I often say that my walkabouts are the travel that best defines me. It is the most intimate way for me to know a country and learn of different cultures. My heart rejoiced in knowing I would return to the Chemin once more.
This walk was special in so many ways. The Via Podiensis does not ask you where you are going. It does not demand answers or plans. Instead, it holds its silence, inviting you to step into its quiet unfolding, to feel the hum of its hidden language beneath your feet-the footsteps of thousands before you.
This is not simply a journey of distance, but of depth.
When we first set out from Le Puy-en-Velay, we carried our maps, our plans, and our expectations. This would be our first time walking in France, and we knew we had much to learn. We knew, more or less, where we were going. We imagined the villages we would pass through, the landscapes we would cross, and the miles ahead. But the Camino has its own ideas about journeys. It gently reminds us that what we plan is not always what matters most.
As Joseph Roux, the nineteenth-century French clergyman, poet, and Occitan philologist, wrote:
“Aimer savoir est humain, savoir aimer est divin.”
To love knowledge is human; to know love is divine.
How eager we are to fill the empty spaces with certainties, to hold the world tightly in our grasp, naming it, understanding it, believing we can somehow master it. Yet knowledge, for all its allure, leaves us standing at the edge of something vast and unnameable.
The Camino waits at that edge.
It does not argue with the mind’s need to prepare or understand. Instead, it opens the door to something larger: a deeper kind of knowing.
To know how to love is divine. It is the slow untangling of the threads we have tied too tightly. It is the courage to let the rain fall, to meet the steep climb without bargaining for an easier way, and to encounter each stranger not as a question to be answered, but as a mystery to be cherished.
Love is not an answer; it is a practice. And on the Camino, it becomes the practice of walking: step after step, breath after breath, the simple act of showing up to the moment as it is.
Our last pilgrimage did not unfold as we had imagined. Life, with its own demands and sorrows, called us away. Tom’s brother Bob became ill, and later passed away. We left the path and returned home, carrying with us the unfinished miles and the weight of a family loss.
Perhaps that, too, is part of the pilgrimage. We cannot always choose the road ahead, nor can we know what awaits around the next bend. Sometimes the most important journey is the one that takes us away from the path we had chosen, only to return to it changed.
And yet, the Camino remained.
This year, we will return to France to walk the final 300 miles, picking up the thread where we left it. We will carry with us not only the memories of our first journey, but also the knowledge that time is precious, that plans are fragile, and that love is measured in ways that have little to do with distance.
The Via Podiensis will lead us once more through the villages and landscapes of rural France; we have chosen to walk the Cele Variant, where the sky feels closer to the earth and time seems looser in our hands. It will offer the laughter of strangers over shared meals, the kindness of fellow pilgrims, and perhaps a stillness so rich it meets our souls.
We begin again with a destination in mind, but perhaps with less need to reach it. We have learned that the Camino is not something to conquer, but something to receive.
The path whispers: Let the world surprise you. Let the beauty you cannot name astonish you. Trust that love does not come through what you hold onto, but through what you let go of.
And as we walk those remaining miles, we may discover that the journey was never really about completing a route across France. It was about learning to be present, to accept what life brings, to cherish those who walk beside us, and to understand that some journeys continue long after we have stopped walking.
We will resume in Figeac, France, and hope to walk to the St Jean de Pied Port, the starting point of our first pilgrimage so many years ago.
We shall see.
You are loved…
