the last time, I gripped the banister with my left hand. I didn’t realize how tightly until I looked down and saw the veins risen and felt the ache in my knuckles. I released. Blood rushed back in, cool and warm. This railing that had been beside me the thousands of times I had walked up and down those stairs. Letting go felt like releasing the edge of a river. I wasn’t sure yet if I was in a boat, a raft, or just floating on my own.

When my mom said she needed to go home, I knew she was right.

I had asked her to stay longer. She thought about it overnight. This was new for me, wanting someone to stay. I tend to like my space. But so many years living alone, far from family, the ones that really know how to let you be your best and worst. I wanted more. I liked sharing the space, especially at night.

With my mom, I can leave the dishes in the sink.

I had grown accustomed to the woods at St. John’s, but this house is remote, and there is no university nearby.

The first night, I woke at 3:00 am to wind and a series of clacks and thumps. I shot up in bed. What was that? I held my breath and listened. Two more, then another. The forest speaks, and this one comes right up to my windows. Should I check? I wanted to stay in bed. Another thump.

I got up and slowly slid the bedroom door open and stuck my head out. Another couple of cracks. They were not rhythmic. I walked into the living room. I couldn’t see much, but when another hit, I understood: pine cones falling from the tree over the deck. In the morning there were at least forty of them. The deck wraps around three sides of the house, and so do the trees.

A new language to learn.

I wavered on the decision to come here while I was walking the Camino. The lease was uncertain. I held that open question alongside each day's walk: where I would live at the end of the road.

What I needed became clear slowly. Twenty-five kilometers, a bed, a small backpack, a new place each day. The rhythm of washing clothes in the sink at night. Church bells in villages I would leave by morning. Solitude each day and community each evening. The knowing accumulated one day at a time.

I imagined Minneapolis. The list of pros was sizable: community, family, art classes, a city I know how to live in. Then I imagined the Tree House. Everything else settled here.

And when I imagined myself in both places, the answer was always the same. I wanted to be in the Tree House.

What I saw: waking early, starting a fire, coffee before prayer at the monastery. Long mornings for writing, painting, movement. Trees outside the window while I worked. The place itself would create the rhythm.

I came back to Minnesota for a fellowship. But the longing was older. I wanted to be closer to home, to family. After twenty years away, and two years at St. John’s, I had come to need birdsong, trees, a slower pace. Life here moves at the speed of walking.

I went up to the university to collect my paintings, everything I had made over the last two years. I walked into the dark office space I was given to hold my things. It was fuller than I remembered, with paintings stacked on both sides.

Oh my, I said out loud, already thinking about what it would take to move all of it, already tired, feeling I had asked too much of my mom.

And then I looked at what was there and the smile came. I liked them. A lot. The faces looked back at me. Had I really made these?

In a box I haven’t opened, there are two floor pillows from Morocco. The lilacs are blooming. The deer came back this morning.

At a seminar I gave in my studio last spring

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this post, please give it a like so others can find it.

Love,

Kim

p.s. Since writing this post, I found one of the pillows.

It was raining when I walked into Santiago for the fifth time. The rain was soft and cold. The normally bustling square was empty at the center. Every pilgrim had taken cover at the edges. I walked to the middle anyway and stood there in it.

I’d walked into that square before in the rain. In 2023 I arrived with a Camino friend and it was pouring and it didn’t matter at all. We were giddy. We embraced in tears and laughter, barely believing we had made it. The rain was part of the celebration.

This time was different.

I put my toes on the marker at the center of the square and waited for the moment to feel extraordinary. I tried to conjure it. It didn’t come. My heart was sad and warm and tender all at once.

The final weeks

By week five of the Camino my body was still sore but not tired. I had learned how to rest by then. I stopped forcing myself up at 6:00 a.m. I woke when I woke and headed out when I was ready.

I walked fewer kilometers each day in those final weeks. Part of it was practical, aligning the walking with my flight. But mostly I just didn’t want it to be over. Whenever I found a café or a perch with a vista, I stopped.

The landscape had changed when we crossed into Galicia. Moss covered not just the ground but the trunks of the trees. You could smell the green. There were hills now that required effort where before had been flat land. We had been walking the dry Roman road through Extremadura and Castilla for weeks. But now, it felt like a fairy could pop out from around any corner. I had been looking forward to this section since the beginning. And for the first time on the Via de la Plata, Camino markers appeared listing the kilometers remaining to Santiago. They had not been there before, counting down every step.

The shrine

Two days before Santiago we stopped in the woods at a place someone had made into a shrine inside a large hollowed out tree. There were no signs pointing to it along the path. No marker on any map I had seen. Someone had chosen this tree and made it holy. Handwritten prayer notes were tucked into the bark. Photographs. A laminated card with a saint’s image. And a photograph of an x-ray of a very crooked spine was thumbtacked to the trunk.

I stood there thinking about the man who had carried that x-ray each day in his pack for weeks, protecting it. I hope he somehow knows that his brave prayer matters to me.

I had my own prayers to offer. I left them there too and wished I’d brought something to pin to the tree.

We took our shoes off and sat for a while. We ate from our packs. A rest next to a shrine in a tree felt like an arm around my shoulder.

Tree shine

The last morning

On the final morning I made myself walk slower than I needed to. I wanted to keep my eyes up. On most days I watch the road, the roots, the rocks, the path immediately ahead to keep from tripping. That day especially I wanted to see what was around me. The green fields and wildflowers. The sky.

The hills were rising behind us and we were descending. I stopped and looked back at them. I thought, this is possibly the last sweeping vista. The last Camino sunrise. I knew I was trying to make time stand still and I couldn’t stop.

The camera lens on my phone was scratched and didn’t capture what I was seeing. I tried anyway and then stopped trying and just looked.

Reina Lupa

About seven kilometers from Santiago we stopped at a bar called Reina Lupa for coffee and tostadas and to wait out a passing rain. When the woman behind the bar making our cafe solos looked up and asked where I was from and I said the United States, she said, Minnesota? I looked up.

She said you called yesterday. Minnesota came up on my phone.

It was true, I’d called to see if she had room left in the albergue. No. Está completa.

I asked if she was Lupa. She laughed and said no, Carmina.

I tell by her response that I had missed something. I looked up Reina Lupa. She was a figure from Galician mythology, a woman whose story is part of how the relics of the apostle James came to be in Santiago. Five Caminos and I’d never come across her. I was irritated.

What struck me next was that Carmina was disappointed she hadn’t been able to offer us a room the night before. She meant it. You could feel it in the way she greeted each pilgrim who came through the door.

We stayed longer than we needed to. We put on our rain gear and walked the last kilometers into the city.

At Reina Lupa

The pilgrim mass

Mass has been part of my life since I was a small child. My relationship to it hasn’t always been easy. For years I struggled to find my way inside it, to not feel like a spectator and frankly, bored.

That has been slowly changing for years. Though what happened over the last two has surprised me. At a Benedictine monastery in northern Minnesota I began to occasionally go to daily mass. The gathering is small, mostly monks, and the ritual only what is needed. Sunday mass is fuller and more elaborate and I understand why, but it can pull me out of the place I’m trying to reach, the place where I stop thinking and evaluating and let the prayers carry me. Daily mass lets me sink in and stay there. It feels like a small cave I enter, where the mass is held and everyone present is needed to complete the space. It feels like a mercy. I don’t take this shift for granted.

The pilgrim mass in the cathedral of Santiago is nothing like daily mass. It is full and grand and celebrated four times a day for people passing through, not parishioners. I imagine to celebrate mass four times a day for strangers takes endurance. Unlike at a parish, there are no relationships that deepen, just new faces four times a day. I wondered what sustains a person in that work. And I am grateful to them for it.

The acoustics in the cathedral made it difficult to hear the homily. I understood about half of it. But the priest was energetic and joyful. The gospel came from John 14, Jesus as the Way.

The Camino is also called the way. There are signs along the road that say you don’t have to know the way, the way knows the way. To hear that gospel in that cathedral, on that Sunday, felt like more than coincidence. And despite missing half the words I felt seen. He probably says over ten pilgrim masses a week. He understood something about what the road asks and gives. I hope he has walked it.

As he spoke I felt I had come home. Not to the cathedral, though it is magnificent. To something older and deeper inside me.

Something that may have been with me since before I was born.

The air in the cathedral was chilly but I felt warm. I felt settled in my seat with nowhere else I needed to be. A friend was beside me. Both present and neither a distraction.

It hadn't been easy to find a church open for mass along the Via de la Plata. But I hadn't felt unfed. Bread had been the substance of every day on the road.

Tostadas in the morning. Bocadillos at midday. Crusty rolls I would never have chosen at home. In its own necessary way it had been keeping me in communion all along.

I just received it.

BREAD!

Lighting candles after mass

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The bookstore

After mass we walked through the cathedral bookstore. I was drawn to the memoirs others had written about their Camino experience. I picked up two and read the back covers. I put them both down. I was too much in the middle of my own.

Then I saw a book of watercolor paintings of the Camino and exhaled. Those gave me breathing room.

I missed my studio.

I belong here

Standing in the main square I saw something I hadn’t noticed in quite the same way until that moment.

I've spent more than six months of my life on this trail. Five Caminos. When I stood in the rain with my toes on the marker I felt connected to it. Not that it was mine in the way a home is mine. But that I was part of it.

What kind of punctuation mark was this. A period. An exclamation point. A question mark.

A comma, I thought.

That evening a small group of us found each other, pilgrims from the Plata, few enough that we stood out to each other in a Santiago filled with walkers from the Camino Francés and the Norte and the Portugal. We didn’t know each other well. But we had shared the road and that was enough. We raised a glass.

The farewell toast

The companionship

I didn’t plan to walk this Camino with a companion. I expected solitude. I didn’t plan for what happened and I’m glad I didn’t.

Weeks into the walk we were moving through a stretch of road when I asked Seán what year were you in Cuba. He said 2003. Something registered immediately. I said wait, what month. He said August and September. I grabbed his arm and stopped walking.

No way, I said.

So was I.

We stood there and stared at each other for longer than normal. Neither of us moved. Eyes squinting, corners of our mouths turning up. We had both been there in the same month. I was leading a group of teachers on a seminar about education in Cuba. He was there volunteering because he believed Cuba had something to teach him.

So we just kept walking.

The world pressing in

I was sitting in a café in Santiago having my last breakfast before the train. A tostada with tomato and egg. They had wifi and I opened my email. Three messages, all from parts of my life I had been working to arrange before coming home. Substantial things. Housing. Work.

I felt myself go elsewhere. My mind was already in Minnesota, working out strategies. Meanwhile this last day was here, in front of me, asking me to be in it.

It wasn’t a one time effort to come back to myself. The grief of goodbye and the worry of tomorrow kept trading places. I shared what was bothering me and said I would try to put it aside for now. It was the best I could do. The leaving and the goodbyes had to come first.

On the metro in Madrid the day after I left Santiago I noticed that every single person in my car was staring at their phone. Not one of them looking up. Every face turned toward a screen.

