Whispers from the Camino: Opening

September 1, 2023

If the first flight was mostly about coming to terms with the degree of letting go I was experiencing, the second flight was about a feeling of opening.

Canadian Rockies from the airplane

I was struck by how quickly I made that emotional pivot. I am sure I knew what it was about. Although I left Portland International Airport on a departing flight to Paris, it had one stop in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I am western boy. I was born in Montana, raised at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and went to college near the Owyhee Mountains in Idaho.

Flying into Canada almost felt like coming home. I was leaving the rainy climate of Portland and the Willamette Valley (a place I love), but rather than feeling like I was leaving the familiar (Portland) for the unfamiliar (Paris), I was leaving the familiar (Portland) for a place even more familiar (the rugged mountains of Canada).

Then I boarded the evening plane in the dark in Calgary for a final flight to Paris. And almost immediately my emotions pivoted. I was no longer grieving a past; now I was preparing myself for a completely wide open future.

Having no plans is sort of like a double-edged sword. It kind of depends on how one looks at it. On the one hand, my secure income was going to run out in four weeks time and my health insurance in less than nine weeks time. That could have been the source for a great deal of anxiety.

In fact, in normal circumstances if I had those few weeks, every waking minute would have been putting in place some security. Instead, I had the full two months already committed to walking the Camino and, potentially, doing two weeks of pilgrimage research in England. I had a full schedule and none of it was about addressing the end of my financial security.

And 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!” There was a whole world of possibility before me. I had no obligations. I had no goals I was trying to accomplish. I had only a commitment to walk the Camino and expect that whatever was going to come next in my life would show up during the walk.

It was ironic, really. I had spent the last six years as an executive in a large church system advocating for a pilgrimage approach to their ecclesiastical future. That is, less planning and more trusting. Now, I was being asked to model it personally.

I should have felt anxious, maybe even terrified. But I wasn’t. I was calm. The lack of a known future actually felt like a gift. If God or the Universe had a message or a place for me, there were no excuses and nothing to keep me from saying, “Yes.” I was free to let the Universe have her way with me.