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.

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.

Two little fish are swimming and an older fish swims up and says, “Morning kids. How’s the water?” The two fish look at each other and one says to the other, “What the hell is water?” What world are we swimming in that we are blind to?

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.