I got so sad. Was this the world I was returning to? Was this me? Before I left home I’d already been thinking about how to reduce my reliance on my phone. I knew I didn’t like how it felt. I wasn’t sure how to carry the way I had been living on the road back into everyday life.

Still a pilgrim

I’ve been asked why I keep coming back to the Camino. Why not go somewhere new?

Standing in the square in the rain I thought about my eight year old self who climbed onto a school bus in a parking lot on a hot July, waved at her parents, and turned her eyes forward before they were out of sight. She was going to a camp in the north woods on her own because she had seen a slideshow with photos of canoeing and cabins surrounded by trees at church on Wednesday night and knew she needed to be there. She didn’t know what a pilgrim was, but she needed to go. She went back every summer until she was twenty.

I’ve been walking ever since.

_______________

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this post, please give it a like so others can find it.

Love,

Kim

By the third week of walking I had stopped trying to photograph the sky.

The colors alone, pink and orange and yellow with the lightest green where the light touched the blue overhead, would have been enough. But one morning I put the phone away mid-reach and turned in a full circle instead. To the west, a full moon, large and low on the horizon, staying with us longer than seemed right, as if it were rolling slowly down the side of the mountain as we walked. I felt tiny and expansive at the same time. When I put the phone away I was letting the sky do its work on me.

Salamanca

By the third week I had left the group I had been walking with. It happened almost naturally, and also by choice. New companions had joined me and the conversations that came with them made the twenty kilometers into Salamanca pass without my noticing. I did not expect to walk that far without stopping. My body has been making its own decisions on this road and today it surprised me with its strength.

I had been looking forward to Salamanca the way you look forward to a place you have heard about for years but never visited. It did not disappoint. The cathedral alone took me nearly two hours on the self-guided audio tour, stopping at every side chapel. I found Teresa of Ávila there, in a chapel dedicated to her alongside Santiago, the apostle St. James. She knew this city. I have been sitting with both of them for two years, through their writing and through my painting. I saw them through the metal grate of the chapel. I recognized them both immediately. I leaned in with my hands and my face on the grate and whispered, hello.

I stayed well past the audio guide’s explanation. I had wondered at first why these two, both patron saints of Spain, were sharing a chapel rather than having their own. But standing there I decided I preferred it. I know them both. They don’t just live in the history of this road. They walk with me on it.

I lit a candle at the chapel of La Virgen de Soledad. I know when I want to and I did. I stayed for a while. When I left I felt lighter than when I arrived.

That evening I found the neighborhood outside the old city center where nearly every metal door pulled shut over a garage or storefront had been painted by an artist. Not tags but deliberate work, up high and down low, on the sides of buildings. One door stopped me entirely: a man’s face painted huge and extraordinarily realistic with spray paint. I stood there wondering how it was possible to create such precise detail with that medium. I wished I could have watched the artist make it. Everyone sitting outside the vegan café nearby was smoking and looked as though they belonged in an artist community. I felt at home in my pilgrim clothes, which is not something I expected to feel in a city.

The chapel of La Virgen de Soledad, Salamanca

Pit Stop

Within the first two weeks I made a decision not to post on social media during the walk. I had sent out a Substack field note and I felt the weight of it, the checking, the attention split, one eye on what was here and one eye on how it was landing somewhere else.

It required discipline at first. Beautiful images to share, small stories I narrated in my head as I walked, funny observations, an insight that felt worth passing on. But I decided to turn all of it toward my journal instead. For me, writing is slow and deliberate. It asks me to be honest about what I am noticing and feeling. A photograph is fast, and sometimes that speed feels like a kind of taking. When photography becomes the main thing, it costs me the experience it is trying to hold. Writing for myself gave it back.

The past twenty months of sabbatical have been a practice of singular attention. Painting without interruption. Prayer without a series of meetings waiting behind it. Writing without one eye on the response. The Camino was the next step in that practice.

I noticed it first when I stopped feeling rushed. By week three, most mornings I was consistently one of the last out of the albergue (hostel). Durning the walk, I stopped so many times, when the view was new or my feet were tired, that others on the road nicknamed me Pit Stop. These were my days, my life, and walking was a part of it. I could hurry to the next town and spend the evening waiting for morning, or I could inhabit the day.

I paid attention to the wildflowers. They would bloom and then disappear and then reappear as I walked further north and the temperatures dropped again, as though I was walking into perpetual spring. Once I accepted that the road was not somewhere I was passing through but simply where I was. None of it needed to be recorded to be real.

A late and lingering breakfast at our hostel. No rush.

The red car

Hitchhiking in rural Spain is something I and other pilgrims have done in moments of need. I know instinctually whether I am willing to get in. That week Anne and I found ourselves on a long exposed stretch in full heat. Anne is a tall lean Dutch woman, a strong walker who laughs easily, and we had been walking together for several days. The day had turned hotter than anticipated and a bar we had counted on was closed. We had almost no water left between us.

We stood at the edge of the road with our thumbs out. Slowly, car after car passed, twenty at least, without slowing. Then a small red car pulled over just ahead of us. Two men. I called out from a safe distance. We were going just a few kilometers up the road, I said, to the next town. The driver looked at me without answering. He said he didn’t know that town. I said it was straight ahead on this road and we needed help. We didn’t have enough water for the heat. He paused. The man in the passenger seat looked at me sheepishly and then away. No, the driver said. They drove off.

Anne laughed, the kind of laugh you make when you don’t know what else to do. Then the heat demanded our attention and there was nothing to do but keep walking.

I thought about that red car for the rest of the day. I was irritated. But by the time we reached the next town, water in hand, I noticed something else alongside the irritation. Relief. Not that they had refused us, but that I wasn’t sitting in that car. He had the energy of someone who takes. He sat comfortably in his no. His face, his body said I have the power and I am showing you that. I still wonder why he stopped. Once I had arrived I found myself wondering what I would have done if he had said yes, weighing the fear of the heat against my read of the man.

When we approached the albergue two Italian men who had been part of our loose pilgrim bubble for weeks greeted us with pretend trumpets, a fanfare, the full ceremony of arrival met with two cheek Italian kisses. I was exhausted and I was laughing again.

We walked long stretches with no shade.

La Caseta de Pipe

About an hour into a morning walk in the farm fields north of Zamora, in the middle of terrain that had offered nothing particular to look at, we stopped.

In the large field, set against mountains in the far distance, was a tiny house. Fourteen by fourteen feet at most. The front door was painted in black and silver stripes. The upper three quarters of the walls were a yellowish cream and the bottom quarter a Cuban blue. The sides were a deep red. The window had handmade ironwork in swirls. A stone chimney with lovely ironwork on top. And a handmade iron sign made by an artist that read La Caseta de Pipe.

We stood there for a long time without saying much. It was small and it was enough and it was exactly what it wanted to be.

In unison my companion and I said, I could live there.

Someone had made every choice with intention. You could feel it. A tiny house in a field. A handmade sign.

We packed up and kept walking.

La Caseta de Pipe. In unison we said, I could live there.

Two bars

There is a bar in a small town north of Zamora that had once been a library and before that a school. Dark inside, wooden walls, red accents behind the bar. The man running it was washing dishes when we came in. He kept washing. We stood. After a couple of minutes he turned and asked us what we wanted. In smaller towns in Spain, at least, this is not unusual. People finish what they are doing before they move to serve you. The coffee was excellent. The most expensive glass of wine on the list was two euros and twenty cents. We sat outside and took our time.

A man came into a bar where we were having breakfast in a mountain village. He sat at the corner and ordered something strong I couldn’t name and sipped it slowly. It was 8:15 in the morning. Later, in Spanish, he told us he had worked in the natural park nearby for fifty years. He complimented our Spanish. When he and the bar owner spoke to each other they dropped into a dialect I couldn’t follow, but when they turned to us they came back to Spanish, as though meeting us where we were. He said he had been outside every day for fifty years, mostly alone, watching the animals and taking care of the trees. He said he was very lucky to have lived that life.

Menu at the bar north of Zamora

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Still walking

I wrote in the first field note of this journey that I was wrong about almost everything I had been told to expect from the Via de la Plata. Four weeks in I was still surprised.

The screw fell out of one of my walking poles somewhere on the road and I spent time searching for it in the grass without finding it. When I arrived at the next albergue the hospitalero reached behind his desk and handed me a set of poles someone had left behind. I walked out with better poles than I came in with.

One Sunday the grocery store had closed before I arrived and a fellow pilgrim, seeing I had nothing for the evening, divided what he had and handed me half without being asked.

One afternoon a group of us found an ice cream freezer in a tiny tienda in a town too small to have any reason for one. We each got something we loved and sat on a bench outside against the stone wall of a church that had been locked. A seventy year old Irishman, a Dutchman in his late sixties, an Irishman man in his forties, and me, squeezed together licking ice cream in the afternoon sun. Someone took a photo. I think I will want to print it someday.

The road kept giving things I had not asked for and taking things I had not known I was carrying.

I did not expect to find, four weeks and five hundred kilometers into a thousand kilometer walk, that the question I came with has dissolved and nothing has replaced it.

I am still walking.

If you appreciated this post, consider “liking” it so others. can find it.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Love, Kim

The photo I wanted to print from the ice cream stop is no where to be found. This bench will have to stand in for that one

.

— Exodus 12:14

On Holy Thursday the daily readings brought me this verse. I read it on the road, as I have been starting my day with the readings most morning of this pilgrimage, and something in it named what I had been living. Pilgrimage has been woven into the last two and a half years of my life in ways I did not plan. I did not plan most of what has happened on this road either.

I came to this road at the end of a year and a half of deliberately slowing down. I did not know it would ask this much of me or give this much back. It is asking me to stay within my own limits, to notice, to rest. What I did not expect was how writing each day is teaching me to inhabit what I am living.

The Via de la Plata was supposed to be the practical choice. The weather suited the timing. It was new to me after four other Caminos and I was curious about it. But I had read enough Facebook groups and watched enough YouTube journeys to have absorbed a consensus: the Plata is solitary, the landscape is monotonous, it is not the Camino for community or beauty. I was making a sensible compromise and I knew it.

I was wrong about almost all of it.

The landscape

No one mentioned the wildflowers. White with yellow centers, purple salvia, color everywhere in the grass in early spring. No one mentioned walking for three days through a massive natural park, Sierra Norte, with mountain views and rivers and nothing but birdsong and running water. And no one mentioned the oak groves, acres and acres of trees spaced wide enough apart that each one has found its full expression, expanding outward and upward without having to fight for the light. Three days walking through something close to a tree utopia.

