The last two journal prompts from this project were waiting for me when I landed in Texas in the early hours of June 27th.

I couldn’t write them.

I told myself it was exhaustion — and that was partly true. I told myself it was the demands of returning to work and preaching — also partly true. But I think it was something deeper than either of those things, and I have been sitting with that for nine days now.

The body has been keeping score in the most literal sense.

My elbow, injured in a fall on the descent into the Bierzo valley on June 9th, was full of fluid after I got home. What looked like a tennis ball lodged under the skin turned out to be 11.5 cc’s of fluid, drained a day after I arrived. Then 18 cc’s more. There may be surgery ahead. I bruised cartilage in my ribs in a separate incident. There are other medical matters I am navigating.

I am in some degree of pain most of the time right now.

The body that carried me 500 miles is asking for some attention of its own. I am trying to give it that.

I have been asked many times over the last nine days: “How was your trip?”

I have been avoiding the real answer, which is: I really don’t know.

I don’t mean that as a complaint or a disappointment. I mean it as the most accurate thing I can say. Something significant happened on that road — I know that. I am still finding out what it was. The full answer to that question is not available to me yet, and I have been reluctant to offer a smaller answer in its place just to satisfy the asking.

Yesterday I picked up Alexander Shaia’s book, Returning From Camino, which I bought a year ago and neglected to read past the walking chapters.

I found this passage highlighted from whenever I had last read it:

“I have heard from too many pilgrims who burned their clothes to celebrate their accomplished ending, and then returned home only to be shocked by their depression and unease. Something deep in us knows that this is a turn-around place, half a Camino, not an end.”

That is exactly where I am. The turn-around place. A real internal sense of now what? permeating my thoughts. Unsettled in a way I didn’t fully anticipate, even though I wrote throughout this project that the Camino doesn’t end in Santiago — it begins there.

I knew that. I wrote it. I arrived at the turn-around place anyway and still felt the vertigo.

Shaia’s advice for this season includes returning to the journal, re-reading what was written, writing a second letter to yourself to be sealed and opened 40 to 60 days after returning home. Sharing carefully and only with people who can hear without judgment. Sitting with what surfaced rather than rushing to explain or resolve it.

These are the things I didn’t do or didn’t know to do in the days immediately after arriving home.

They are my next focus.

I sat down to write this morning because I am approaching some peace about not knowing. Not because the not-knowing is resolved — it isn’t. But because I have learned enough, in these last months of walking and writing and interior work, to recognize that some things need time before they reveal themselves. That sitting in an unresolved place without judging it is a discipline worth practicing.

My instinct is to stay in this turn-around place for a while. To not force the landing. To trust that what the road put into me is still working, even when I can’t see it clearly yet.

I suspect I am right where I am supposed to be.

The journey continues.

Buen Camino.

— Pastor Wade

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Come Walk With Me continues.

Lavacolla → Santiago de Compostela (10.1 km)

ARRIVAL DAY

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“It’s about the journey, not the destination.”

I have carried that quote since high school. It is not earth-shattering. It has always been accessible in my mind — one of those phrases that sounds simple until you’ve actually lived it.

After three previous arrivals in Santiago, and after 500 miles of walking on this trip, I genuinely had no idea how I would feel walking in this time.

Fourteen hours later, I am still not entirely sure.

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I set this goal nearly seven years ago at what was probably one of the lowest moments of my life. I was in the opening stages of divorce. I was professionally headed toward a reckoning I couldn’t quite see yet. I had gone from 260 pounds to 306 in a matter of months.

What I knew about the Camino de Santiago was that it was a far-away wish. Something that kept me looking forward instead of behind — or kept me from having to stay in that miserable present moment for one more minute.

That was the beginning of this journey. Seven years ago. A goal written in desperation as much as hope.

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When I walked into the Plaza del Obradoiro yesterday, I was not terribly emotional. Not moved by the moment itself — but moved by considering the totality of what the moment represents. The distance between the man who wrote that goal in 2019 and the man who walked into that plaza yesterday is not measured in miles.

As people walked beside me and asked how are you feeling? I had no ready answer. I appreciated the care. I just didn’t have the words.

My intention to write yesterday fell by the wayside, because it felt like I should be able to conjure something ultimate — an overwhelming, mountaintop reflection that would encapsulate the entire experience with unimaginable joy.

Sitting here now, many hours later, I have accepted that those aren’t necessary. They were expectations I didn’t know I was carrying.

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The internal journey didn’t cease when I heard the bagpipes at the tunnel entry into the Plaza del Obradoiro.

It didn’t reach conclusion during the San Juan Feast Day Mass in the cathedral last night — the presence of the bishop, the pomp and circumstance, the great Botafumeiro swinging its arc of incense through the transept.

It wasn’t over at the late Spanish dinner afterward, or during the group goodbyes that followed.

It won’t end at an airport. It won’t end when I empty my pack and tuck it into the closet at home.

This was never about walking across miles to find an emotional high. This was always an inward journey, above everything else. I knew that going in. The road confirmed it every single day.

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What I am left with is moments and people.

My Camino family — every one of them — will not be forgotten, even if we never see each other again. My friend Cory, who spent his last hours in Santiago waiting for me to arrive, who gave me a final hug and a promise to stay close. The people who blessed me with their stories and their presence and their willingness to be known.

And Jeana. Who was a colleague and acquaintance before the 2022 Camino and has become so much more since. This became our journey as much as my own. That is its own kind of gift.

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The gifts of these seven years of walking are innumerable.

The challenge — for me, for any of us — is to just keep walking.

This morning I don’t feel like I am walking “to” Santiago anymore.

I am walking “through.”

In peace. In gratitude.

Buen Camino.

— Pastor Wade

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Come Walk With Me continues.

O Pino → Lavacolla (10.0 km)

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Lavacolla.

Medieval pilgrims stopped here to wash before entering Santiago — to cleanse themselves at the threshold before crossing into the city that had been their destination for weeks or months of walking. The tradition is old enough that the place is named for it.

Today I washed too.

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What do I want to leave here, at this threshold?

Expectations.

I wrote yesterday about arriving at the Cruz de Ferro with expectations I didn’t know I had — and how the quiet, brief moment there turned out to be exactly right, because the real work had already been done. I don’t want to repeat that pattern tomorrow.

