Whispers from the Camino: Letting Go

September 1, 2023

PDX airport carpet

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. Of course, I was anticipating the 500-mile adventure of walking the Camino, but the weeks leading up to this famous Spanish pilgrimage were spent preparing for the uncertainty that lay before me.

I was leaving for this experience with no guaranteed work to come back to (I had an interview for a half time interim pastor in Eastern Oregon, but no decision had been made by the time I left for Spain). My income from the final agreement from my former position was ending at the end of September and my health insurance at the end of October.

With no guarantee of where I might end up next I prepared my house to be rented out as an Airbnb. The timing was good for my son and he agreed to manage the rentals and the property for this next unknown stage of my life.

I had potential inklings of what might come next. I had had conversations with various national entities about working on a Trail of Tears Pilgrimage Project, but nothing solid was in place. I was also planning to meet with the leaders of the British Pilgrimage Trust in England after the Camino, but again, those meetings were all part of a long-term vision and would do little to address the looming end of my income and health insurance.

Leaving my house behind in favor of a 21-pound pack.

But the letting go had more to do with relationships and community than it had to do with the uncertainty of my financial situation. In 2020 I bought a house in the Portland area after seventeen years of renting apartments and homes while I pursued transitional work around the state of Oregon. As much as I loved the transitional work I yearned constantly for a community. In 2020, I finally felt that my employment was secure enough to put roots down. I bought this house just a few miles from my oldest child and his family and a few miles in the other direction from my youngest child. After years of moving around I was delighted and relieved to be settling down near family and in a community where I had many friends.

But my employment was not as secure as I had hoped and in 2023 I found myself once again discerning my future direction. I have always been a person called to serve the community and so just getting a job for job’s sake has never been palatable to me. Over the last few years I had been making more connections with organizations associated with pilgrimages and adventure travel.

I decided to go for broke, as they sometimes say. I would study the infrastructure of the Camino de Santiago in Spain and the budding infrastructure of the British Pilgrimage Trust to see what I could bring back to the States where I could advocate for repurposing some churches on designated routes in America as pilgrim hostels. With more than 175,000 miles of designated routes and an increasing number of church closures this seemed like an idea ripe for our time.

Flying over the Canadian Rockies—magnificent!

Interestingly enough this decision represented a parallel process. I would be studying the infrastructure of pilgrimages at the same time that I was on my own “life pilgrimage” trusting that Life/God/the Universe would provide for me before I reached the end of my pilgrimage in October. Pilgrimages are all about trust and setting off on this 500-mile adventure with no income to come back to felt like a pilgrimage on steroids!

As I boarded the plane to Paris I was aware of a very heavy pressure on my chest—the grief of letting go of my family, my friends, my home and my dream of settling in the Portland community. It’s not that I had a plan NOT to return. It’s just that I had NO plan at all except to walk the Camino and see where life took me after that.