They mentioned the Roman road and the ruins. They did not mention what it feels like to walk it, the stones of the original road still visible beneath your feet, the small Roman bridges carrying you over streams after two thousand years. Or the medieval cities, Cáceres most of all, a complete city, not ruins, another world fully formed and still inhabited. Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross knew these streets, walls, and territory. I have been sitting with them for two years through their writings and through painting Teresa’s portrait.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The company

This is my fifth Camino and I have learned that the people you walk with are never who you expected. The busier routes have their own culture, café con leche stops throughout the day, the end of day beer in the central plaza, Camino masses, a community built around shared rhythms and infrastructure. The Plata has almost none of that. Between towns there are no services and you carry everything for the day. What it has instead is varied landscape, enough pilgrims to form a real community without the scramble for beds, and a culture built around the physical demands of the walk itself. What I did not expect was how much I would prefer it.

In the first days I walked alongside a northern Irishman named Jerry, whose brogue was so thick I had to work to follow him. He arrived on the Camino with his best mate Gary. Jerry and Gary. But Gary’s calf muscle gave out after one night and one café con leche and he was on a plane home before the rest of us had found our shoes. Jerry carries on ahead now, a day beyond me, which is how the Camino sorts people. At every break he took off his shoes and socks and put them in the sun. Your feet feel like a new day, he said. The shoes dry and the feet cool and he was right, almost. It is now part of my practice.

The companions who have stayed are two Germans and an Italian. At first glance we seemed to have little in common beyond the path beneath our feet. The group felt like a practical container, people sharing logistics, meals, the dailiness of getting somewhere each day. I am getting to know each of them through the everyday interactions of the walk. At our first shared meal we made sure to look directly into each other’s eyes when we clinked glasses, the way Europeans do. Everyone looked genuinely happy and even a little relieved to be at that table together.

Holy Week on the road

I have never walked a Camino during Holy Week and I did not understand what that would mean until I turned a corner in a small town and walked into a procession. They were walking the stations of the cross through town, carrying a large brown wooden cross along the narrow streets, stopping at stations, singing. Perhaps a hundred people, mostly women, the women being the body of it. The men carried the cross and the microphone. I stood on the sidewalk and watched and felt a longing I have felt before, for a community that lives its spiritual life this embodied, this communally, woven into the ordinary life of the town without overtaking it.

The Holy Week processions have followed me across two weeks of walking. Or I have followed them. In Zafra on Palm Sunday the square filled slowly and then all at once with families at long tables, everyone dressed beautifully, the celebration lasting all day and into the evening. The newspapers the next morning dedicated sixteen full pages to it. In Cáceres on Good Friday the Nazarenos moved through the medieval streets, men in long robes with pointed hoods, a tradition of solemn devotion going back to medieval Spain. Christine said something to me in a normal voice and was immediately shushed from the sidelines. We exchanged startled half smiles and retreated. The devotion here does not make exceptions for pilgrims passing through.

The night before, on Holy Thursday, I arrived late to mass at the monastery where I was staying in Alcuéscar. I had the time wrong, thought it started at six thirty, arrived to find it had begun at six. I slipped in through a side door, not the back, so there was no hiding it. The whole church smelled of incense and I assumed this meant mass was just beginning. It was in fact ending. Some heads turned. I stood there momentarily embarrassed and then, only a few minutes later, the priest and others processed out right in front of me, the incense swinging past me as they went. I smiled to myself. I didn’t get the readings or the communion but I got to be inside that church with people who wanted to be there, to witness how it had been prepared for Holy Thursday, and to be passed by the incense as they left. I received it as a blessing and let it be enough.

What the road keeps giving

The screw fell out of one of my poles somewhere on the road and I spent time searching for it in the grass without finding it. When I arrived at the next albergue I asked the hospitalero if he knew where I might find a replacement. He said I would never find it but reached behind his desk and gave me a set of poles someone had left behind. I walked out with better poles than I came in with.

A Spaniard named Salva offered me his lomo the night before a long day and left it in the fridge. When he came into the breakfast room and saw I had left three pieces for him he brought them over. He said he knew I could finish them. There is almost never a moment on the Camino when you cannot eat more.

I arrived at the monastery on Holy Thursday after an 18 mile journey to find a donated dinner waiting, all homemade, soup and chicken and potato and cheese and egg and fruit and sweets, served by volunteers who had given up their holiday to feed pilgrims. Before the meal they taught us a prayer set to the tune of We Will Rock You, complete with table pounding and hand clapping. It was slightly awkward at first and then people got into it and there were smiles around a table of strangers who were becoming, slowly, something else.

A perpetual institution

I did not deliberately plan to be walking this road during Holy Week. I did not plan the community that has formed or the processions I have walked into or the monastery that fed me or the poles left behind by a stranger. The road keeps offering itself.

I am still walking.

Thanks for reading.

Love,

Kim

The debit card slipped out of my passport when I checked into the hostel in Seville. I had looked through that passport, and my entire pack, several times in Madrid searching for it. I stood there in the lobby holding it, relieved and then immediately frustrated, because I had already called the bank and put a block on it, and a block, they told me, is the same as a cancellation. There was no reinstating it. I spent a half hour at twenty-five cents a minute on the phone arriving at nothing, and then I let it go.

It had been a good morning before that. I spent the night in Madrid with Yolanta’s community of Claretian Missionary Sisters, a gift I had not anticipated needing as much as I did. They gave me a room off their courtyard, included me in dinner and morning prayer and breakfast, and sent me off with a bag of food and their good wishes. When I discovered the card missing, Yolanta lent me what cash she had without hesitation. Between hers and mine I arrived in Seville with a hundred and fifty euros, a credit card I knew was largely useless in small towns, and a money transfer somewhere in process that I will not be able to access until Mérida, nine days from now.

I am trying to receive this as an invitation to trust. I cannot say I am not nervous.

The hostel was called Backpackers Triana, named for the neighborhood. I had a room of four beds with a curtain across each, which is always a welcome retreat on pilgrimage. A cell. A little enclosure.

I walked the city in the afternoon. I haven’t been to Seville since 1999, a summer in Spain with a friend, a weekend trip I remember only as endless meals and the sense that time was needless. What came back to me slowly was the architecture, the way Spanish and Arab forms have grown into each other here over centuries, flying buttresses meeting horseshoe arches, apostles carved alongside geometric patterns, the cathedral so large you cannot see it whole from any single place you stand. The streets are narrow and winding and full of cafés where families were sprawled across long tables in the late Sunday afternoon, unhurried, eating well.

Orange blossoms were everywhere in the air, and oranges on the ground beneath the trees, waiting. I picked one up and ate it. (Not recommended, as they are not for eating.)

I walked through all of it in pilgrim clothes, which is to say plainly, which is to say visibly out of place. I was aware of the contradiction I carry. I long for simplicity and I long for beauty and I have not yet found a way to hold both well. The beauty in this city was everywhere and I wanted to be inside it, and I was also aware of how much of it is organized around acquiring things. It’s a lot of effort. I felt this all week in Rome too, the plainness of what I was wearing, the discomfort of that, and underneath the discomfort something that felt, despite everything, like being at home in myself.

I pulled the curtain across the bed and slept.

My roommates were a French couple on their fifth Camino. Over breakfast we traded notes on past walks and settled on Spanish as the best language between us. I was glad for the practice. I had been sheepish with Yolanda’s community, where everyone spoke Spanish and I could barely find a word. It is always like this at the beginning. In a week I expect the language will begin to come back.

This morning was a gentle start. Twelve people in the breakfast room, six of us pilgrims, two on bikes I won’t see again, one young woman whose name I didn’t catch, and the French couple. They plan to walk fifteen to twenty kilometers a day, which is a lovely pace but not mine, and so I imagine our paths will diverge by tomorrow. I simply packed my bag and walked out the door. The French couple and I fell into step together for the first half hour, long enough to find our way through the city, long enough to feel the nod toward companionship that this path offers, and then the walk opened up ahead of me.

I have been thinking about beginnings. Last year on the Le Chemin du Puy, I started in Puy-en-Velay with a mass in the cathedral, great doors opening in the floor onto the town, four hundred people descending the steps together. Mike and Diane were beside me, two people I had met on the Camino Francés in 2023 and found again on another pilgrimage. Then a second beginning at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, crossing the border into Spain, the Pyrenees ahead, and what felt like a thousand people departing that morning. I remember feeling overwhelmed, and that feeling followed me toward Burgos until I caught a bus to the Camino del Norte and started again in San Sebastián.

This beginning feels nothing like those. It feels soft. Solitary but not lonely. I left this morning with a smile on my face and something in my chest that I can only call an open heart. I have walked enough now to know that I cannot know how this one will unfold, and that not knowing is not the same as being unprepared.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Thanks for reading.

Love,

Kim

A view of the cathedral, Seville.

It was 6:55 when I pulled into the abbey parking lot, early enough to get away with the “Admissions Guest Parking Only” spot. I stepped out of the car and did the Minnesota shuffle up to the door, the run where your feet barely lift because you want as much contact with the ice as possible. It is not a good look, but we do not care much about that here under our five layers.

As soon as I opened the second door and entered the dark church, the space itself made me exhale. I set my winterware on the dark pew and walked toward the choir stalls, entering the section designated for lay people. When I bow and land in that choir stall and feel the slight give of the wood beneath me, I exhale again.

I set up my three books: one for the opening hymn, one for the psalms, one for the responses and canticle. I lean back, close my eyes, and wait for the bells.

There is light just over the choir stalls and the altar, but the large stained glass wall we face is still dark. By the time we leave at 7:30, the light will have begun to pour in, one of my favorite shifts of November through March, before the days are so long that we start and end in the light.

I’m not fully awake when I arrive. I’m still in liminal space, sometimes rubbing my eyes and realizing I still have the morning in the corners. No one is looking at me, I tell myself. The thirty minutes in that choir stall is the first input of my day.

We pray the psalms together, all of us. Choir 1 and Choir 2, we go back and forth. There is a leader for the solo parts. We say the words without inflection, a certain flatness that bothered me at first. Now I understand. The words move inside of you. Between each line, there is a beat. A rhythm that gets into your bones. The monks hold it well. I follow their lead

We prayed Psalm 122, titled in the prayer book “In Praise of Jerusalem: A Pilgrimage Song.”

I rejoiced when I heard them say,
Let us go to God’s house.

God’s house. Where is it? The houses lining the streets of Minneapolis. Meals for neighbors. Prayer meetings. Alex Pretti. Renee Good. Keith Porter.

And now our feet are standing
within your gates, O Jerusalem.

But I did not hear Jerusalem.

I heard Minneapolis.

It was sudden. Uninvited, but welcomed. Obvious.

And now our feet are standing
within your gates, Minneapolis.

The replacement continued.

Minneapolis is built as a city, strongly compact.
It is there that the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord.

Peace be to your homes.

Yes, I thought. Yes. PEACE.

Tears filled my eyes, warm, hot. I blinked and one rolled down. It was soft, not dramatic. I held most of it within.

For the peace of Minneapolis, pray.
Peace be to your homes.
May peace reign in your walls.

Then:

In your palaces, peace.

My body tensed. All of my muscles hugged my bones. My shoulders went up.

God, are you asking me to pray for those in palaces? How can I with the take-over, the terror on our streets?

