An Update, and a Farewell for a While
·Stepping off the page and onto the road — with a door left open for anyone ready to begin.
I am going to do the thing I have spent these months writing about.
For weeks now these letters have circled a single claim: that the knowing which matters is not believed but walked — that the path is a practice, that the body is where the truth finally lands, that a road put under your feet teaches what no doctrine can. I have made that case sitting still at a desk. It is time I stood up and honoured it.
I am going to walk the Camino.
Some hundreds of kilometres of old pilgrim road, a pack, a pair of boots, and the particular clarity that only arrives when the mind has run out of things to say and there is nothing left but the next step. Pilgrims have walked it for a thousand years, and not one of them, I suspect, came back with a better argument. They came back changed. That is the only credential the road issues, and it is the only one I am after.
So this is an update, and it is a farewell — for a while.
The weekly letters will go quiet for a season. There will be some weeks of silence on the road, and then, before the year turns, I mean to write to you from the far side of it — letters home, you might call them, from a man who finally went and walked what he’d been teaching. The classes pause with me and resume in December, when I’m back with the dust still on my boots. And in February a new beginners’ group begins — so if you have been reading these letters from the edge of the circle, wondering whether to step in, that is your door, and it will be open.
And there is a second road waiting on the far side of the first. When I am back, I mean to give my own practice the room the working weeks never allowed — long daily meditation, four to six hours of it, and letting the reading and the writing grow up out of that stillness rather than being squeezed in beside it. Building the February group is part of the same movement, not a project bolted on: the natural overflow of a practice given space to breathe. I say it plainly, and a little sheepishly, as a promise to keep — the teacher had better go on walking his own road.
I want to be careful about how I say the next part, because it would be easy to dress a simple thing in too much cloth. This is not a supply of content pausing. The walking is not a gap between essays. It is the thing itself — my practice — complete on its own terms, gift enough without a word written about it. If I never sent another letter, the road would still have been worth every step. Hopefully I will find some places in nature, the churches and cathedrals along the way where I can meditate. That, too, is something these months were trying to say: the work is a gift in the doing, not a means to something else.
So I am not really leaving. I am going ahead on the same road we have been on together — just, for once, with my actual feet. Walk it with me in spirit. Let the practice continue in you while I am gone; the quiet does not need me to hold it. And when I come back, dust still on my boots, I will tell you what the ground and the blisters taught me that the desk never could.
Beyond belief — into knowing. Some of it, it turns out, you can only find out on foot.
As my teacher used to say: ‘Practice, Practice, Practice.’
Until the far side of the road —