A week ago a stranger sent me a message about my luggage.
I had mentioned that I am having my bag transferred between hotels. He wanted me to know that his seventy-year-old mother carried her own pack the whole way from St. Jean to Santiago, and that I did not need luggage transport.
Then he added the part I have not stopped thinking about.
If you do not suffer at all, it will not mean anything when you get there.
I answered him without pausing, which surprised me, because pausing before I speak has been the pattern of my entire life.
It will. I have done my share of hikes carrying weight. This journey is more about releasing what was never mine to carry.
I did not plan that sentence. It came out because it is the truest thing I know right now.
But here is what I have to be honest about, because this whole series is supposed to be honest.
That message made me quieter.
I have been hesitant to post about this trip since. Not devastated. Not crying about it. Just a little smaller, a little more careful, a little more inclined to leave things out so nobody has an opening.
One stranger, one message, and I started editing myself.
I am eighteen days from walking across a country to find my voice, and a man I have never met made me lower it.
So here is my route, all of it
I fly into Bilbao on August 18 and start on the Camino del Norte, along the coast.
Most of that section I am riding an e-bike. San Sebastián down through Basque Country, past Gernika, through Bilbao, along the Cantabrian coast, into Asturias.
One day, between Llanes and Nueva de Llanes, I am on horseback.
Then a driver takes me from Oviedo down to Sarria, and I walk the final hundred kilometers into Santiago on foot, on the Camino Francés.
After that, Fisterra. The coast. The place medieval pilgrims believed was the end of the world.
Thirty-one days. Three ways of traveling. Two routes. One square.
I did not pick this to be clever. I picked it because I have lupus, interstitial cystitis, and fibromyalgia, and because I have already spent years proving I can carry things.
The truth is the route chose me more than I chose it.
What I actually cannot choose
Here is the thing I keep circling.
You can argue with me about a bicycle. Fine. Some people will, and I have decided to survive it.
But there are things in my life I do not get to choose at all, and no route across Spain is going to change them.
I do not get to speak to my older daughter.
And I barely speak to my own mother.
One woman, sitting in both chairs.
There is no villain in that sentence. I want to be very clear about that, because I know how these things get read.
I love my mom. I am grateful to her for everything she has ever done for me. She chose to have me when she did not have to, and I do not take that lightly and I never have.
What happened is quieter than a falling out. There was a certain dynamic between us for most of my life, and when I stopped people-pleasing, when I started building boundaries, when I stopped showing up for the drama and the chaos and the gossip, it disrupted the foundation the whole thing had been standing on.
Nobody warns you about that. Everyone talks about how healthy it is to set boundaries. Almost nobody talks about how hard it is to turn an unhealthy relationship into a healthy one, or about what happens when only one person is trying to.
And with my daughter, I own my heartbreak. My grief. My part.
I can also acknowledge that it is not easy on her either. None of us chose this. It is years of things handed down through a family, and the fact that I can name the pattern does not mean I can stop it.
I cannot fix it. She probably cannot fix it. Only God can move in that.
Acknowledge, surrender, emerge
So a man tells me my journey will not count unless I suffer.
And I am walking toward a country carrying a relationship I cannot repair, in a body that has its own terms, on a route I built around both of those facts.
Those turn out to be the same lesson.
Acknowledgment is saying it plainly. This is my route. This is my body. This is a relationship I do not get to fix.
Surrender is putting down the outcome I was never going to control, and putting down the standard somebody else set for me.
And what is left after those two is not a lesser version of the journey.
It is just me. Which is the only person who was ever supposed to be walking it.
The heart of the Camino belongs to the heart of the person.
The Camino does not call everyone to a forty-five pound pack.
It does not call everyone to five hundred miles, or to a hostel bunk, or to blisters as proof of purchase.
Every journey is going to look different. That does not mean it does not count.
And disqualifying someone in the comments of a blog or a video is not what this road is about. It is close to the exact opposite of what it is about.
Why can we not meet a person with compassion? Every one of us choosing something different should still be celebrated for choosing at all.
Camino History
There is not one Camino. There are many.
The Camino Francés is the famous one, running roughly five hundred miles from the French Pyrenees across northern Spain. It has the most infrastructure, the most pilgrims, and the most company. It is the one in the films.
The Camino del Norte follows the northern coast through Basque Country, Cantabria, and Asturias. It is harder. More climbing, fewer people, less infrastructure, and long stretches where you will not see another soul for hours. It also gives you the sea.
The Camino Primitivo is the oldest of them all, the original route walked by King Alfonso II in the ninth century when he traveled from Oviedo to see the newly discovered tomb. It is mountainous, demanding, and short on comfort.