The anger starts low in my belly, burning. It radiates up through my ribs, into my shoulders, out to my fingertips. If I sit still today, if I do nothing, it will spin into a wheel inside of me I cannot stop. But right now it is liquid. Moving. I am all edges. Raw. Pulled hard to one side of seeing.

The psalm ended:

For the love of the house of the Lord,
I will ask for your good.

Then silence. I heard someone shift. The space between psalms, held by the leader who will begin the next one.

Nothing released. My shoulders stayed lifted. The heat didn’t vanish, only shifted locations—from my belly to my throat.

I want to have compassion for everyone. But that feels too slow, and meanwhile people are dying. The urgency is real.

I want both. I can’t. I don’t know how.

The leader began the next psalm. I opened my mouth and said the words.

_____________

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With love,

Kim

On Friday, a book arrived through interlibrary loan: The Select Writings of Anne Truitt. It sat on my desk through the weekend. This morning, I opened the book, unwittingly, to page 167, to an Artist Talk she gave at Yale in 1976. And on this day, I find Truitt writing about placement and belonging. About the right to command space. About how we “rise from the earth,” and that rising gives us the right to be here.

She writes:

I would like to begin by addressing myself to the matter of placement. These sculptures, as you see, are facing east-west-north-south on coordinates of latitude and longitude all their own. So are you, and so am I. We each occupy a unique place, categorically our own. From this position we look out, so to speak, at the world. Although obviously painted wooden structures, these sculptures also stand in a space belonging entirely to each, and to each alone... Now they are scattered around the country, but each continues to command its own space, and will do so for the length of its existence—as we will.

She writes about placement—not position. The difference matters. We thoughtfully and carefully place things we care about. We toss, throw, and abuse things we do not. Placement suggests care, intention, belonging. Not hierarchy. Placement is something we all have a right to.

Anne Truitt (1921–2004) was an American artist, sculptor, and writer, known for her tall, columnar painted wooden sculptures that stand with quiet authority. In this 1976 talk, she tells a story. At the Corcoran Gallery exhibit in Washington in 1974, someone was so disturbed by one of her sculptures—so offended that it dared to exist without justifying itself as “art” elaborately enough—that they pushed it over.

She writes: “Most of them left in a state of high dudgeon, angry. Even in 1974, at the Corcoran Gallery exhibit in Washington, someone was so upset by this controversy of what he thought art should be that he pushed one piece over on the floor.”

And then, this: “Yet the essence of the work lies partly in this assertion of a right to exist in the same way we exist, rising from the earth as we do.”

They pushed it over.

The Yellow Column

I recently saw one of Truitt’s sculptures at the East Wing of the National Gallery in DC. Her yellow column stood across the room in an exhibit where every work explored yellow. Hers stood apart. Taller. More concentrated. The surface held light differently. It stood in the corner, proud and glowing.

That sculpture didn’t argue for its right to be there. It didn’t perform “artness” with flourishes or explanations. It simply stood—vertical, present, claiming space through the clarity of its existence. The right to exist was self-evident in the standing itself.

This is what Truitt’s sculptures do. They model something essential about inherent worth. They represent our right to exist because we were born, and with that existence, the right to be treated with dignity. They don’t earn their space. They don’t justify their presence. They rise from the earth and stand.

And someone pushed one over.

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Two Definitions of Human

What we are experiencing in Minnesota right now—what we are experiencing across this country—is a battle over competing definitions of human.

There is the definition Truitt’s sculptures embody: human as being, as existing, as having inherent worth. The yellow column standing in the corner. No justification needed.

And there is another definition: human as something measured by power. Human as something that must earn its right to placement. Human as us versus them, rather than us together.

When we stop recognizing inherent dignity—when we measure our worth by how much power we have—then the exercise of that power becomes unbridled. Particularly “power over.” The impulse to push things over that simply stand there.

The earth is filled with imaginary lines drawn to divide us from each other, when in truth, we all need each other. We all rise from the same ground. The right to command space—to exist, to have our being, our rights to safety—belongs to all of us.

Standing Things Back Up

Truitt’s sculpture didn’t fight back when someone pushed it over. It just fell. And presumably, it was stood back up. Or it wasn’t. But the act of toppling it only revealed the pusher’s violence, not the sculpture’s lack of right to stand.

What we are protecting right now is not abstract. It is the right to placement. The right to rise. The right to stand like that yellow column—proud, glowing, holding summer in the corner—no justification needed.

We protect this by standing ourselves. By standing things back up when they are pushed over. By insisting on belonging when others insist we don't. By remembering that we all rise from the earth, and that rising is enough.

The right to be human is not something we earn. It is something we are born with. It is something we protect in each other.

And we protect it by refusing to accept any other definition.

I am immensely grateful to and for my fellow Minnesotans right now. May we stand because we stand together.

Love,

Kim

While I waited, I stopped at a coffee shop nearby. A Capitals hockey game was starting shortly. With the entrance to the arena just across the street, the café was filled with red, white, and blue jerseys, hats, and noise.

I made my way out of the café, passing a group of fans chanting USA, and entered the museum with a dozen others, all of us ready to get out of the cold and into the quiet.

A museum volunteer offered guidance as I passed the front desk. I smiled and said thanks. I climbed the staircase and was met by a large group portrait of the first four women justices of the Supreme Court—O’Connor, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan. I stopped there.

The Four Justices, by Nelson Shanks, 2012

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the only one facing forward. The others are turned slightly toward her, their bodies angled in her direction. I noticed how the artist made her the center of attention through orientation and gaze.

Each justice wears a different collar. Ginsburg’s is a circle, a style she wore often—formal, deliberate, almost like a frame for her face.

I’ve drawn Ginsburg a few times myself. Once you’ve drawn someone’s face, you become familiar with its particular lines—the seriousness of the mouth, the unique features. I had to consciously shift my gaze. She was staring so intently at me. I finally let my eyes wander to Sandra Day O’Connor on her left.

I remembered learning her name in second grade, the first female justice, with no one to follow yet. That idea stayed with me. I’ve thought of her often since, especially in rooms where I’ve been the only woman at the table.

It was difficult to leave that portrait.

I moved through several rooms after that—portrait after portrait of men. Suits, uniforms, familiar postures. My pace picked up.

I found my way to 20th Century Americans. I’m often searching for images of women or work by women artists, but I allow myself to mostly be led by what attracts my attention.

The self-portrait by poet e.e. cummings holding a paintbrush called to me. I stopped because of the brush. I didn’t know he painted. A moment of jealousy rose up. Unfiltered, I thought: a famous poet and an artist, with a painting in the National Portrait Gallery. I whispered under my breath, “i carry your heart with me,” as I moved along.

Self-portrait, e.e. cummings, 1958

In the next room was an elegant portrait of a woman in a ballgown. Her expression suggested impatience—are you nearly done—and her relaxed posture seemed at odds with the dress, as if it didn’t belong to her.

I usually pass by portraits like this. Formal. Polished. But the contrast caught my eye. And she was one of only two women in the room.

I learned her name was Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts—my green sash with its patches came briefly to mind. The portrait was painted in 1887, when she was twenty-seven. The dress fit society. The person inside did not.

Juliette Gordon Low, by Edward Hughes, 1887

Without meaning to, I drifted into the gift shop positioned between gallery spaces. The room was brighter and louder. Shelves were packed with books, postcards, mugs, small objects stacked and repeated.

I picked up a small notebook—good paper, nice weight. I turned it over. On the back, in tiny letters: Made in China.

I put it back on the shelf. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for anymore. A postcard of the Four Justices? A t-shirt that displayed my appreciation for the museum. Everything looked the same suddenly.

Someone passed behind me and I stepped aside, still holding nothing.

I didn’t stay long.

I stopped in one of the bathrooms nearby. The walls were beige. The lighting was fluorescent and unforgiving. I washed my hands and looked at myself in the mirror—tired, older than I felt an hour ago in front of the Four Justices.

I thought of the public bathrooms at Minneapolis/St. Paul airport, where color and pattern are built directly into the walls by local artists. Bathrooms that feel like someone thought about who would use them.

I dried my hands on the rough paper towel and left.

I took a break in the courtyard. A few people were there—students working, a family with young children. I overheard a conversation about not needing to stay awake until midnight. Same, I thought.

Photo credit: Zack Frank, Smithsonian American Art Museum

I then went looking for a painting I don’t skip: Rosalind Krauss in the Manner of Degas, 2006.

Her head dominates the center of the canvas, but her face is in profile. Her chin rests on a typewriter. The weight of her body seems to lean into it.

She looks forward. The gaze is steady and determined. Her attention is elsewhere.

Behind her, the background is soft and floral, mimicking a Degas painting. The typewriter is a muted red—duller than fire but insistent. She has things to say.

Rosalind Krauss in the Manner of Degas, by Kathleen Gilje, 2006

In a room full of portraits, Artists on WPA stood out, and I walked straight toward it. Seven people sketching, painting, and posing in a large space yet still intimate.

Art making, supported, shared. A scene from the middle of the Great Depression, and I found myself wanting to step inside it.

Artists on WPA, by Moses Soyer, 1935

I ended my visit in a permanent collection labeled Folk Art and Self-Taught Artists.

There was a major exhibition of eighty-eight pieces by Anna Mary Robertson Moses, titled Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work.

What struck me, beyond the sheer number of works displayed room after room, was her age. She began painting at seventy-eight.

Wasn’t she tired?

Her paintings are rural landscapes filled with small figures and many details. They require good sight, a steady hand, and time. Leaning in close again and again, I tracked the tiny movements of people across fields and hills.

I saw the phrase “self-taught” on the wall label and felt my shoulders tighten before I moved on.

The scenes feel active and inhabited. This was how she saw the world. This was the world she lived in.

She lived until 101.

Grandma Moses Goes to the Big City, by Anna Mary Robertson Moses, 1946

On my way out of the museum, I passed an art supply store and went in without thinking. I bought a bag of scrap paper and a small bottle of glue. I put them in my bag and started walking home. It was cold and windy, and I was hungry—it was three in the afternoon and I hadn’t eaten—so I stopped for a bowl of ramen.

I found a table by the window in the nearly empty restaurant and took out the scrap paper and opened my sketchbook. I tore the paper into shapes and started gluing them down. Face shapes. Angles. Planes. Some pieces stuck out past the edge of the page. Glue covered my fingertips. I wiped it on a napkin.

The waiter passed by and looked at the mess. He smiled and kept walking. I kept tearing paper. The bowl of ramen steamed in front of me. I ate a few bites and glued a few more pieces. The waitstaff was nearby preparing for the big night ahead.

—-

Thank you for joining me.

If you made it this far, consider “liking” so others can find me here.

Love,

Kim

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The space had changed. New color field paintings—and this time, some figure paintings of his.

The current Rothko’s on display were from his later years. Two were from the Harvard murals (1962–63). The subtle sparkle—ground mica?—in the red and black was an earned observation for getting close enough that I was asked to step back. From several feet away, it gave the impression of light dancing.