I don’t know what it will feel like to walk into the Plaza del Obradoiro. I have been there three times. Each time was its own thing. This time is its own thing too, and I want to let it be whatever it actually is rather than whatever I’ve imagined it might be.

So I am leaving the expectations at the river.

Whatever tomorrow brings — tears, silence, joy, something I can’t name yet — I want to receive it with open hands rather than a prepared script.

The hands are open.

Tomorrow, Santiago.

Buen Camino.

— Pastor Wade

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Come Walk With Me continues from the road in Spain.

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Arzúa → O Pino (19.2 km)

NOTE: Two posts today, this being the first. Got behind yesterday.

Today’s prompt: “Two days from Santiago. The road has given you everything — the beautiful and the difficult, the expected and the unwanted. What does it mean to arrive not at the end of a perfect journey, but at the end of a real one?”

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As has become something of a tradition in this project, I’m going to push back on the prompt.

For readers who may be newer to this series: most of these prompts were generated by AI — so that I could have a surprising and varied writing plan for each day of preparation and walking. What you are reading here are not raw journal responses, but reflections drawn from my daily journaling and experience on the road over the last 41 days. The prompts have been useful. They have also, on occasion, needed arguing with.

Today is one of those occasions.

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Was this a perfect journey? Maybe not by some definitions. Many of my plans were scrapped early and often. The hypothermia on Day 2. The foot that became hamburger on Day 18. The reordered itinerary. The days that went sideways in ways I didn’t expect.

But my plans were always malleable. The journey was always going to include the unexpected. That was, in some sense, the point.

So while it may not have been a perfect journey by some external measure — it was perfect for me. Not because of planning. Because I left myself open to whatever each day brought.

It was perfect because I met perfect friends, who are not perfect people, but are now my people.

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My larger pushback is about this being the *end* of a real journey.

I have been wrestling with something these last couple of days: what will it feel like to walk into the Plaza del Obradoiro on Wednesday? I have arrived in Santiago three times before. Each time was meaningful in its own way. This time feels like it should carry more weight — seven years of building toward it, months of intentional preparation, forty-one days of walking and writing and excavating and setting down.

So what will that arrival actually feel like?

I don’t know. And I want to sit with that uncertainty rather than fill it with expectation.

I have some experience with this, from earlier on this journey.

For the better part of a year I had built the Cruz de Ferro — the Iron Cross — into what I expected would be the penultimate spiritual moment of this Camino. When I arrived there on June 8 (*From the Road — June 8*), the experience didn’t match those expectations. The scene was chaotic. The moment was quiet and brief. I laid my stone and walked away.

And within minutes I realized it was perfect — because what I left at that cross was a symbol of something that had already been released long before I got there. The real work had happened in the months before I left Texas. The cross was a celebration of what had already occurred, not the occurrence itself.

I suspect Wednesday may be similar.

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There is a saying I have repeated throughout this project: the Camino doesn’t end in Santiago. That’s where it begins.

What I feel walking into that plaza may or may not carry the weight others expect it to carry. It may surprise me. It may be quiet. It may be overwhelming. I genuinely don’t know.

What I do know is that the journey continues. The inner work continues. And I hope — more than I hope for any particular feeling in that plaza — that I feel deep gratitude then, and in the days and years after.

That is enough to walk toward.

Buen Camino.

— Pastor Wade

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Come Walk With Me continues from the road in Spain.

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Melide → Arzúa (14.2 km)

Thousands walking the same direction toward the same place.

Geographically, that’s true. Regardless of where any of us started — Saint-Jean, Sarria, Lisbon, Porto, somewhere else entirely — we are all pointed toward Santiago de Compostela. The roads converge. The destination is shared.

But pilgrimage isn’t primarily about moving from one place to another until you reach a physical landing spot.

So I want to push back on the question a little.

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This pilgrimage has been about asking my body to do unfamiliar things — and then learning to listen to it, so it could carry me far and deep. It has been about opening my mind to possibility. About letting the peaceful places in my mind have the floor, rather than the noisy ones.

A couple of days ago I wrote about being at peace. I want to be clear about something: I am not at peace because I walked across a country full of ancient places and spiritual echoes. I am at peace because I chose, at some point each day, to focus on the peaceful people and places and things in my life and in my consciousness.

In most cases they were always there. In most cases I hadn’t been paying enough attention.

The Camino didn’t give me peace. It gave me conditions in which I could finally notice what was already present.

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So are we really headed in the same direction? To the same place?

The hopeful answer is yes.

We are converging — physically, and in something harder to name. The beauty of the land, the ancient churches, the camaraderie that permeates these interactions when we pay attention — all of it creates a temporary shared world that feels, while you’re inside it, like something universal.

But the honest answer is more complicated.

We are all headed back to somewhere eventually. And it isn’t the same somewhere for any of us. We will step off this road and back into our regular lives, our regular environments, our regular pace. The person walking past us in a grocery store will not respond to *Buen Camino* the way a pilgrim on the trail does. The door that phrase opens here will not open there.

What we carry back — or don’t — is entirely individual. The integration, as I wrote recently, is a lifelong pursuit. And it will look different in every vessel it enters.

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What I hope, for myself and for everyone walking this road, is that we each find a direction and a place that reminds us of the peace that is possible.

Not the peace of the Camino specifically. The peace that was always available, in whatever corner of our ordinary lives we hadn’t yet learned to look.

That peace doesn’t require Spain.

It just sometimes takes Spain to find it.

Buen Camino!

— Pastor Wade

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Come Walk With Me continues from the road in Spain.

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Lestedo → Melide (19.7 km)

There is no shortage of simple pleasures on this road. The difficulty isn’t finding them — it’s choosing which ones to write about.

Today I want to tell you about two quiet ones.

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Last night we stayed at Rectoral de Lestedo — a place I have now stayed three of my four trips on the Camino. The building itself is lovely, but the real draw is the family who owns and runs it. There is a particular quality to their hospitality that makes you feel, within about ten minutes of arriving, like you are a part of their family. I suspect most people who stay there feel the same.

