How did I come to plan a pilgrimage that will take me from the edge of France through Spain, some 500 miles, to Santiago de Compostela?
It started with a ‘ping’, an intuitive nudge, that came while I was reading The Salt Path. A beautiful story of a couple’s walk along the Southwest Coast Path in England during a time of great hardship. When things fell apart, they decided to walk. Even with health issues, even with barely any money, even with no plan for what would come next. There is such beautiful simplicity in this. The simplicity of days spent in a sort of walking meditation, nothing else to do but eat and sleep, spoke to me because I was really struggling with how to move myself forward. After losing my first and only pregnancy at the end of last year, I have been in a state of limbo. Grief does that to us. It causes the floor to drop out of our lives and we are left standing in what can feel like an abyss. Not sure where to turn, because our basic instinct is to avoid any more future pain.
Life is fucking hard. It is also beautiful and so many other things, but sometimes it just feels too fucking hard. And this is one of those times. When all the years of dealing with an autoimmune disorder, and a herniated disk, and infertility just amount to enough is enough. So, what’s next? What do we do when we want to throw in the towel and tap out? Well, I for one spent some months watching Netflix as a wet lump on the couch. This was all I could do, and frankly that’s more than ok. I didn’t drown my sorrows in drugs and alcohol. I just lay there waiting to see if a day would come around when living felt like a thing that I’d like to participate in rather than a thing that is just happening to me.
So, when I got the ping to walk the Camino it was the first time I had felt any spark of light in the darkness. The inner or intuitive voice is always a part of us. It doesn’t go away just because our heart feels broken. Somewhere deep inside it keeps the light on and it speaks softly to us. It whispers to take a walk and feel the wind and sun, to pick up that book and feel the glimmer of inspiration, to take out your paints and spill all your feelings out onto the page. That voice, that light, slowly and gently guides us back.
The Universe, our guides and Spirit, they send us messages, lifelines when things get hard. Maybe we can’t hear or see them at first, it may take time. But when we do, it’s up to us to grab ahold. Only we can decide to act or to not. On my better days I believe that nothing that is for us will pass us by, it may just take a while to come back around. It may take a while to be ready to finally receive it.
As for walking the Camino del Norte to Santiago, I have no ideas what this journey will bring. If we are all the hero or heroines of our own lives, then this is my heroine’s journey. It may not be the path I would choose, but it’s the path I am given and it’s mine to follow to its end. It is only by following our own path that we can really come to know our true self, and hopefully, find our way home.
Thank you for reading and following along! I will be posting more about my day to day journey on Instagram starting June 6th, and if you feel called to support my pilgrimage you can do so in a few ways:
- leave a comment below, I’d love to hear from you!
- purchase a piece of art, all proceeds go towards the Camino.
- make a donation via Venmo: @Vale-Burns or PayPal: @valeburns