And then it was thereafter that I finally, after some 6 weeks of walking all the way across the entire country of France (not to mention the month it had taken me to get from Stuttgart and down the length of Switzerland to the French border), arrived at the blessed destination of St. Jean Pied du Port and passed joyfully through its arched portal entrance-way. This was the very same portal I had traversed some eleven years ago when I set out on my very first Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, and it was the portal that now marked what was essentially the midpoint on my current Walk HOME …

“Yes, the Way is far – no doubt. And yet there is no journey upon this Earth that a man may not make if he truly sets his whole heart to it. In truth there is nothing that such a man cannot do – no mountains he may not climb and no deserts he cannot cross (save a mountain or a desert of which such a sincere seeker is ever spared the knowledge). In truth, if love leads such a walker as he, and he holds his life in his hand counting it as nothing, ready to keep it or to lose it as circumstance or Providence might at whim demand, then he is fully assured of completing his Journey in full. For him to in no small measure fulfill his trek becomes as sure a thing as his one day death itself.” ~ via H. Rider Haggard

Filed under: My Life in Pictures by Scaughdt