At dinner I met a group of three people at a nearby table — what I assumed was a mother, father, and daughter, though I was never entirely sure of the relationship. I had met the father briefly on the patio earlier in the afternoon and stopped to say hello to everyone. We talked about the day’s walk and what was ahead.

This morning, as we were all preparing to leave, the daughter handed me a wax stamp — something she had made or bought — to press into my pilgrim credential. A small gesture. A mark of friendship formed over two brief conversations.

Later in the day I walked past her resting on the trail and we talked again, encouraged each other, and continued on.

We may never meet again. I won’t forget her.

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Earlier in the morning I passed a woman on the trail and said hello as I went by. A little while later she passed me. Then at some point I noticed her walking back toward me — back toward Sarria, away from Santiago.

I called out: “Santiago is back that way!”

She laughed, turned around, and said she didn’t want to walk ahead alone. We fell into conversation, found a spot for second breakfast, talked for a while. Then she went ahead.

I may not see her again either.

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I wrote early in this project about being a lifelong social chameleon — someone who read rooms carefully, managed how he appeared, held people at a comfortable arm’s length while seeming open. The Camino has been disrupting that pattern since about Day 6.

What surprises me most, looking back across these weeks, is not the grand moments. It’s the ease. The naturalness of stopping to talk to a stranger, making a joke, handing someone encouragement on a trail, receiving a wax stamp as a gesture of friendship after two brief conversations.

These things happen several times every day out here. Not all of them become lasting friendships. Most of them won’t. But they are what I have come to think of as nuggets — small, dense pieces of human connection that the ordinary pace of life rarely makes room for.

I love these moments. I love that I am capable of them.

That might be the simplest and most surprising pleasure of all.

Buen Camino.

— Pastor Wade

Come Walk With Me continues from the road in Spain.

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Portomarin → Lestedo (20 km)

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The question today is about the difference between where I started and where I am right now. Not where I’m going — where I actually am.

I am the same person.

The difference isn’t transformation exactly. It’s something quieter and, I think, more durable than that. It’s about how I feel about myself. About what I’m carrying and how I’m carrying it.

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Physically, I am confident in a way I haven’t been in a long time.

Yesterday we walked 20 kilometers. At the end I felt genuinely good — no significant pain, no fatigue, no need for a nap. I am comfortable in this body. I trust it more than I did when I left Texas. The foot that turned to hamburger in late May, the hypothermia on Day 2, the reordered plans and the taxis — all of it taught me something about what this body can do and what it needs, and I am a better student of it now than I was.

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My mind is settled.

Six days remain, and from a walking perspective I am approaching them as celebration. Not anticipation exactly — I have learned enough on this road about the cost of anticipation. Just a quiet readiness to receive whatever these last days offer, without gripping them too tightly.

There was one significant exterior loss on this journey I want to name: I had to miss the Rio Texas Annual Conference gathering, which I have attended for the last twenty-five years. Several friends were ordained last night. I am proud of each of their journeys and I missed being there to witness them. That absence mattered.

And even that — I held with more peace than I would have expected.

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Which brings me to the biggest change I can actually discern.

I am at peace.

Not just today. For most of these six weeks. This journey — the walking and the writing and the interior work and the people and the Cruz de Ferro and the Meseta and the reunion with Jeana and all the rest of it — has marked a period of inner peace that I cannot recall experiencing before. Not like this. Not sustained, not this quiet, not this settled in the bones.

I am sixty-four years old. I have been working toward something like this for thirty years.

I am grateful — very grateful — that it arrived.

That is where I am today.

Buen Camino.

— Pastor Wade

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From the Road — June 18

Morgade → Portomarin (10.4 km)

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There is a saying on the Camino: the Camino doesn’t end when you reach Santiago. That’s where it begins.

What that really means, I think, is integration.

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I was still thinking this morning about the gap between my experience and that of the new pilgrims walking with us — they are on Day 2, I am on Day 37. The difference in what we’ve seen, what we’ve carried, what we’ve set down, feels enormous from the inside.

But as I walked today — more solitary than yesterday, though never far from the group — something shifted in that thinking.

These new pilgrims haven’t seen everything the Camino still has waiting for them. They haven’t walked into Santiago. They haven’t felt what it means to cross a finish line that turns out to be a beginning. There is still much ahead that will surprise them, move them, break them open in ways they aren’t expecting yet. Today is still new for them.

And here is what I had to sit with: today is still new for me too.

This shift in paradigm — from solo pilgrim to community member, from the interior journey to the shared one — hasn’t fully revealed itself yet. There is still much I haven’t experienced or learned. What lies ahead for any of us has yet to be fully unveiled.

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What we will all carry home, though, is ours to integrate individually.

We can walk the same road, see the same landscape, share the same albergues, have versions of the same conversations — and still filter all of it through entirely different lives, entirely different histories, entirely different wounds and gifts and accumulated experience. The stew each of us makes from these ingredients won’t look the same. It can’t.

For me the complication is particular: I have filtered my entire interior life — and especially the work of the last year — through forty-plus days of this Camino. The experience and the emotion are woven together in ways I am only beginning to understand. I am coming around to the idea that integrating this myriad of experience is not a project with a completion date.

It is a lifelong pursuit.

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So here is what I find myself hoping — for myself, for the new pilgrims in our group, for the ones I met and bonded with earlier on this road, for the ones who came before and the ones who will come after:

That each of us meets the new versions of ourselves that this walk has been building.

And that we might love and trust ourselves — including the versions that are incomplete, including the ones that are no longer needed.

That last part is harder than it sounds. The incomplete versions, the outgrown ones — they were built for reasons. They served their purpose. Loving them on the way out is different from needing them to stay.

But it is, I think, part of what it means to actually integrate something rather than just leave it on a pile of rocks at the foot of a cross.

Buen Camino.

— Pastor Wade

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Sarria → Morgade (12.0 km)

The walking today was different.

I knew it would be. I have known for months that joining Jeana’s group would mean walking together as a unit for the first two and a half days — matching pace, staying cohesive, being mindful of others. That was the plan. I agreed to it. I looked forward to it, even.

The knowing didn’t fully prepare me for the feeling.

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My preferred pace is nearly a full kilometer per hour faster than the group’s. That gap doesn’t sound like much until you’re inside it — until your legs want to move and something invisible is holding them back.