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Harvard Murals), 1962-1963

The second room was now consumed by The Stations of the Cross by Barnett Newman, a contemporary of Rothko. Fourteen canvases representing the traditional Stations, plus a fifteenth “coda,” Be II, focusing on Jesus’s cry: Why have you forsaken me?

It took him eight years to complete the fifteen-panel series. I wondered what else he was working on during that time. How many paintings were made and not included. Any? What led him to this theme?

I have questions. I want more information.

Barnett Newman, Stations of the Cross, 1958-1966

—

I almost always visit the National Gallery alone. I need the space and freedom to be with the art on my own terms. As much as the idea of sharing the experience sounds appealing, I usually feel pressure—to linger longer, to move too quickly, or to have something meaningful to say.

No, thanks.

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I noticed my ability to notice the artists I’ve grown to love, particularly their lesser-known works. I spotted three Georgia O’Keeffes—not flowers—from across three different rooms. We’ve spent a lot of time together.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Wall with Green Door, 1953

The special exhibit featuring Aboriginal art from Australia, “The Stars We Do Not See”, relied heavily on natural materials—a study in contrast to my own canvas with plastic (acrylic) paint. The paintings on bark intrigued me. What types of bark work well? They used eucalyptus. What is needed to prepare it? What is used for the natural pigments?

I wanted to touch them.

I sat and sketched an installation in my notebook for a half an hour. The crosshatching was addictive. People looking over my shoulder was not.

Nyapanyapa Yunupinu, Gäna (self), 2009-2018 (front and back of wood panels and painted trees). The installation I sketched.

Backsides of the bark panels

—

An O’Keeffe seashell gave me the opportunity to observe the variation in her lines on a spiral and study her work closely. Precisely what I needed. My line work is too even.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Shell No. 1, 1928

—

Henri Matisse, Palm Leaf, Tangier.

I walked into the French wing looking for Matisse. Palm Leaf, Tangier looks free. The color blocks and gestures are doing a lot of work. Nothing here is casual, even if it wants to look that way.

—

The most pressing observation I made was the presence of imperfections in the paintings of artists I admire. Surfaces with unintentional raised areas. Paint nubs I often struggle with—especially when they become more noticeable in my color field studies.

Oh. Color fields.

I saw two Anne Truitts. I gasped. I saw her yellow column from across the room. It was in an exhibit where every work explored yellow. Hers stood apart. Taller. More concentrated. The surface held light differently.

It stood in the corner, proud and glowing. Like a temple built to hold summer.

Anne Truitt, Summer Remembered, 1981

Three hours later, I walked through the underground concourse to the West Gallery. Parents were lined up to take photos of their children in front of the water feature, and the Cascade Café had a line more than twenty people long.

I skipped the cappuccino and headed to the icons of Madonna and Child.

Madonna and Child, 1470, Artist: Follower of the Era Filippo Lippi and Pesellino

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Love,
Kim

And then we begin to judge.
Frustration rises. Anger.
Anxiety sits heavy in the chest.
We want to beat our fists.
We want to shout: How is it possible that this beauty and truth exist and we do not feel it in the leadership?
How did this happen?

Suddenly, the peace we felt moments ago feels so distant—so distant.
We wonder if it was there at all.
Did we make it up?
Did we manufacture it?
Is it real?

So we try to walk forward again and reconnect.

This is the work we have to do
—to be the witnesses and bearers of beauty.

Again, and again, and again.

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Sometimes we need a way to see what’s moving before we can understand it.

Last year I was in that place. An institute agreed to support a large yearlong creative project I had proposed (“The Leadership Voices of Women Mystics” - a visual exploration). I understood it conceptually, but I didn’t yet know how to enter it. It felt important, but I had no map. And I didn’t want to start by thinking too hard or trying to force clarity.

So I used a practice I’ve returned to for years—a warm-up that helps me approach something new without getting too precious about the beginning.

I walked into my intimidatingly cool loft studio in the Art Center—a space that felt both exciting and a little beyond me—and sat down with a simple piece of white paper divided into eight squares. I chose the theme of “my spiritual center” and made eight marks. Lines, forms, shapes. Nothing planned. Nothing precious. I wasn’t trying to figure anything out. I was simply giving myself a way to start.

At the time, I didn’t expect those marks to go anywhere.

But over the past year, every single one of them has resurfaced in my paintings and in the unfolding of the project itself—spirals, rings, branching lines, seed-like forms, patterns of movement and emergence. They were never intended to be a system or a structure, yet they’ve become one of the containers that has held the work all year.

Only in hindsight do I understand that those eight marks gave shape to something I felt intuitively but couldn’t yet articulate.

They offered a way into the project that the rational mind alone couldn’t provide, or may have even prevented.

It helped me see that those earliest movements in us—what we’re drawn toward, what stays with us, what our body and inner voice keep circling back to—often point to what wants to grow long before we can name it.

Practices that help us notice and trust these signals make it possible to move in alignment with what’s already forming inside us.

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If you want to try this yourself - NO ART SKILLS REQUIRED

All you need is a piece of paper and a pen. Divide the page into six or eight squares.

Choose a simple theme that’s present in your life right now. It could be a transition, a question, a desire, something you’re holding, or something you’re entering.

In the first square, make one simple image or mark. Then move through the remaining squares, noticing what comes next. Keep it simple. Don’t try to make meaning.

When you finish, take a moment to notice:

– what shapes appeared more than once

– what you were drawn to

– what surprised you

– how you felt while making them

You may discover that these small marks give you a way to see something that doesn’t yet have language—a direction, an inner movement, a beginning. Also, it can just be fun!

With love,

Kim

The Womb as Creative Force

These questions shape my days lately: What does it mean to be the carrier of a womb that does not carry a baby? How does the creative force inside of her live, express, and give birth?

The womb is not an empty space. It pulses with potential, swelling and releasing, shaping the body’s rhythms. A womb is usually carried for a lifetime. Even for women who give birth, pregnancy marks only a short part of that life. The womb remains, shaping the body and its cycles.

In the course of meeting new women, the question often arises as we search for common ground: Do you have kids? Are you a mother? It reaches toward something profound, life-altering. For women without children, the question can feel like a boundary line between belonging and otherness. But it also gestures toward something deeper: the womb as a seat of creativity itself. Both are true, and both alter the shape of a woman’s life.

Sometimes I answer simply, no. Other times, I say I don’t have children of my own. What I don’t add out loud is what I feel: not that way, not through children, but through another kind of birth.

Embodied Energy

But my womb is not dormant. Its fire must move somewhere, or it will consume me. It does not ask politely. When I resist, my stomach contracts, I grow tight and irritable, and over time heavy and restless. When I allow it, the sensation expands and spirals upward into my heart, then out through my limbs—into my hands and feet—wanting to be released, to move, to take shape.

One afternoon in the studio, I reached a stuck point in a painting. All I had was a theme, an intention, and a few layers on the canvas. But I couldn’t see what came next. Instead of forcing it, I sat down and turned inward, asking: what wants to emerge here? What happened surprised me. I could almost physically feel myself moving inside a tree, my body merging with its trunk as though it were a resting place. The sensation was so real it steadied me. And the image I needed was clear. When I picked up the brush again, the painting unfolded from that vision.

When I paint from my womb—my creative center—the brush knows the way. What comes is not produced but carried. I know it when it arrives: not as something I made, but as something I met. When I create from my head, in get-it-done mode, the work feels forced.

This is how womb-energy lives in me. It is not efficient. It asks for patience, for showing up again and again. And when I answer, vitality follows—a surge of aliveness, even a kind of eros, that enlivens the whole body.

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A New Relationship

For most of my life I thought of the womb as a space waiting for children, or, if not, simply unused, even a burden. Now I’ve chosen to change my relationship with it.

My womb participates in my life every day. It asks me to listen, to carry, to give form. Creativity is not a side project or an optional practice. It is a purpose written into the body itself.

But creation is not only for those with wombs. Whether through children, art, ideas, or relationships, this energy demands form. For me, it has become less about personal fulfillment and more about participating in a wider truth—that life presses forward through us, asking to be honored.

I don’t always know what form it will take. I only know it won’t let me rest.

Thank you for being here. If something in this piece connected with your own story, I’d be grateful if you shared a thought below or passed it along to someone who might appreciate it.

Love, Kim

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Nests keep appearing—in my drawings, in the woods, even as gifts. A synchronicity I can’t ignore.

That image led me to think of my own family. My grandmother, who died long before I was born, once carried me in seed form within my mother. And she herself had been carried by her mother, my great-grandmother—whose name I don’t even know. I was struck by how women carry not only their own lives, but the possibility of lives to come.

This sketchbook entry I made yesterday explores this same sense of spiraling lineage. Circles within circles, seeds inside seeds. It is a reminder that life is not random or disconnected, but an unfolding. What was hidden becomes visible. What was planted finds its season to grow.

This morning, I was reading Julian of Norwich, who writes that our desires come from God, and that their fulfillment is already held within them. Desire, she says, is both the seed and the unfolding at once. That resonated deeply with me.

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To live a life of unfolding is to trust that what is planted in us—our longings, questions, and callings—will open in time, because they are already woven into the fabric of our being. And yet, unfolding is not passive. We are not bystanders. Our choices, our attentiveness, our willingness to respond, shape how that unfolding takes form. It is both inevitable and free, both gift and responsibility.

This image of womb within womb grounds me in that truth. It connects me to a long story of unfolding across generations, but also to the confidence that what unfolds in my own life is not random. It is part of a pattern, part of a promise, already seeded and already held—and still requiring my yes.

Thank you for being here. If something in this piece connected with your own story, I’d be grateful if you shared a thought below or passed it along to someone who might appreciate it.

Love, Kim

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She mentioned it casually, over coffee. “I’ve been clearing out the house,” she said. I pictured cracked Tupperware or old toys from her daycare days. Then, almost as an afterthought: “Oh, and I threw out your baby book.”

“What? Why didn’t you ask me if I wanted it?”

She shrugged. “It’s been sitting there for decades. Honestly, there wasn’t much in it anyway. Yours had less than your sister’s.” (Who is younger, by the way.)

I laughed—half-wounded, half-free.

The official record of my early life, meager as it was, gone with the recycling. No more handwritten notes about first steps, first words, doctor’s visits. No archive of my adorable beginnings. Just me now, drinking coffee with the woman who remembers.

It stung, if I’m honest. Like my history had been tossed away. I wanted to ask, Who gets rid of someone else’s baby book without asking?

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But then it hit me: it wasn’t mine. Not really. It was her book. Her story about her baby. And she gets to let go of it if she wants to. She gets to be a person who isn’t just “Mom,” but someone with her own thresholds, her own clean-outs, her own decisions. Even her motherhood role stands on its own. Of course it does.

I didn’t like how that felt. But something small and irreversible shifted in me.

What else don’t I know about her? About how she’s carried me in her memory? About the stories she’s told herself about being my mother? About being herself?

