The pilgrimage shifts and changes, and continues to guide and provide.

When you come off the Camino, the pace of life inevitably picks up. For 25 days, we walked at most 25 or so kilometers a day, over 6 to 8 hours. Since we rented our little Renault car on Saturday evening, we've traveled about 600 or 700 kilometers in the same amount of time. We have driven down along the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean Sea, and now are over east of Marseilles. That's a lot of ground covered in a very short amount of time.

A very different pilgrimage from the Camino, but still a pilgrimage. What are we doing in France? We are following an inspired path to honor and explore the sacred feminine, yet in a different way from when we walked. Now, we are visiting specific sites that offer us a very specific connection to the sacred feminine. When we walked the Camino, every step was for the sacred feminine. It was a more inward journey. It felt like each step was an invitation and an invocation.

On the train to Paris:

Last year I walked the last 170 kilometers of El Camino de Santiago and then traveled by train the Celtic Camino. I traveled from Santiago up through France to Scotland in 9 days. This year I walked for nearly a month and only got to the border of Spain and France from Santiago! It's all so relative - time and distance wise.

When you travel on a pilgrimage by car or train, the destinations become what is important. The space in between is just somewhere to travel through. The pilgrimage becomes about the experience of being at the destination.

When you walk the pilgrimage path, the time and space inbetween is the pilgrimage. Walking slows the experience down to a pace that demands that the time and space expand to become the experience itself. Walking is the pilgrimage. The destination is a part of the experience, a guidepost along the way, and is not, cannot be the experience itself. You get up, you walk, you eat, you walk, you sleep, you walk. That's what you do, you walk. The journey is in the walking. You get up to walk. You eat to walk. You sleep to walk. You move to walk. It's so simple.

I love to walk. I loved getting to walk for 25 days. I. Just want to keep walking...and walking. I deeply appreciate the simple act of walking. I get to experience all of who I am when I walk - who I am as divine, who I am as human; my fears, doubts, and concerns - my love, faith, and trust; my thinking and my thoughts; my movement and my feelings; my aches and pains, my joys and gratitude. All of me shows up when I walk.

The walking creates the journey, and the journey is the pilgrimage. The space inbetween, the pause in between the breaths, is the journey.

Walking is a natural pace for our human bodies. Yes, we can run to move faster, but on a very basic level, we can only move as fast as our bodies can walk or run. This reality opens up the time-space dynamic so that we can experience what is occurring in the moment, both internally and externally, fully.

When we start to move more quickly than our bodies can move on their own, such as with the help of a bicycle, car, train or airplane, we have to focus on the destination. We cannot experience as fully the moment the more quickly we move. And the faster we move, the more important the destination becomes. Not to say that we cannot enjoy the travel, but travel is the means to the end, not the end in and of itself.

Getting to experience this dynamic of a walking pilgrimage immediately followed by a car/train pilgrimage now twice, I am profoundly aware of how different they feel to me. While I can appreciate the gifts and qualities of both, and have received so much from both.

So, for the past three days, we have been traveling by car from Saint Jean and Bayonne, to Lourdes (unexpected stop on the pilgrimage), Toulouse, Saintes Maries de la Mer, Arles, and Saint Maximin la Sainte-la Baume. The focus was certainly on the destinations, and the time is between fully supported our intention to be at these different wonderful places.

I will share what each of these places was about for us and why we chose to go to each of these places another time. As we head to Paris for the last leg of our journey, there is a perfection and a completion with our experiences over the past few days. We were blessed to still be guided and provided for by the Camino. Magic continued to occur, angels showed up just as and when we needed them, and awareness and understandings impulsed for both of us. Somehow, both pilgrimages were necessary for the whole experience. One without the other would have been incomplete. Two complementary aspects that are working together synergistically to create a more profound whole.

But that's for the next blog.

A bientot!

Suseya,
Sarah
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