The best way I can describe it: I felt like someone had put a governor on a hot rod.

Not because of anything anyone did. Not because the group is wrong or slow or difficult. Simply because I have been unleashed for thirty-one days — entirely in charge of my own pace, my own decisions, my own rhythm — and I suddenly wasn’t. That shift, even when chosen and expected, has a texture to it. An unfamiliarity. A low-grade discomfort that I am trying not to judge before it has a chance to settle.

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What I am noticing is that we are all navigating some version of this. Each person in the group is finding their place in a new dynamic, learning the pace and the personalities, negotiating their own needs against the group’s. My experience of that is different from theirs — I’ve been walking for over a month, they’ve been walking for a day — but the discomfort of adjusting to something new is probably similar across all of us.

It’s group dynamics. It’s the ordinary friction of becoming a cohesive thing out of a collection of individuals.

I know this. I’ve led groups. I’ve been part of groups. I understand, intellectually, that the first few days are always the adjustment period.

Understanding it intellectually and living it in your legs are two different things.

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I am trying to adjust my expectations before I get twisty. Trying to receive this as what it is — not a diminishment of the experience, but a different kind of experience. One that is asking something different of me than the solo road asked.

And here is the thing I keep returning to: when I get home, I will step back into work, into community, into collaboration with people at whatever pace the situation requires. The governor isn’t going away. Learning to operate well with it — to find the satisfaction in the shared rhythm rather than the individual one — is probably more useful training than I was looking for right now.

The Camino provides.

Sometimes it provides what you didn’t seek. Sometimes what you didn’t know you needed.

Sometimes it provides a governor for a hot rod and asks you to find the gift in it.

Buen Camino.

— Pastor Wade

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From Sarria and a Day of Rest — June 16

Rest Day — Sarria

Yesterday I didn’t write. I rested from reflection as much as from walking, and I think that was the right call.

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Jeana and I had massages in Sarria. Long, soothing, necessary ones. We had lunch at one of our favorite restaurants in the city. My feet, which have been in a constant state of distress for weeks now, appreciated every minute of not moving.

There are 114 kilometers remaining to Santiago. Rest, at this point, is not indulgence. It is strategy.

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Last night we welcomed the rest of Jeana’s group to the hotel — the pilgrims we had been encouraging through Zoom calls and emails for months, now finally here, finally real, buzzing with the particular energy of people who are about to begin something they have been anticipating for a long time. We heard their excitement. We heard their anxieties. We answered questions.

I recognized myself in all of it. Not so long ago.

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But here is what actually needed the most attention yesterday — and I want to be honest about it because I think it is more interesting than the massage, however good the massage was.

I am in the middle of a transition I did not fully anticipate.

For thirty-one days I was entirely solo. I made every decision alone. I walked at my own pace, stopped when I needed to, ate when I was hungry, processed whatever surfaced without having to narrate it to anyone. I became, over those weeks, very comfortable in my own company. Quiet. Unhurried. Present to myself in a way I don’t often manage at home.

Now I am part of a group.

Not a bad thing — I chose this, looked forward to it, and the people around me are wonderful. But there is a real and interesting negotiation happening between the self who walked alone for a month and the self who is now being asked to step back into community. To consider others’ pace, others’ energy, others’ needs. To be present not just to myself but to a circle of people.

Reconnecting with Jeana has been the easiest part of that — we have our shorthand, our ease, the language of us that doesn’t require much translation.

The rest is a different kind of walking. Interior walking. Figuring out how to carry what the solo road gave me into a communal one without losing it entirely.

I suspect that is its own kind of pilgrimage.

Buen Camino.

— Pastor Wade

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Samos → Sarria (15.4 km)

Sarria. The last 100 kilometers begins here.

The road is filling with new pilgrims — people who are just starting, packs fresh and unworn, legs that haven’t yet learned what this costs. I have been walking for over a month. I find I do have some things to suggest to them.

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• Recently, as we were preparing for the group Jeana will lead beginning tomorrow, one of the pilgrims asked what advice I would give. My answer was simple: “Remember that this isn’t a race.”

I want to unpack that a little.

The obvious meaning is about speed — don’t sprint, don’t compete, don’t measure your worth by how far or how fast. But the deeper meaning is about the whole orientation of the thing. A race is about finishing first. A pilgrimage is about intention. Those are fundamentally different endeavors, and confusing them will cost you more than time.

If your intention is to finish the walk first — every day, or overall — you might accomplish that. My question would be: why? And then: what did you actually accomplish?

The Camino is a physical endeavor, but it is primarily an interior one. You walk across a beautiful country. You see and experience things both gorgeous and difficult. But if a significant part of that experience isn’t interior — or isn’t shared in the company of others — I am afraid you’ve missed the point.

Pilgrimage, as I have come to understand it, is an interior journey negotiated and navigated in community. Could you find meaning walking in complete solitude? Probably. Would you have found what I found — the Camino family, the strangers who became dear friends, the conversations at picnic tables with people walking in opposite directions — without opening yourself to the people around you? Doubtful.

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• Do your research. Read books and guides. Watch the films. Listen to the podcasts. Learn what you can about the route, the distances, what to carry and what to leave behind.

And then hold your plans loosely.

Some of the deepest gifts of this walk come from what you didn’t plan for — the albergue that was full and sent you somewhere better, the wrong turn that led somewhere right, the day you had to stop and ask for help. Meticulous planning is good preparation. Obsession with your plans is a way of missing what is actually being offered.

Asking for help is hard for many of us. I know this personally. Not asking for help usually makes things harder. Humility in all things — on the Camino and in life — will generally serve you better than self-sufficiency.

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• Don’t take yourself too seriously.

Take your intention seriously — that matters enormously. But know that what we identify as our intention often doesn’t play out the way we imagined. This journey requires flexibility. Love and care for others. The willingness to let the experience guide you rather than the other way around. The practice of listening — to your body, to your mind, to the spirit of things, however you define that.

There is likely so much more I am not sharing. You will not find all of it before you go.

But go.

Just go.

Buen Camino

— Pastor Wade

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Fonfria → Samos (19.3 km)

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I have been writing for months about learning to listen to my body. About the difference between willing yourself forward and following what the body actually needs. About slowing down, doctoring the foot, taking the taxi, choosing the Camino that is best for you rather than the one that proves something.