Maybe the book is gone. But I’m still here. And she’s still here. And there’s still time to ask the questions I didn’t know I needed to ask.

Love you, Sandy!
(That’s my mom. I went through a phase as a kid when I called her by her first name to get her attention.)

If this piece moved something in you, feel free to tap the heart or share it with someone who might appreciate it.

Love, Kim

Where was this coming from? At first, I couldn’t name it. But as I sat with the heaviness in my chest, I realized the thought of going on without them felt like more than I could manage. I didn’t have the usual inner resources I rely on— decision-making, flexibility, courage, an awareness of God’s presence, and a healthy dose of optimism. I felt stripped bare.

My friends must have sensed it. Before they left, they asked two pilgrims we had met to look out for me. And they did. Their companionship carried me through those first lonely miles. This was the beginning of an unsettling realization: for too long I had been surviving on grit, a sense of obligation, and the belief that failure was not an option. Thankfully, I was starting to see the cost — and to admit it wasn’t a way I could keep living.

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Giving It a Name

At that point, I didn’t even have the language of burnout. I only knew I was exhausted – increasingly reactive, judgemental, and cut off from a sense of purpose. It wasn’t until later Caminos, in 2024 and 2025, that I heard the word burnout everywhere, especially from Europeans whose doctors had even prescribed the walk as medicine.

What I came to see is that burnout isn’t only about conditions at work. It’s about alignment—how much of ourselves we hand over to work, and what we neglect in return. For me, other responsibilities pulled from the same reserves, and I had also stopped spending time on what restores me most—painting, writing, the kind of work where I lose track of time. None of these on their own would have left me depleted, but together they kept me running on sheer will longer than was good for me.

Burnout Has a Name in Europe

One Dutch pilgrim I walked with in 2024 told me his story. In the Netherlands, burnout is a diagnosable condition. He had taken a full year off, walked the Camino, and returned to work. But the pace of re-entry was too fast. When we met, he was on a second leave, walking again.

His story surprised and intrigued me not only because he spoke so openly about burnout, but because his country and culture gave him the time and structure to step away, rest, and walk. No stigma. Back home, six weeks away was a hard sell.

Hearing stories like his, I realized that while European systems gave people permission and time, many still turned to the Camino. Which made me wonder: what is it about walking this long, ancient road that heals in ways ordinary rest does not?

The first day of my walk in 2023: nature conspiring for renewal

What Pilgrimage Gives That Rest Alone Cannot

The Camino is not “me time” in the sense of a spa day, nor is it structured guidance like you might receive on a retreat. It doesn’t offer comfort or convenience, and it won’t hand you answers. What it does offer is a simple, honest way of relating to life and to yourself:

A pared-down rhythm. Each day comes down to the basics: wake up, coffee, walk, eat, walk, eat, walk, eat, sleep. The body, not a calendar or obligation, decides the pace.

Spaciousness. Without constant screens or schedules filling your hours, a single morning can consist of a sunrise, 15,000 steps on four different surfaces, coffee on a ridge and a soulful conversation. Days expand not because you do more, but because you notice more.

The intimacy of strangers. Pilgrims share bread, Advil, directions, and sometimes stories you’d never tell at home. Some turn into companions, some you let go of the moment they turn a corner, and a few test your patience. Humanity, in all of its glory and every-day-ness, is present.

The gift of nature. The Camino gives you shade when you’re overheated, big blue skies that make you look up, fields of wildflowers you hadn’t expected, and birdsong that replaces the sound of your phone. Nature doesn’t require anything from you. It just shows up. Reliably.

A life that asks less and gives enough. You leave behind the life you thought you had to maintain and step into one that requires little more than that you keep walking. I always resisted the phrase “In my real life” when walking the Camino. THIS is my real life. At least it is today. Maybe what’s left is simply believing I belong to it.

Not everyone can—or even wants to—fly to Spain and take weeks off to walk. But what the Camino gives—time, rhythm, nature, community—is what all of us need in some form when burnout or even a stressful season takes hold.

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As my system eased, I began to notice small signs of hope.

My Trio of Caminos: Leaving, Letting Go, Beginning Again

Between September 2023 and June 2025 I walked three Caminos. It sounds like a luxury—and in many ways it was— but it came with sacrifice, born of finally admitting the old way wasn’t working. I needed a different path.

2023 was a reckoning. Somewhere between Day 1 in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France, and Day 35 in Finisterre, I admitted that something major had to change. On the table were three possibilities: move away from Washington, D.C., sell my house, or leave my job. All three were calling to me, pointing toward and supporting a more creative, spacious, balanced life. I didn’t know yet which I would do, only that staying the same was no longer possible.

When I returned home, I learned that pilgrimage gives you insight, but life requires implementation. I called my coach, my spiritual director, a financial advisor, and a few trusted friends.

Step by step, I discerned. And in the end, I did all three. I sold the house, left my job, and moved to Minnesota. Even with over a year of discernment, the changes shocked my system. I had chosen to lay down the major parts of my external identity, and the weight of that choice was real. So in 2024, only days after I closed the chapter on my job, I returned to the Camino.

The second walk became a ritual of transition—a place to process the upheaval and to celebrate the leap I had taken, all in the laughter-filled companionship of the Camino crew of four I found along the way

Just seeing their faces here brings me JOY!

Then, nine months later, after immersing myself in my choice to pursue a more creative and contemplative life in the woods of Minnesota, I walked a third Camino.
The decision was partly practical, mostly intuitive. I had to be away from my residency at the Collegeville Institute for the summer, and I wanted something that would continue the work already happening inside me. So I followed the urge to walk again. I didn’t know yet what it would give me, only that I would try to be open to it.

This time the Camino’s invitation was solitude. It became a place to practice staying connected to my inner life. Most of the time while walking I avoided escape mechanisms like listening to podcasts and music, and in doing so, I heard my own internal mental chatter. And let me tell you, that grew tired rather quickly. In time, I found a quieter, gentler space within, which I wrote about more fully in, Where Do You Go to Listen to Yourself?

Each walk gave me what I needed, not always what I wanted. And each confirmed what I had come to suspect: the Camino doesn’t solve burnout. It gives you the conditions to face it.

Still Walking

When my two friends left me in 2023 and I broke down sobbing, I didn’t yet know the word burnout related to me. I only knew I couldn’t keep living the way I had been.

Three Caminos later, what I know is that the road itself doesn’t hand you answers. It gives you time, and it gives you a mirror to look at yourself. It offers companions when you need them, solitude when you don’t, skies and fields and flowers that invite you into the beauty—not just of the world around you, but of the life within you.

I didn’t arrive in Santiago with everything figured out. I arrived still walking. And I suspect I always will.

Not everyone will walk the Camino. But all of us, in our own way, need time, rhythm, nature, and community—because paying attention to ourselves is not a luxury. It is how we stay connected to our own lives.

—

Thank you for reading. This was a vulnerable one to share, even after all I’ve learned about burnout. I hope it offers something useful — and perhaps a bit of courage to share the tender parts of your own story.

Kim

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If you want to explore more of the lessons learned along the way, you might like:“Where Do You Go to Listen to Yourself?” or “How We Walk is How We Live.”

🥾 Walking + Trail Life

Movement

• 1,200 miles walked

• 102,000 feet in elevation gain, give or take a few hundred feet (that’s over 19 vertical miles — or nearly 3.5 times the height of Everest, but thankfully, at a comfortable breathing altitude)

• 63,184 — most steps walked in a day

• 328,758 — most steps walked in a week

• 1,263,031 — most steps walked in a month

• 4 days I walked at least a marathon

• 1 rest day (do not recommend)

Trail life

• 66 days on the trail

• 66 beds slept in (mostly plastic)

• ~120 hours walking with no one else in sight (wanted to love this… often felt uneasy)

• 60+ missed trail markers (about one per day)

• 0 times I got lost and didn’t mind

• 2 pairs of sneakers, walked till their death

• 1 blister (a minor miracle)

• 1 day I almost quit

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🧭 Navigation

• 8 times I walked at least a half mile in the wrong direction

• 2 trail markers missed because I was staring at cows (twice? yep)

• !!! times Google Maps lied to me

  

🧍 Human Encounters

• Hundreds of fellow pilgrims met from ~30 countries — mostly European.

• Further afield (but many in number): Canada, US, Australia, South Korea

• At least one pilgrim from: Uruguay, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Japan, South Africa

• Countless times I tried (and failed) to remember someone’s name five minutes after they said it (with maybe a few handsome exceptions)

• 66+ trail angels who gave me food, water, directions, or grace (about one per day)

• 5 evenings when a fellow pilgrim pulled out a guitar and led a sing-along

🏞️ Nature & Landscape

• 6 days of rain

• 3 sunrises caught on the trail (sun rose around 5 a.m., so… that wasn’t happening often)

• 6 mountain ranges crossed: Velay Mountains, Margeride Plateau, Aubrac Plateau, Pyrenees (crossing to Spain), Cantabrian Mountains, Picos de Europa

• Dozens of breathtaking beaches in Spain

• A few scary cliffs

• Daily forests or wooded areas walked through

• Hundreds of wildflowers and notable plants spotted (including wild orchids)

• Dozens of storybook villages and vineyards

• 1 day walking on a plateau in a storm with metal hiking poles and nearby lightning (not fun)

• 3 sketchy tunnels (fingers-crossed moments)

⛪ Pilgrim Rituals + Customs

• 80 stamps collected in my pilgrim credential (limited to places I slept and churches)

• 7 pilgrim blessings received

• 60+ communal dinners

• Daily church bells, always appreciated

• 1000s of “Buen Caminos” uttered

🧃 Food + Drink

• 132 café con leches consumed (give or take… mostly give)

• 180+ pears, apples, and flat peaches eaten on the go (at least one of each per day)

• 30 Spanish tortillas

• 40 croissants (lie)

• 15 liters of wine consumed (because wine is cheaper than water in Spain :)

• 1 celebratory beer at the end of each day (many N/A, but also many not)

• Always found in my pack: a baguette, a bar of chocolate, nuts, a nub of cheese, and an emergency can of tuna

• Green vegetables? Hahahaha. Good luck.

• 1 celebratory tarta de Santiago in Santiago, shared with a pilgrim friend, of course

Trail lunch

🛏️ Sleep + Shelter

• 56 nights in albergues or gîtes

• 7 nights in monasteries (the best)

• 2 nights in hotels

• 1 night in a yurt (LOVED)

• 3 freezing cold showers (may be choosing to forget some)

• 8 nights without medical-condition-level snoring within earshot

  

  Proof of the plastic beds

🧳 Gear & Logistics

• 15 pounds carried at the start of the Camino (not including food or water)

• 10 pounds by the end

• 15 minutes to pack my bag on Day 1

• 5 minutes to pack it on Day 66

• 12 audiobooks downloaded, 1 actually listened to

Final weeks: pack was light, steps were easier, socks still always drying on top.

