Pilgrimage is a funny thing — making the most “boring” of landscapes a sanctuary of Meaning, turning the most innocent of encounters into ones fully Purpose-full, and morphing the most banal of gifts into the most magnificent of treasures. The view from a bedroom window becomes a masterpiece … The blankets on a pull-out sofa […]
Madeleine and I made our way back to St. Alban and set off for our first and only full day of walking together on The Way. Loca proved to be a fine walking companion as well. Granted, she isn’t at all fond of other dogs of any sort or breed, and yet other dogs are […]
“Very few beings truly seek Knowledge in this world. Few really pose the deeper queries, trying instead to repeatedly wring from the unknown the more comfortable answers they have already shaped in their own minds — justifications, rationalizations, explanations, confirmations, and other forms of consolation without which they cannot face the mirror each morning. No, […]
We flowed easily enough into the tiny hamlet of La Truyere, where a young boy calls out to us and offers to sell us a snail he had captured. I choose to set aside his less than kind offer and respond as though he was giving me the snail freely — announcing a hearty “Merci […]
One of the advantages of walking with the same person(s) for any significant length of time is the wider range of Meaning-full topics that can be far more deeply discussed. And indeed, such was the case on this day’s walk with Madeleine — a walk that allowed us to cover a variety of truly important […]
“Comfort and success and pleasure and influence are quite acceptable goals to have, no doubt. And yet they are all goals as ultimately fleeting as they are inevitably unattainable. Indeed, they are all goals fully dependent upon external circumstances beyond one’s control, and as such they are all goals that can never fulfill a lasting […]
I only ended up walking 16 kilometers today (that’s just 10 miles, for all you non-metric folks out there), and yet my legs were exhausted and hurting pretty intensely by the time Madeleine & Loca & I amble-hobbled into the day’s final destination of Aumont-Aubrac. That being said, there is something energetically uplifting about entering […]
I walked this cool, overcast morning for a few more hours with Madeleine & Loca, all the way to a two-house hamlet called Les 4 Chemins (translation: “The 4 Pathways”, or symbolically “the Crossroads”), where they had ordered a van shuttle to pick them up and return them to St. Alban — and thereafter, their […]
It continued to rain as I once more set out alone on The Path — ever essentially alone (and often wet, and tired, and hungry to boot), and yet also ever surrounded by Beauty, and also ever sharing the Way with like-Souled fellow wanderers … 😀 “Real courage is when you know you’re licked before […]
“And the real name of our connection to this everywhere named Earth is ‘work.’ For we are deeply connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected, and it is now becoming quite clear that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. The name of […]
There were many ways I “did my part” by spreading the anti-exploitation & pro-justice vegan message, and yet one of the simplest and most fun (though admittedly probably also the least effective) of those ways was simply leaving the gates of dairy cow paddocks wide open whenever I walked through them … 😉 “There are […]
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