Yesterday Jeana’s body had things to say.

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The nephews went ahead. Jeana was dealing with foot and knee pain that extended what should have been a manageable walk into something considerably longer and harder. We slowed down. We took it at whatever pace she needed. The day stretched by a couple of hours.

And something happened in that slowing that I want to name carefully.

The lessons the road taught me about my own body — the ones I learned the hard way through hypothermia and hamburger feet and reordered plans — became, on my first day walking with Jeana, the thing I had to offer her. Not advice. Not a plan. Just presence. The willingness to go as slowly as she needed and call it enough.

That is a different kind of gift than I would have been capable of giving a year ago. Maybe even six months ago.

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There is a quality to walking with Jeana that I can only describe as shorthand.

Things don’t need to be explained from the beginning. We have negotiated the language of us over time — through hard seasons and good ones, through this project and its months of writing, through thirty-one days of morning blessings she sent while I walked and she waited. Some things just don’t need to be spoken. Others need to be spoken precisely because we know each other well enough to let them go unspoken too long.

The blessings she sent each morning were a particular gift — unexpected evidence of her love and her attentiveness to where I was each day, what I might be facing, what I might need to hear. She was walking with me before she arrived. I felt that again today.

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What I notice in myself now that the road is shared: I have shifted from considering my personal journey to considering our journey. The internal monologue of thirty-one solo days — the constant checking in with my own body, my own mind, my own spirit — has begun to expand to include her. To consider what she needs. To measure the day not only by what I can do but by what we can do together.

In two days we will welcome a group joining Jeana’s guided walk for the remaining 114 kilometers of the Camino Francés. What has been a largely individual pursuit becomes a community working and growing together.

From thousands of miles apart, to walking in tandem, to serving one another alongside others.

That is a movement I recognize. It is the same one that has been happening inside me for months.

Buen Camino!

— Pastor Wade

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Come Walk With Me continues from the road in Spain

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La Laguna → Fonfria (14.5 km)

REUNION DAY

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Today’s Prompt: You walked into Fonfria today. The last time you were here was 2022 — leaving one life, not knowing what came next. Jeana was your guide then. She is here again now. Write about what it means to arrive at the same place as a different person.

There is a whole world of difference between the man who arrived in Fonfria in 2022 and the one who arrived today.

And a whole world of difference between the “us” who arrived here too.

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In 2022 I was in Fonfria on something of a whim. I had joined a Camino group led by Jeana Martin — a friendly colleague and pilgrimage leader among her many talents. The group was set to start walking from Sarria three days later. Jeana had invited me to join her and her mother for those three days ahead of the group, walking into Sarria early.

My sole motivation was simple: I didn’t want to be in Spain alone.

That was then.

Today, Jeana and her two nephews, Daniel and Haiden, met me twelve kilometers above Fonfria. We will walk into Sarria together in two days, before joining another group she’s leading.

The walk down from just below O Cebreiro to meet them, and on into Fonfria, happened in circumstances entirely different from 2022.

Jeana is now my love and my partner. Today was Day 32 of this Camino — and the first 31 of those days I walked completely solo.

A new friend I met just yesterday — Joe, from New Braunfels — happened to have his camera ready and caught the moment of our reunion. Thanks for the quick reflexes, Joe.

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Those are the surface differences. But about fifteen minutes before we arrived in Fonfria, something else occurred to me — something I hadn’t considered until that moment.

In 2022 I walked 150 kilometers of the Camino Francés, starting from Fonfria. Today, walking into Fonfria again, I have now walked roughly 650 kilometers of this same route — enough, between the two trips, to complete the entire French Way.

The circle closed in those last fifteen minutes. I hadn’t planned for it. I hadn’t even thought about it until it was almost upon me. And when it arrived, I was quite emotional.

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But here is what I think the circle actually closed.

In 2022 I came to Fonfria because I didn’t want to face Spain alone. I needed company. I needed Jeana — though I didn’t know yet what she would come to mean — and her mother, and the simple comfort of not being by myself in a foreign country.

Today I walked into Fonfria having spent thirty-one days completely alone. By choice. By design. Through hypothermia and foot pain and the Meseta and the Cruz de Ferro and the descent into the Bierzo, alone — and not just surviving it, but finding something in it. A version of myself I like. A quieter mind. A body I’m learning to trust. Friendships made and released without wounds. A stone set down at the foot of an ancient cross.

The man who needed company to face Spain became the man who could walk five hundred miles alone — and then be met, at exactly the right moment, by the woman he loves.

That is the circle. Not just geography. Not just kilometers. The whole arc of what’s possible when someone does the work.

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I am more comfortable in my own skin than I have ever been. I am more comfortable in this relationship — in the depth and trust of it — than I once believed possible.

That is a testament to the work I have done. It is at least an equal testament, and probably a greater one, to who Jeana is and what she has given me, both in 2022 and every day since.

This morning’s reunion was confirmation of all of it.

Buen Camino!

— Pastor Wade

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Trabadelo → La Laguna (16.2 km) Now 2.5 km below O Cebreiro

Note: I don’t like to play favorites with my posts, AND this one is possibly my favorite.

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I wrote yesterday that the healing I’ve experienced over the last year happened largely before I started walking — that this Camino has felt more like a celebration of healing than the healing itself.

I want to add something to that tonight, because I think it’s important.

Healing from years of untreated trauma doesn’t really end. I’m not sure I’ll ever be completely free of some of the things that live in me as a result of what happened to me from age three through young adulthood. The “yuck,” as I’ve come to call it, doesn’t fully evaporate. It changes shape. It loses power. But I don’t think it disappears.

What has changed is my relationship with it.

Through my own relationship with a higher power — whom I choose to call God — I have been able to get sober, stay sober, and work on all of this for thirty years. I am now able to talk specifically about what happened to me from early childhood through young adulthood without the shame and reluctance that used to accompany those conversations.

But I don’t think it would be accurate, or even necessary, to proclaim myself “healed.” I still have things to work on. I expect I always will.

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What I’ve come to understand is that this kind of work becomes less of a chore and more of a gift to the degree that I’m willing to be honest with myself about what still needs attention — and then willing to look at it critically rather than filing it away.

