What's in the Pilgrimage Creations Newsletter this month?

• Finding your Camino Rhythms date change.
• Preparation for Walking a Pilgrimage seminar June 22.
• From Steps.
• Walking classes start again.
• Pope compares faith to long walk.
• Ten years ago in Santiago.
• Camino numbers.

Finding your Camino Rhythms

Our Finding your Camino Rhythms pilgrimage package is quickly coming up on us.

Please note that we have changed the starting date from September 10 to September 17 due to a scheduling conflict. We hope that is not a problem for anyone. So far it has not been. The walk now will be Sept 17-24. Because of we changed the starting date, the deadline for signing up has also been moved back a week. You now have until July 17 to sign up. That is coming up very soon. Click the link above or go to Our Offerings, Finding your Camino Rhythms on Pilgrimage Creations for details.

We look forward walking with you on your first days of the often life-changing pilgrimage of the Camino de Santiago. We will share with you our view of the spiritual, emotional, and physical rhythms that help make the Camino experience not only rich and joyful but also a path to improving life. We seek to guide you into a spiritual retreat and personal quest that the Camino can be.

Preparation for Walking a Pilgrimage

Our Spiritual and Practical Preparation for Walking a Pilgrimage, an online workshop, is coming up June 22.

Using our ten years of pilgrimage experience, this workshop encourages you to become more aware of your “call” and motivation for going on your pilgrimage. In addition, the workshop gives you many insights into the practical side of pilgrimage walks. We encourage you to face fears and emotional feelings and come to see them as gifts to help you to discover new insights. We help you not only to decide what things to take along and but also to discover and celebrate the gifts of the joys, doubts, crisis, and fears that will surely come up before you walk and as you walk.

In the past we have facilitated this workshop in many group settings. Now you take the workshop to the comfort of your own home at your computer and save the expense of travel and lodging. Click the link above or go to Our Offerings, Workshops on Pilgrimage Creations for details.

Steps

Here are a few posts from Steps, our almost-daily sayings, meditations, and observations on our pilgrimage through life.

Accept
When I cannot even figure out myself, I end up simply accepting myself as I am. How can I expect to treat others any differently?

Expose the light
Accept both knowledge and darkness. If you worry about expelling the darkness, you may forget to expose the light. If you expose the light, the darkness fades.

Write
For the most part, I have little evidence that what I write will be “of use” to others. But I do know that I have learned from a lot of other writers, and I often have not told them so. If you are a writer, believe that the same is true, and will be true, of your writing. You owe it to your invisible reader to write.

Walking classes

Petra's walking classes in Santa Fe, New Mexico, are off and running to rave reviews. She took off the last month to visit her mother in Germany. The classes will begin again on June 17 and 19.

This is a walking class of a different kind. You will learn how to walk with more joy, awareness, and relaxation. At the same time you will develop your strength and health. Step by step you will experience how walking can also be a meditation.

Both pregnant moms and several others have already enthusiastically taken part. Click the link above or go to Our Offerings, Walking classes on Pilgrimage Creations for details.

Faith and walking

In a recent audience with Italian students the new pope, Frances, compared walking and faith. When a student doubting his faith asked for words of encouragement, the Pope likened faith to a long walk. “To walk is the art of looking at the horizon, thinking about where I want to go but also enduring the fatigue. And many times, the walk is difficult, it is not easy…. There is darkness…even days of failure…one falls… But always think this: do not be afraid of failure. Do not be afraid of falling. In the art of walking, what is important is not avoiding the fall but not remaining fallen. Get up quickly, continue on, and go.” (Text from Vatican Radio website.)

Ten years ago

June 14 is our 10-year anniversary of arriving tearfully in Santiago on our first Camino. I had walked from Roncesvalles but Petra had walked all the way from Lake Constance in southern Germany.

Five days later on June 19 we walked into Finisterra and ended our Camino life and began a new one at the ocean, the beginning and end of all life.

It's hard to believe it is that long ago. Petra and I met in Puente la Reina May 10th on the way. We married each other soon afterwards. It has been a wonderful decade since.

For a journey ten years back, click on these two links to look once again at the pictures and text I posted of Santiago and Finisterra just after the pilgrimage.

Camino numbers

With five months of 2013 behind us, 46,000+ people have received their Compostelas as of the end of May. That is 10% more than at the same time last year. Each year for the past several, the numbers have been going up around 10%. The total for 2012 was just under 192,500. Add 10% to that and you can project almost 212,000 to get a Compostela by the end of 2013.

That is a crowd. When do we see saturation? When do the people along the route just get tired of the traffic—even though they are making a lot of money from it? When do the pilgrims stop increasing? Stop coming?

The Camino those of us who first walked at the beginning of the century is no more. We have to look to the Via de la Plata or even the Camino de Levante in Spain to find the solitude that we could sometimes find at that early time on the Camino Français. Or maybe we stay in the US and walk the Camino Real between the missions in California. The Camino de Levante and the Camino Real are getting back to the solitude and singular journeys of the mid-90s Camino Français. You could also just take to the roads and Walk across North America. You will not find fellow walkers there. But then some of you like the camaraderie of the big crowds. That's what makes the world interesting.