Immediately as I emerged from my albergue, I saw a lanky man with a headlamp and a backpack just below me on the road. Following him made sense.

“What is your intention for walking the Camino?” That is the question I knew I was going to be asked when arrived in Saint Jean de Pied Port to get officially registered for the pilgrimage.

I had nearly eight hours on the train which led to a rich time of reflection. One question surfaced almost immediately. It was “Where can I best serve?”

I knew I didn’t want to do this alone anymore. I would be starting out alone, but I wondered…

Pilgrimages really start the day that you commit rather than the day you take the first step on the trail.

I was feeling calm. In fact, not only calm, but liberated! I wrote in my journal on the flight from Calgary to Paris, “Opening! Opening! Opening!”

As I boarded the plane in Portland to Paris with a quick layover in Calgary, my heart was swirling with varying emotions associated with letting go.

It was my executive coach who first noticed that I had gone strangely silent.

“It feels sort of funny to write this—to say that I spent five weeks walking across Spain for two really good pictures…

It got so ridiculous at some points that I was thinking about my experiences in blog titles rather than the purer language of feelings, descriptions and honest reactions.

On Wednesday, August 30 at 7:00 p.m. (Pacific time), Brandon will host a “sendoff” for me as I embark on the Camino de Santiago for a pilgrimage that is both personal and missional.

Paris first. Then off to St. Jean Pied de Port for the first night of the formal Camino. At least that is what I thought.

“I write. I experience. I teach.” Those words feel pure and true.

THE BIG LAUNCH—If all goes the way I am imagining it, I will take the months of May, June, July of next year to cycle the 4,100 miles of the Lewis and Clark Trail building the momentum for putting a pilgrimage infrastructure on this route.

Such a journey takes great intentionality—not in the sense of planning, but in the sense of listening, moment by moment, for the next right step.

Pilgrimages don’t actually start the day you take Step One on some specific route. Pilgrimages start the day that you DECIDE when you are going to take Step One.