Preparing for this Camino made the trauma work urgent in a way it hadn’t been before. I knew I couldn’t simply show up, walk forty-plus days, and be healed. I knew healing was possible. But I also knew it would require help, determination, and intention.

Intention turned out to be the key. I’ve written throughout this project about showing up to pilgrimage with intention — and my intention was to experience healing on this journey. But the journey was never just the hiking. It was preparing my mind, body, and spirit to seek and accept healing, long before I laced up my hiking shoes.

It was work. Emotional, ugly-crying, tender work. And it didn’t happen alone.

It was Jeana — appropriately challenging and gentle, often in the same breath.

It was my therapist Debbie, who asked good questions and reflected back the better things about me that I couldn’t always see for myself.

It was my spiritual director Scott, who met me wherever I was and gently reminded me that I had been on a productive spiritual path for a lifetime, even when it didn’t feel like it.

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So yes — I am celebrating healing on this trip. I suspect there are aspects of it I haven’t yet seen, things that will reveal themselves in the coming days, or in the years after I’m home.

The journey never ends. But the terrain certainly changes.

I’ve walked through a great deal of terrain in Spain these last few weeks. I’ve also walked through a great deal of terrain in a longer journey of healing — one that started long before Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and won’t end at Santiago either.

Tomorrow: O Cebreiro. Galicia. The spiritual phase, officially.

I am ready for whatever terrain that turns out to be.

Buen Camino.

— Pastor Wade

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Come Walk With Me continues from the road in Spain.

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Tonight I am living a happy accident.

Several days ago I sent emails to albergues in Trabadelo trying to book ahead. Nobody responded until two days ago — too late for the places I had originally intended. So I booked a single hotel room instead.

Tonight, one night before the last big climb and two nights before Jeana arrives, I have a private room, a quiet evening, and one more night of genuine solitude before the road becomes shared.

The foot-dragging of a few Spanish albergues accidentally gave me exactly what I needed.

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I am, somewhat surprisingly, ready for the solo portion to end.

I have known for months that Saturday would mark the transition — Jeana arriving, her nephews, the group, the shared road for the last stretch. I have been prepared for it in the planning sense. What surprises me is that I am prepared for it in the interior sense too. Ready to receive company. Ready to share what I have been carrying alone.

One more full day of solo walking. Then everything changes again.

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Here is something I have not said directly until tonight.

When I first began planning this pilgrimage, I envisioned it as an opportunity to chase some ghosts. I talked about that early in this project — the fears, the wounds, the weight I had carried for decades. I thought the walking and the solitude would help me do that work.

But alongside the planning I also doubled down on recovery and began intensive therapy, because I realized early enough that putting those ghosts in the hands of me and a hike was not going to be sufficient.

My spiritual director Scott and I talked, in the early months of preparation, about this pilgrimage being pregnant with possibility. He offered the image of the Divine Midwife — something new being birthed in and around me. I loved that image. I carried it all the way here.

What I expected, I think, was that the birth would happen on the road. That walking in Spain would deliver the transformation. That somewhere between Saint-Jean and Santiago, the divine wisdom would arrive and I would know it when it came.

Here is what I have actually discovered:

The Divine Midwife delivered early.

The bulk of the healing happened before I left Texas — in the therapy, in the recovery work, in the months of writing. The big interior moments on this road have carried far less weight than I anticipated. Not because the road hasn’t been extraordinary. But because the work was already done.

What this Camino has been, more than anything else, is a celebration of internal healing rather than the healing itself.

I did not see that coming.

I am glad it has.

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Tomorrow the last big climb. Saturday, Jeana.

One more night alone with all of it — the ghosts that have quieted, the stone that has been set down, the “but” that has finally, mostly, lost its grip.

The Divine Midwife delivered. I just didn’t recognize the delivery room.

Buen Camino.

— Pastor Wade

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Come Walk With Me continues from the road in Spain.

Ponferrada → Cacabelos (15.3 km)

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I started writing this post as a travelogue.

Fresh cherries right off the tree. The first hydrangea bush of the season. A random encounter with a Texan named Jeremy from Seguin who now lives in DC and with whom BBQ was promised. The beginning of a landscape covered in flowers and wine.

All true. All worth mentioning. None of it the real story of today.

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This is prime wine country — the Bierzo Valley, one of the celebrated wine regions of Spain. Which is wonderful if you make wine in the Bierzo Valley or enjoy drinking it.

This trip has been, in part, a celebration of thirty years of sobriety. So I am leaving the wine to my Camino friends.

But I want to say something about walking through those vineyards today. Endless rows of grapevines in every direction. The landscape offering me, in abundance, the exact thing I have chosen to live without for three decades — the thing that caused me so much pain in another life.

I stood in the middle of it grateful and at peace.

Not tempted. Not wistful. Not performing serenity. Just genuinely at peace with the beauty of a thing I have chosen not to have. That is probably the best thing I can carry forward from the Bierzo Valley.

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I got to spend most of the afternoon with Cory — my Camino brother — before he moved ahead. We visited, laughed, said goodbye for now. He is walking faster than I will be for the remainder, and so our paths diverge here.

I am grateful for the time. Deeply grateful. We figured out our connection back in the early days of this Camino and there have been many touchpoints — in life, in pain, in the particular humor that emerges when two people recognize each other’s stories without having to explain them. Getting to know Cory has been one of the more significant gifts I have received out here.

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Most of my early Camino family has scattered now. Chelsea, Steve, Liam, Gerald — you are not soon forgotten. I hope we meet again in Texas or wherever the road leads.

As I sit with that tonight I notice something: I am releasing them up the road without feeling like I have opened a wound.

There is a narrative available to me that says I am losing new friends, possibly never to see them again. But I cannot let that be a sad thing. To have never met these people — never laughed and cried and walked and shared with them — that would have been the real loss. What we now share is indelible. The road gave it to us and nothing takes it back.

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What has the long interior stretch given me?

Not the kilometers. Not the vistas, though they have been extraordinary. Not the foot pain or the Meseta heat or the descent into the Bierzo that can still kiss my —

The long stretch gave me people. A way of valuing connection and accepting its loss at the same time. The particular gift of being known quickly and deeply by strangers who became something more than strangers, and then watching them walk ahead, and finding that the gratitude is larger than the grief.