🩺 Health & Body

• 1 massage

• 12 trips to the pharmacy for Compeed, Advil, earplugs, melatonin, etc.

• 15 minutes spent stretching each day in the first two weeks

• 1 minute spent stretching each day after the first two weeks

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HEY! If you made it this far and you’re still with me—or even kind of enjoyed this—how about clicking that little heart below? 💛
It lets me know what’s resonating and helps others find me too.

💶 Breakdown of Expenses (approximate, in Euros)

Total for 10-week trip: €5800

• 45% Food + Drink

• 25% Lodging

• 10% Transport (partially funded by miles)

• 10% Pharmacy, insurance, fees, other sundries

• 10% Gear (including a new pack and 2 pairs of trail shoes)

Views: always free

Updated Packing List

In an early Camino post, I shared my carefully edited packing list. Here it updated with what made it home, what didn’t, and what I added along the way.

Sleep Kit

✅ Thin cotton/silk sleep sack

✅ MusiCozy sleep mask

✅ Melatonin

➕ Earplugs

Electronics

✅ Extra fast charger + European adapter

✅ Phone

✅ Backup battery

✅ Headphones

Toiletries

✅ Clean teeth

✅ Clean hair stuff

✅ Tweezers, nail clippers, tiny scissors

❌ Face cream (ran out and went without)

❌ Dark eye concealer + tinted chapstick (still made me feel human)

❌ Laundry soap bar (lost and started using shampoo)

First Aid

✅ Advil, magnesium

✅ Sunscreen

✅Compeed

❌ Allergy pills, arnica, .emon balm, antibiotic cream, tape

Clothes

✅ 2 tank tops

✅ 2 bras, 3 underwear, 2 pairs of toe socks

✅ Zipper hoodie, rain jacket, rain skirt

✅ Black yoga leggings

➕ Shorts

➕New hat

❌ 2 shirts (downsized to 1)

❌ 2 hiking pants

❌ Baseball cap (lost) + warm hat

❌ Fun neck scarves

❌ Puffer jacket (sent home)

Shoes

✅ Trail runners (replaced once mid-Camino)

✅ Waterproof sandals 

Packing Gear

✅ 25L Gregory Maya

✅ 1L Nalgene bottle

✅ Camping mug with lid

✅ Color-coded dry bags

❌ Gregory front pack / bum bag 

Other

✅ Linen scarf (MVP: towel, pillow, wrap, shade)

✅ Bungee cords for drying laundry

✅ Hiking poles

➕ A tiny shell gifted by a child on the trail, carried all the way home

❌ Paint kit 

Essentials

✅ Passport, insurance cards, money

✅ Cloth hanky

These numbers reflect the practicalities that shaped each day. But there’s more to unpack: what this journey cost me beyond money and sore feet, and what I’m taking home in my heart and mind. And of course, what I’m leaving behind.

More to come in the week ahead 💛

Thank you for reading along. It’s a gift to me!

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Rioja, Spain

A few days ago on the Camino del Norte, one of those moments found me.

I was walking alone, thinking about Pilgrim, the poetry collection by David Whyte. It’s one of those books that has lived on my bedside table for years. I remembered that he wrote it after his niece walked the Camino, and I found myself wondering—after nearly two months of walking—how he could so intimately and accurately capture this experience without having done it himself.

Where must a poet go, inwardly, to write something that true? What kind of inner life must he cultivate to speak so precisely to the pilgrim’s journey?

David Whyte is one of those writers whose language seems to listen to you as much as you listen to it. His work lives in my mind and heart alongside that of his friend, the late John O’Donohue. From what I understand of their writing, both come from the same lineage of poet-mystics—people who don’t just observe life but enter it. Their words reflect a profound trust in the inner world and how it shapes our outer one.

But that morning, I wasn’t feeling poetic.

I had been walking for nearly two months, and the truth is, I was starting to feel disconnected from the Camino. Most of the friends I had made were behind me, or had gone home, or taken other routes. The daily rhythm—sleeping in crowded albergues with twenty others snoring, not quite hot showers, plastic beds with paper sheets—had begun to wear thin.

I said to a fellow pilgrim that day, “I’m not sure the path has anything more for me.” I wasn’t ready to quit, but I also wasn’t sure why I was still here. So I made an agreement with myself: I’d walk just one more day and see how I felt by evening.

And then, I saw it.

A handmade sign nailed to a post along the path. It read: Anam Cara.

I stopped walking.

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Anam Cara, of course, is the phrase O’Donohue gave the world in his book by the same name. It means “soul friend” in Gaelic, but more than that, it points to a sacred kind of intimacy—an encounter that transforms both people, where the soul is seen.

But it wasn’t just the words that stopped me. It was the timing. I had just been inwardly sitting with the spirit of these two poets, letting their work guide my reflections. I was in conversation with something deeper, listening without expectation. And the world answered back—with wood and paint and a message I didn’t even know I was waiting for.

Carl Jung might have called this synchronicity: a moment of inner and outer alignment that lands like poetry. Not caused by me, but somehow connected to me. An affirmation that the soul is still near.

The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich once wrote, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” She wasn’t offering a platitude. She was speaking from attunement to mystery. Like Jung, she trusted that soul reveals itself not only in visions or dreams, but in the world around us.

Here’s what I’m learning through long walks and signs:

The unconscious isn’t a shadowy part of us we need to fix or control. It’s more like a hidden well waiting to be drawn from. It speaks in symbols, images, dreams—even roadside signs—if we’re paying attention.

So I stood there for a while, looking at the sign. And it felt less like I had found it, and more like it had found me. As if the soul, or the Self, or whatever we want to call that deeper intelligence, had left a breadcrumb. Just enough to say:

This path still has something for you.

For Reflection

Have you ever felt ready to give up, only to be met by something that changed your mind?

What’s your version of a roadside Anam Cara?

And I did. I got the bed.

But I missed something else.

I enjoyed the day, but I condensed it—squeezed its fullness into a smaller container. I moved through the hours like someone trying to fit all experience into too little time. I was there, technically present, but it was a kind of presence reduced by low-grade anxiety. I was still caught in a pattern of rushing toward the next thing.

And isn’t that how we so often live? For me, it’s the lesson that won’t leave me.

Spanish pintxos and a 0.0 cerveza.

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The Allure of Forward Motion

The reminder to stay present is everywhere these days. It’s quoted, printed on mugs, tattooed. “Be here now.” “Stay in the moment.”

But in practice, it’s not so simple.

We treat presence like a momentary choice. Take a deep breath, a pause, a glance up from our phones. But in my experience, it’s something else. Something harder.

Presence isn’t a single act. It’s a practice that asks us to return, again and again, to what’s directly in front of us.

It’s not a switch to flip, but a muscle to build. And like any muscle, it requires training. Attention. Humility. Repetition.

It’s a practice I’ve been faced with, step by step, on this two month walk.

I’m currently walking over a thousand miles on the Camino de Santiago. Each day begins the same: wake up, pack my bag, find coffee (please), and head our the door. While I hope to enjoy the day, there can also be an underlying pressure to reach the next destination before the beds run out, especially the coveted bottom bunks.

But here, the metaphor becomes reality.

How I walk is how I live.

Busted! Walking a ridge in northern Spain with my face in my phone.

Attunement in Difficulty

The hardest part of any day on the Camino are the climbs.

It’s tempting to look up toward the top and wish it were over. But something changes when I stop trying to fast-forward. When I stop fighting the incline and stay with the step I’m in.

I begin to notice how strong I feel. How alive I am.

It’s exhilarating to realize that my own body can carry me up 5000 feet of elevation with a pack on my back. And then I find that I still have more to give. Determination kicks in. And there’s a kind of clarity that shows up when things are hard.

I think this is true far beyond the Camino: in difficulty, we find parts of ourselves that remain hidden when life is smooth.

Climbing the Pyrenees: crossing from France to Spain.

When Strength Becomes a Liability

But there’s irony here.

Sometimes it’s my strength that causes me to miss the moment.

My pace can be fast. I can power through hills without much effort. I’ve learned to push mentally, emotionally, physically, and for much of my life, that’s served me.

But it also means I can override what I don’t want to feel. I can charge ahead when what I need is to pause.

Years ago, in a leadership program, I kept getting the same feedback: You move too fast. You talk fast. You leave people behind.

I remember asking one of the master teachers, “What’s wrong with going at a pace that feels natural to me?”

She paused, then said:

“Nothing’s wrong with it if you’re not ready to change. But you’ll only be able to receive what can be received at that speed.”

At the time, I thought I was slowing down for others. Now I understand: I need it for myself. When I move too fast, I leave myself behind.

Walking With, Not Past

There’s another kind of presence we don’t talk about as much: presence to suffering. This isn’t just our own suffering, but the pain of others.

When we become secure—financially, socially, professionally—it’s easier to avoid what makes us uncomfortable. The person sleeping on the street. The friend who’s struggling. The stranger whose need we quietly judge, imagining it could’ve been prevented.

Letting their humanity in means confronting the truth: the difference between us is often just a few fragile layers of support. The kind of support that caught us in our worst seasons, but may not have caught them.

We tell ourselves we’re being independent, but often we’re just avoiding. Avoiding vulnerability that we cover it with platitudes. Avoiding closeness that we try to fix what can’t be fixed. Avoiding the feeling of needing anyone at all. We say, “It’s hard for me to ask for help,” as if it’s humility, when so often, it’s pride in disguise.

A fellow pilgrim carrying my pack after I overheated on the trail.

The Real Reason We Walk

This, I think, is part of what draws so many Americans, especially those of us from places of abundance, to the Camino.

We want to feel again. We want to struggle, as long as it’s in a controlled way. We want to remember our need, our resilience, our humanity.

And we want to do it without the need for performance.

The Camino strips things down. You start to feel awe again for small things: water when you’re thirsty, shade when you’re overheating, an encouraging word when you’re flagging.

What begins as noticing becomes something closer to reverence. We are able to recognize that something is being offered. That beauty is steady beneath all our striving.

Pausing to rest and appreciate the view along the Camino del Norte.

What I’m Practicing

Presence is hard for those of us shaped by achievement because presence can’t be accomplished.

It can’t be checked off or optimized. It doesn’t offer a gold star.

It asks us to stay open to longing without grasping for outcomes.

To stay rooted in the present without becoming indifferent to the future.

To hold memory without being trapped by it.

We don’t need more strategy. We need more capacity.

Not more control; but more contact with what’s in front of us: a blister that needs tending, a story that asks for real listening, the sound of your own feet on gravel.

A stunning lunch stop in Cantabria, Spain—found because I slowed down and stepped off the path.

Building the Muscle

Presence doesn’t just happen. It’s built through consistency.

For me, it starts with little returns:

Realizing (yet again) that I’ve been holding my breath, and then choosing to come back to it.

Focusing on my surrounding when I notice I’ve drifted into my head and left my body behind.

Letting a feeling last a few seconds longer than I want it to.

Sometimes it means putting down the phone. Or the plan. Or the pressure to be useful.

