Madeleine had chosen to bring her small dog (Loca) with her for the walk, and was extremely concerned about the supposedly huge storm that was scheduled to hit south-central France on this day*, so we decided to head back to Le Puy instead — allowing her to spiritually soak alone in the Le Puy cathedral […]
The tiny chapel of St. Michel wasn’t the most ornately decorated or architecturally astounding church in which I prayditated* during my Walk, and yet its ambience was indeed nothing short of “holy”, and my offerings of Gratitude and Resolve resounded quite powerfully off its hallowed walls … 🙂 “The person with a secular mentality feels […]
It was easy to flow down the 268 steps from the top of St. Michel, and after doing so I decided to stop in to Le Puy’s primary cathedral one final time to offer up a few additional thoughts of thanksgiving and a few additional prayers for Peace … 🙂 “In a world where thrushes […]
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 […]
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