Simple pleasures. Freshly picked cherries. The first hydrangea of the season. Thirty years of sobriety standing quietly in a vineyard, at peace with the beauty of what I have chosen to live without.

That is what the road has given me.

That is what I am carrying into whatever comes next.

*Ultreia et Suseia.*

— Pastor Wade

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*Come Walk With Me continues from the road in Spain.*

El Acebo de San Miguel → Ponferrada (15.4 km)

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It turns out the Cruz de Ferro was over before I arrived.

I mean that in the best possible way.

I wrote yesterday about being thrown by the festive chaos at the cross — the tour buses, the motorcycle pilgrims, the sixty high school students. What I realized sitting at that picnic table in the shade, waiting for the noise to subside, is that I wasn’t waiting for the moment to happen.

The moment had already happened.

My work was done before I stepped on the airplane in San Antonio. It happened in AA meetings and therapy sessions and months of honest writing. The stone I laid at the foot of that cross was a symbol — a meaningful one — but the emptiness where it had been was already there before I arrived.

I’m actually grateful I got thrown at first. It taught me three things:

Kids are gonna be kids. Tour groups that include people who cannot walk a Camino still deserve a chance to leave a burden behind. And my work was complete long before I got there.

The cross held what I brought. I walked away lighter than I arrived. That is enough.

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Now. The descent into the Bierzo Valley.

Holy.

Both yesterday and today — steep, narrow, relentlessly straight downhill, very little meandering, the kind of gradient that makes your legs into something resembling steam engines just to keep you from tumbling.

About halfway down today I took a tumble. Head over heels. I landed on my elbow and mostly on my pack. A scrape on the elbow, a scrape on the knee, a swollen place on my forearm, a jammed finger.

I am okay.

The descent into the Bierzo Valley can nonetheless kiss my — well. You know.

The views coming down were spectacular. My body remains largely unimpressed.

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The highlight of today — once I was vertical again — was touring the Knights Templar Castle in Ponferrada, which dates to the 11th century. The kind of place that makes you stop and reckon with the fact that human beings have been building extraordinary things and walking this road for a very, very long time.

Tomorrow I hope to spend some time with my friend Cory before he moves ahead for the rest of the trip. It feels a bit like I have a new brother. I look forward to that more than I can easily say.

And I am four days from reuniting with Jeana.

God is good. The Camino provides.

Ultreia et Suseia.

— Pastor Wade

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Come Walk With Me continues from the road in Spain.

Rabanal del Camino → El Acebo de San Miguel (16.8 km)

The Cruz de Ferro

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There is a straight answer to today’s prompt, and there is a more complicated subtext underneath it. I’ll start straight.

If you’ve been following this writing for a while, you know what I was carrying up that mountain. I brought a rock — symbolic of all the ways I have put a “but” after any good thing I could say about myself, particularly as it relates to my worthiness to be forgiven and to be loved. That is a short sentence that encapsulates a lifetime of pain, of editing myself to please others, and a whole lot of interior work that allowed me to feel ready to leave those things behind today.

I wrote last night that I was ready. I was. That part went off without a hitch.

I can walk away from the Cruz de Ferro quite a bit lighter. The truth is that lightness has been building for months. Today was the opportunity to leave it symbolically, and I am grateful for that.

Now for the subtext.

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Yesterday at my albergue, a tour bus pulled up and about sixty high school students got off. Wheeled suitcases. Loud hallways. Typical teenage behavior — not unexpected, a little annoying, not unexpected.

This morning I navigated through the same crowd on the way out. On the walk up toward Foncebadon and the Cruz de Ferro I felt good. I took my time. The landscape was gorgeous. I kept telling myself it was just another walk — and that worked for a while.

Until I got to Foncebadon.

I don’t think there is anything magical about the Cruz de Ferro. I want to say that clearly. But I will also say that it is significant for me, and I was grateful to finally be approaching it.

After a short hike from Foncebadon I came around a corner and saw the cross about 300 meters ahead.

I don’t know exactly what I expected. But it wasn’t what I found.

It is right next to the road. There were tour buses in a parking lot across from it. The people there were loud and boisterous. A group of motorcycle pilgrims were celebrating loudly while posing for photographs just below the cross. Some tour bus visitors were donning medals before approaching — I still don’t know what that was about.

I went and found a picnic table back in the trees to settle myself and wait for things to quiet down.

Sitting there with my own thoughts, I remembered something I wrote a few days ago: the road is just the road. This pile of rocks by the road is, in itself, nothing but a pile of rocks. My attitude began to quiet.

And then the sixty high school students arrived. All of them. Climbing up to the cross, loud, taking photos, jacking with my momentary serenity.

So there I sat — at a picnic table in the shade, a fair distance from the din, waiting. I told myself I would let the kids have the table if they asked, as long as they agreed to be silent.

I had become that guy.

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I decided instead to respect their youthful exuberance. I walked up to the cross, laid my stone, lingered to look at all the stones and mementos left by pilgrims across the years, and departed.

I think I had envisioned a moment of triumph. Or magic. Or something I couldn’t quite name.

That moment didn’t happen there.

But it did happen. It happened in countless AA meetings. It happened in hours of therapy sessions. It happened in all of this writing. It happened in the pre-dawn walks and the hard decisions and the hypothermia and the foot and the Meseta.

It happened long before I laid that stone.

As I walked down the hill I shook my head at my near miss of a premeditated resentment — the expectation that almost became a disappointment. I left grateful. I spent the rest of the day walking through stunning beauty as the mountains rose and fell around me.

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Five-year-old Wade would have loved this day.

He would have been loud and boisterous atop the sacred rock pile, climbing without ceremony, taking photos, eating lunch in the sun.

And so 64-year-old Wade decided to be satisfied and complete.

It was a good day.

A great day.

Buen Camino!

— Pastor Wade

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Come Walk With Me continues from the road in Spain.

From the Road — June 7

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*Murias de Rechivaldo → Rabanal del Camino (15.5 km)*

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The Cruz de Ferro.

Tomorrow is the day.

I am ready. Really.