Like any muscle, presence grows through repetition.

We get better not by getting it right, but by coming back.

What Presence Makes Possible

In a world filled with distraction, division, and speed, presence becomes a form of resistance.

It cultivates:

• The courage to stay with complexity instead of hardening into certainty.

• The willingness to feel discomfort without shutting down.

• The capacity to remain in relationship, even when we don’t share the same politics.

Presence trains us to observe before we judge, to listen before we defend, and to respond rather than react. These aren’t minor skills. On a good day, I might hit one out of three.

At the end of the day on the Camino, my body remembers what my mind tends to forget:

You can’t think your way to connection.

You have to walk your way there.

Step by step.

This is what I’m learning: how we walk is how we live.

And I want to walk in a way that lets me receive what’s being offered—even, and especially, if it means stopping for a beer.

Walking the Camino, I find myself telling the same story over and over again: where I’m from, what I do, what brought me here. These introductions are brief but frequent — a kind of pilgrimage shorthand. You meet someone on the trail, exchange a few details, and then either drift apart or fall into step for a few miles, maybe even days. Over time, a rhythm emerges. So does a pattern.

My shorthand has become: “I’m making a major change in my life.” I say that the Camino helped me find courage and clarity last year. That since then, I left my job, sold my house, moved states, and turned toward my art. All of that is true, and it’s also the kind of story people on the Camino love. I know my audience.

Somewhere on the GR-65, France

But there’s more. Part of why I’m here is to listen for what’s now emerging. The story is still being written. And in the braver moments, I find myself admitting: I’m scared. I sometimes feel untethered. And yet, I also feel alive in a way I haven’t in years.

Who Are We When We Speak of Ourselves?

Every time we introduce ourselves, we’re choosing a frame. Even if we’re not aware of it, we’re deciding: This is what matters. This is the most relevant or acceptable or compelling part of me. And that frame often reflects what we believe gives us value.

I’ve noticed myself mentioning work I’ve done that I know sounds important or impressive. Even as I’m saying it, something in me recoils. It feels slimy. Like I’m trying to grab hold of something shiny to distract from the ground shifting underneath me.

Why do we do this? To be accepted? To convince ourselves we still matter? To feel connection, accomplishment, identity? Maybe all of those. We reach for the versions of ourselves that we hope will win us entry, respect, worth. The ones we believe, or want to believe, about ourselves. I’m trying now to have fewer of these conversations — the ones that slide across the surface because they’re polished, but only partially true.

What Do We Share When We Want to Be Known?

When there’s more space, time and with it, trust, different kinds of stories arise. I find myself leaning toward spiritual questions, creative expression, fears, dreams. Things that don’t resolve quickly, but invite engagement and and ease.

I recently met someone like this — someone who felt spacious from the start. He had depth, introspection, curiosity, generosity. A wide field around him that wasn’t “set,” but open terrain to explore. We didn’t need to define or defend ourselves. We just started walking, talking, sensing.

In these kinds of spaces, availability shows up. I stop narrating and start inhabiting. I feel myself being revealed — not because I’m explaining who I am, but because the way we’re being together reflects it. It’s a knowing that happens not in the head, but in the field.

Exploring the experience of this kind of encounter in my journal through intuitive drawing.

What Is the “True Self,” Really?

We often speak about “who we really are, but many of us don’t know what that means. We confuse it with our preferences, our politics, our cultural identity, our Enneagram type, our tastes. These aren’t meaningless. But they are not the whole, not the center. They’re like the shell of something living. They can hold us, but they can’t define us.

The contemplative tradition calls this the difference between the false self — the one we construct, defend, present — and the true self — the one we discover through presence and surrender. It’s not something we earn; it’s something we return to.

Sometimes I experience this when I’m walking alone on the trail, or letting an image emerge from the end of my pen or paint brush that wasn’t planned. There, I don’t need to explain myself. I’m not curating or editing. I’m just with what is, and it feels truer than anything I could say out loud.

Learning to Tell Truer Stories

I don’t always know how to speak from this place. It rarely shows up in the first five minutes of conversation. But when it does, when I risk saying something that isn’t strategic or impressive or perfectly formed, something shifts. The space softens. A connection forms. It doesn’t happen every time, but when it does, well, I like it. A lot.

There’s a difference between being interesting and being known. One is performative. The other opens a world of possibilities.

The March of the Pilgrims. Many new encounters each day. (Rioja region, Spain)

Pilgrimage as Witness

Perhaps this is one of the gifts of pilgrimage: not just to move through landscapes, but to let something inside us shift. To release the grip on the stories we tell. To witness the ones others are telling.

We walk alongside strangers not just to share the path, but to listen for the moment when we’re touched or surprised by a new encounter with ourselves .

We are always, in some way, telling the story of who we are becoming.

My prayer, my pilgrim’s practice:

May I tell it slowly.

May I tell it true.

Questions for contemplation:

1. What story do I find myself telling when I meet someone new? What does it reveal about what I value — or what I fear?

2. If I set aside what I do, where I’m from, and who I’m connected to… how would I begin to speak about who I am?

In the early days of this Camino, when the trail was busier, I sometimes chatted with fellow pilgrims if they spoke English or Spanish. But even then, after fifteen minutes or so, something in me would shift—not from rejecting the other person, but from a subtle inward pull.

Before coming to France, I wrestled with this possibility. I searched English-speaking Camino forums, looking for someone to assure me this pilgrimage would mirror the more communal experiences of my past ones.

But deep down, I already knew.

This path I chose would be about solitude. And I resisted that. Not because I fear solitude, but because I didn’t want to give up the version of the Camino I knew from past experiences.

Three weeks in, I surrendered. And in that surrender, I’ve found something new.

Solitude as a Cave

Solitude, I’m learning, is a cave. A cave I want to enter.

At first, stepping into it, you’re still part of the world behind you, where the sun shines warm, voices are within earshot, and familiar ways of seeing bring comfort.

There’s a push and pull: stay on the edge of the light and familiarity, or move deeper into the unknown?

When you enter, the cave feels like darkness. Your eyes haven’t adjusted. But if you stay, if you keep walking, your way of seeing begins to change.

You start to see with something other than your eyes.

You hear the wind in the leaves, the distinct calls of different birds (but don’t ask me to name them), the rhythm of your own breath. You notice the scent of spring flowers, the earthiness of dewy grass in the morning, the relief of cool water on your tongue after a demanding vertical climb.

And your inner senses begin to sharpen too:

• The ear that listens inwardly—what the Rule of Benedict calls “the ear of the heart”

• The eye that notices what isn’t visible at first glance

• The heart that recognizes old emotions you’ve been carrying for miles, like extra weight in your pack

Solitude doesn’t just make things quiet.

It makes them available.

A cave in the Célé Valley, France

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Walking with What Arises

What I’ve begun to notice is that the emotions that arise on this walk are rarely new.

Take the shared dinners in French gîtes. They often last two or even three hours. I don’t speak enough French to follow the conversation. I sit quietly, politely. After a while, I begin to feel trapped. I know it would be rude to leave, yet I often want to. I go to bed exhausted not just from walking, but from containing myself.

And then in the morning, while walking, I replay the evening and feel it again: that familiar, claustrophobic sense of being trapped.

But now, something else is happening.

Instead of pushing the feeling away, I walk with it. And as I do, I begin to remember other times in my life I’ve felt this way. I see how I have a storied history with this emotion and how it’s shaped choices I’ve made.

And I also see: while the circumstances may have been real, my relationship to that emotion—and to myself inside of it—can change.

• I can stay.

• I can listen.

• I can soften.

• I can notice the smell of the food and the pace of conversation, even if I don’t understand the words.

The feeling doesn’t have to overtake me. It can become something I walk beside.

Dinner at the gîte in Campuac, France

The Fire in the Cave

This is what I mean when I say the cave becomes a place of aliveness. It’s not just about peace or insight. It’s about a heightened sensitivity to life as it is, in all its color and texture.

And then something else comes: I begin to sense what lives even further inside the cave. Not just emotions or awareness, but something essential. Something life-giving.

There is a fire in the cave.

It’s not the fire of ambition or being seen. It’s not even the fire of clarity. It’s smaller than that. But it’s warm. And steady. It gives light freely.

This fire lives close to the core of who I am. It animates me. And for the past few years before my sabbatical, I’d lost touch with it. I woke in the mornings lacking a sense of purpose for the day ahead.

But here, without distraction, I feel its warmth again.

I begin to trust it.

I begin to remember.

Cathedral in Eauze, France

The Reservoir and the Valley

Nearby, there is also a reservoir.

Cool. Silent. Still.

A place that invites presence. Not something that pushes me forward, but something that lets me rest. It is deep knowing. A calm confidence that I am where I need to be, even when fear arises. A source that doesn’t need to be earned or proven. Only accessed.

I used to think strength had to be cultivated through training and striving. Now I just think this a little less often.

But I believe this kind of strength has always been here. I just didn’t consistently know how to find it. Or maybe I didn’t yet have the courage to walk far enough into the cave for it to show itself to me.

Lac du Brousseau in southwest France

And finally, there is an inner landscape I’ve known for years.

A personal sanctuary I can enter, no matter my surroundings. It’s a quiet valley filled with wildflowers, large oak trees, and butterflies that dance through the air (think Colorado in the springtime). A place of peace, listening, and reflection. I discovered it about a decade ago, and it’s become a refuge in the noise of life.

What Solitude Offers

These inner landscapes—the fire, the reservoir, the valley—aren’t always present in my awareness. But in solitude, they return. And when they do, they guide me back to what is most true.

In solitude, I find the space to listen, to feel, to simply be.

It’s not about escaping the world, but about returning to myself.

And when I do, something shifts. The day opens up. Time stretches. I move more slowly. I notice more. Even the smallest tasks take on significance. I stop worrying about how I’m perceived.

The Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila once wrote:

“It is foolish to think we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves.”

I’m beginning to understand what she meant.

The more rooted I am in myself, the more alive the world feels around me.

This is what I came here for: not answers, but a way to enter myself, to know myself better.

(I’m happy to say that I already knew I loved croissants.)

Of course, not everyone has the space or privilege to walk for weeks through the countryside to find this kind of solitude. I know what it’s like to live a life where even an hour of quiet feels impossible to come by. But I don’t think solitude is only found in silence or distance. Sometimes it lives in the pause before you respond, in a cup of tea before the house wakes up, in a walk around the block with your phone left behind. Even small openings can become thresholds into the deeper cave. And what lives there—your fire, your stillness, your sense of self—is available, even in brief encounters.

For Your Own Contemplation

If you’re feeling stretched thin, uncertain, or disconnected, I offer these questions can for reflection:

• What do you need to let go of to enter solitude? What permission do you need to give yourself?

• When have you felt most connected to your inner fire, your deep well, your place of peace?

• Can you name the landscapes where you return to yourself?

• What helps you remember who you are when the noise of the world falls away?

Church ruins in Flamarens, France