The Camino Portugués comes up from Lisbon or Porto. The Vía de la Plata climbs the entire length of Spain from Seville. The Camino Inglés is short, historically walked by pilgrims who arrived by ship from Britain and Ireland and only had the last stretch to cover on land.
Every one of them ends in the same square.
Pilgrims agonize over the choice. Which is most beautiful. Which is most authentic. Which one will make me a real pilgrim.
And then they walk, and within a week the question dissolves, because the road you are on becomes the only road there is.
The Cathedral has never required you to walk.
To receive the Compostela, the official certificate of completion, a pilgrim must cover the last one hundred kilometers on foot or on horseback, or the last two hundred by bicycle.
Horseback has been a recognized way of arriving for as long as there have been records. Medieval pilgrims rode constantly. The wealthy rode, the elderly rode, and the sick were sometimes carried.
The people who decide what counts decided a long time ago, and they were more generous about it than the internet is.
There is one more thing worth knowing before you choose.
Every route teaches you the same lesson eventually, and it starts on the first day. You cannot see very far ahead.
Some days you will not know where you are sleeping. Some days the guidebook will be wrong. The weather will make your plan irrelevant by ten in the morning.
You learn to trust the next arrow instead of the whole map.
That is not a travel skill. That is a faith practice, and it starts before you leave.
Scripture Study
Psalm 121:1 through 4
The psalmist lifts his eyes to the hills and asks where his help comes from. He answers his own question. His help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. God will not let his foot slip. The One who watches over him does not slumber or sleep.
This is a walking song.
Psalm 121 is one of the Songs of Ascents, a set of fifteen psalms sung by pilgrims traveling up to Jerusalem for the festivals. People sang these with packs on and dust on their feet, three thousand years before anyone painted a yellow arrow on a wall in Spain.
It is the oldest trail music we have.
And it opens with a question, not an answer. Where does my help come from. The psalmist is on a road, looking at what is ahead of him, and he does not know.
Dig Deeper
Most of us read the first line as scenery. Lifting your eyes to beautiful hills, feeling close to God.
That is almost certainly not what is happening.
For an ancient traveler, the hills were the problem. Bandits worked the high ground. The road up to Jerusalem passed through terrain where people were robbed regularly. The hills were also where the local shrines sat, the high places, the altars to other gods that Israel was constantly being warned about.
So read it again. He lifts his eyes to the hills and asks where his help comes from.
He is looking straight at the danger. And at the false options.
Then he answers, and the answer is not the hills. My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.
That changes the psalm entirely. It is not a nature meditation. It is a man looking at what he is afraid of and deciding out loud who he is going to trust.
One more detail for the walkers. The line about your foot not slipping is not poetic in the original. It is what you would pray on uneven ground in bad sandals with a long way to go. It is a practical request.
And the promise that He does not slumber is a direct contrast to the gods of those hills, who in the surrounding religions had to be woken, fed, and persuaded to pay attention.
The God of this psalm is already awake. He was awake before you asked.
Reflection Questions
Write honestly or do not write at all. Nobody is reading this but you.
- Whose standard have I been measuring my journey against?
- Where have I confused the hardest option with the holiest one?
- What am I currently trying to fix that is not actually mine to fix?
- What have I gone quiet about because one person made me feel like I was doing it wrong?
- If I stopped waiting for permission, what would I choose today?
Prayer
Father,
I have spent a long time measuring myself against people who were never given my life to live.
Quiet the voices that tell me my way does not count, including the one in my own head.
Where I have been striving to fix what only You can move, help me let go without calling it giving up.
I lift my eyes to the hills and I am not going to pretend they do not scare me.
My help comes from You. Show me the next step.
In Jesus' name, Amen.
Camino Challenge
Look at where you are standing today. Not where you meant to be by now. Not where you told people you were. Where you actually are.
Write it honestly.
Then write how you want to choose differently going forward. Not a five year plan. The next choice, and what would make it yours instead of somebody else's.
One more line at the bottom. Name one thing you have been trying to fix that is not yours to fix, and say it out loud.
Out loud matters. You will feel the difference.
That is the beginning of surrender, and surrender is not the same thing as quitting. It never was.
Tomorrow We'll Walk…
There is a post office in the first few towns of almost every Camino route, and it stays busy.
Pilgrims mail things home before the first week is out. Boxes and boxes of them, full of items each person was completely certain they needed when they packed.
Somewhere around day four, the weight stops being an inconvenience and becomes the main character.
Tomorrow we are going to talk about what you are carrying, and about the things that weigh nothing at all and are somehow the heaviest items in the bag.
Whose standard have you been measuring yourself against? Write me back below. I read every one.
Don't quit in the quiet.
Sharing love,
~ Jenn