As I sat down to write tonight I realized two things. First, I intended to write more about the Cruz de Ferro during these weeks on the road and I haven’t. Second, I need to take you back to something I wrote months ago — before I left Texas, before the hypothermia in the Pyrenees, before the foot and the Meseta and the friends and all of it — to give you the context for what it means that I am ready tonight.

So what follows includes some of what I wrote in Post 8, back in the earliest days of this project. I have added to it where something has shifted. The original words are there. So is who I am now.

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I have lived in 55 different places.

Not 55 towns, though there have been many of those too. I mean 55 apartments, houses, dormitories, rooms — 55 addresses that were supposed to be home. Some of them twice.

The weight of that number is significant.

I was left alone in many of those places from a very young age. Three years old. A child who learned early — not from being told, but from the particular education of experience — that safety was not something you could count on. That the ground could shift. That people left, or the situation changed, or you moved again, and you had better stay ready.

My default emotional stance for most of my life has been what I now know to call high alert. Not healthy attention to risk. Something closer to constant, low-grade fear — a vigilance that never fully turns off, that scans every room before relaxing into it, that keeps something held back because exposure has historically not been safe.

It has only been fairly recently that I could name this. That I could look at the pattern of my life — the guardedness, the chameleon behavior, the quick deflection when things got too close — and recognize it not as personality but as protection. A system built by a child who needed it and never got the memo that it was okay to stand down.

As I approach tomorrow I can’t say I never feel like that. But the feeling has dissipated over the last weeks and months.

The “but” that I have written about throughout this project — the word that kept attaching itself to the end of every good thing I tried to believe about myself — came from a three-year-old left alone. From a dinner table where abundance felt like danger. From 55 addresses and the particular exhaustion that comes from never quite arriving anywhere and feeling safe.

Until very recently, fear has been running my mind for a very long time.

But tonight, while that operating system is still in my brain, it’s not in charge.

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Tomorrow I arrive at the Cruz de Ferro. The Iron Cross. It stands at the highest point of the route, nearly 1,500 meters above sea level, on a simple wooden pole that pilgrims have been adding stones to for centuries. The tradition is to carry a stone from home — something that represents a burden you are ready to release — and leave it at the base of the cross.

I am carrying fifty years of high alert. I am carrying the fear, the mistrust, the crippling self-criticism. I am carrying the “but.”

When I wrote that months ago I didn’t know exactly what it would feel like to set it down.

Tonight I know: I am ready.

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I wrote early in this project that one of the key elements of pilgrimage is intention. That you walk it with purpose — not just feet on a road, but a soul pointed toward something.

My intention has been tested over these weeks. The hypothermia on Day 2. The foot. The hard decisions. The loneliness and the community and the grief and the grace. I have never written this many consecutive days in my life. That is what intention looks like when it’s real.

I meant it.

Tomorrow I will walk away from that symbolic stone — set on a pile of other burden-stained stones at the foot of a centuries-old cross — and move forward. Toward more healing. More forgiveness. More self-love and self-care.

I am not the child who was molested. I am not the boy who trembled at the dinner table. I am not the cultivated person I spent decades wanting you to see.

I can be forgiven and I can be loved.

And in fact, I am.

The cross has been standing there for a thousand years.

It can hold what I’m bringing. So I don’t have to.

*Buen Camino.*

— Pastor Wade

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Come Walk With Me continues from the road in Spain.

Santibáñez de Valdeiglesias → Murias de Rechivaldo (16.6 km)

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Today’s prompt:

“You’re beginning the climb toward Galicia  now. The flatter roads of the Meseta are behind you. What does it feel like in your body and your spirit when the ground rises — when the road asks more of you just as you thought you’d found your rhythm?”

If you had asked me this question on May 13th or 14th — when I was climbing the Pyrenees in a storm, hypothermic, being helped into a taxi by strangers — my answer would have been very different.

Today the climbing is different. I am different.

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On every Camino I have walked, there comes a point where my mind and body actually prefer going up to going down. I am there, I have been for a couple of weeks. The steeper inclines are still a challenge, but the challenge now is muscular — mostly my hips — rather than cardiovascular. When I get tired I slow down, shorten my steps, and recover in a couple of minutes without stopping. That is progress, for which I am grateful

But here is my pushback on the prompt: there is rhythm no matter what the road is doing. The rhythm is never constant or the same — but it’s always there.

Walking the Camino feels like listening to music. Every song has a different rhythm than the one before it. All of them can be great while being completely different. I rarely walk in one rhythm for very long, and I have stopped expecting to.

When I see the road rise or fall ahead of me, I don’t change my approach much anymore. The road is the road. At this point it just exists. It doesn’t feel like an opponent. It doesn’t feel like it has a conscience or an agenda.

The road is just the road.

If there’s an opponent out here, it’s my magic magnifying mind and my mf-ing right foot!

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The mind is much quieter than it was three or four weeks ago. The foot is annoying, but it only acts up in the latter third of the day. I have accepted that I’m going to have some foot pain most days and it’s just pain — not damage. There’s a difference, and knowing the difference matters.

Is there an existential lesson in that? Maybe. The way I’m handling both things now is simply to acknowledge that the road is varied and it’s a road — gravel or grass or cobblestone — and I take it as it comes. With the foot I compare today to yesterday, yesterday to the day before, and realize that in any case I’m going to be okay.

That mindset is going to matter over the next several days as the climbing gets more serious.

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Somewhere in the higher reaches of this climb is the Cruz de Ferro. The Iron Cross.

There was a time not long ago when I was genuinely worried about that moment — worried about getting it right, about being ready, about whether I had done enough interior work to deserve whatever release the cross might offer.

I have let that go.

I know what I am leaving there. I know it’s possible — maybe even probable — that I’ll need to let it go again. And again after that, for a while. That’s okay. The more I remember, process, and release these things, the less power they carry when they return. That is what I have come to call the Onion of Authenticity — layers coming off, the core becoming clearer, the fears arriving with less force each time.

We’ll explore that more after I’m a few days on the other side of the cross.

For now: the road is the road. My mind is quieter. My foot is annoying.

And I am, mile by mile, okay.

*Buen Camino.*

— Pastor Wade

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Come Walk With Me continues from the road in Spain.