In my last couple of blog posts, I have shared some of the physical and mental challenges of being stopped and detoured, with my knee injury, on my (virtual) pilgrimage.

I had been so focused on adapting to my new circumstances, that I almost forgot that I was on a pilgrimage!

One of the first questions that I had, as I sat in the doctor’s office, waiting for the x-ray results, was: “What is a pilgrimage if I can’t walk?”

I am only just now beginning to explore that question.

As the first part of that exploration, I have a related question: “How can being a pilgrim help me now?”

Maybe now (stopped and detoured) I can begin to understand more about what it really is to be a pilgrim.

I know a few things about being a pilgrim, from my prior virtual pilgrimages, and from reading a lot of pilgrim memoirs.

Pilgrims get stopped.

Pilgrims get detoured.

And:

• They carry only the essentials.
• They find their own rhythm.
• They trust their path.
• They are mindful as they walk.
• They are open and receptive, and they listen.
• They meet life with creativity.

I believe that all of these qualities of being a pilgrim can help me now, as my injury heals.

It’s the bit about carrying only the essentials that has captured my attention this week.

I have discovered, through my experience of all of the things that I can’t currently do, that very few things are essential, at least right now.

Especially the things that we think that we must do.

It’s amazing! Who knew?

Examples:

• As I couldn’t easily get to my computer, I learned that lots of things that we do on the computer are not essential.
• When I couldn’t reach anything beyond arm’s length, I learned that I really could let go reading that book that I thought I needed to read.
• And when it was no longer possible to trim things or mow things on the property, I realized that the natural wildness on our habitat serves the woodland creatures better.

This might not all be Front Page News.

But here’s what might be Front Page News: It might just be the best “use” of the gift of life, right here, right now, to sit on the screened porch and watch the leaves blow and the birds sing.

“What is essential is invisible to the eye; only the heart can see it rightly.”

-Antoine de Saint Exupery

What are your essentials?

Remember the bit in the last blog post where I said I was accepting where I was (injured and limited)?

Well, I thought I had accepted “what is,” but this week, now that the physical pain has subsided a bit, the inner challenges started to arise. It was almost as if I didn’t know who I was when I couldn’t do all the things that I do.

Apparently, I am a Human Doing.

Didn’t see that coming. I talk a good game about “who you are is a lot more about who you ‘be’ than about what you do.” 🙂

The sum of it seemed to be an inner Production Critic with a story along these lines: “I’d better get a plan together for how I’m going to use this recovery time, because what if I get to the end of the 6+ weeks, and have nothing to show for it?”

My mind then leaped into high gear, concocting plans and schedules, for reading all those books I never read, writing all those things I never write, sketching, learning a new skill, etc.

The unmanaged mind can be a dangerous thing.

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Peter Druker

The essence of it all was that there was a part of me that wanted to fill in all the now unknown territory that lay before me, so that I didn’t have to sit in the discomfort of being in unknown territory (on a pilgrimage! How perfect, right?)

Pilgrims get detoured.

Actually, I believe that the unknown territory in our lives is exactly where the potential gifts of growth lie, in wait for our discovery. But that doesn’t make the experience of being in unknown territory comfortable.

I noticed that a deeper voice in me had a different perspective than the Production Critic:

• What if you let the story tell itself to you, instead of you writing the script?
• Is it possible that there is meaning and purpose in the silence and space?
• What if this is a different kind of opportunity to be a pilgrim, one who really trusts the journey?

Have you ever had a technology device that develops a glitch so bad that you have to do a factory reset, restoring it to its original condition?

This feels like a factory reset.

Where are you detoured?

What is a pilgrimage when you can’t walk?

This is the question I am now faced with, but this week I’ve been occupied with more banal issues.

I fell and broke my knee. I will be off the trail with no walking for at least 6 weeks. I have a brace and a walker. The walker is to allow me to move for only absolute necessities. I am to stay off my broken knee as much as is humanly possible.

So this week has been about pain, inconvenience, adaptation, release, and acceptance.

Pain

As any of you who have had broken bones know, at first there’s a lot of swelling and pain, and that makes it hard to sleep. Having chosen to pass on narcotics, my sole option for pain control is Tylenol and for the first few days, it wasn’t completely effective. The pain wasn’t excruciating, but it was difficult to ignore. Pain takes a lot of energy.

Inconvenience

It’s astonishing how much we take for granted when we are mobile, until we aren’t mobile. It took a while to establish new strategies for getting around, even for the minimal amount of getting around that I am allowed to do.

Adaptation

Pretty soon, I adapted to being on a walker. We humans are flexible beings and we are good at adapting. I do think that adapting is different than accepting. I am adapting to the new circumstances and limitations, which leads to…..

Release

There are a lot of things that I just need to let go for now. Top on my list was walking, which, as I have described before, is (I thought) essential to my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. The days unfolded and revealed themselves to be a constant stream of little releases, as my world of normal activities kept shrinking.

• That book that you wanted to read that’s sitting by your bedside, way back in the bedroom? Let it go.
• Want that pair of glasses across the room? Forget it.
• Carry your dinner from the kitchen to the dining room table? Not happening.
• Pop out the back door and put the recyclables in the bin? Think again.

Having to use a walker is certainly not the end of the world; for millions of people, it is a way of life. But it is an adjustment and a practice in letting go, and in discerning what’s essential.

Acceptance

I am massively fortunate that this wasn’t a lot worse, and that it is a temporary condition.

Pilgrims get stopped. They get detoured.

In the end, I can only feel huge gratitude as I begin to accept where I am and make a promise to receive whatever the gifts from this experience turn out to be. My gratitude extends also, of course, to my husband and all of my friends for their support.

It will be interesting to see what shows up on the journey of this pilgrimage, especially the inner journey, as the next few weeks unfold.

Where have you been stopped?

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my craving for inner spaciousness, and how I was committing to more time to just be in emptiness, as part of my daily pilgrim’s practice.

It has felt so good. Room to breathe. Room for my mind to stand down.

The hard part has been resisting the urge to fill that inner spaciousness by bringing an agenda in my mind of things that I think I need to know right now.

Allowing inner spaciousness has resulted in an ease in moving through my life, and an increased trust that the answers will reveal themselves as I need them.

Cultivating inner spaciousness is what many pilgrims do, intentionally, on their walks. They empty their minds to become present to the Now moment, and in that, many begin to strongly trust that their needs will always be met, at exactly the right time.

“Pilgrims are persons in motion passing through territories not their own, seeking something we might call completion, or perhaps clarity will do as well, a goal to which only spirit’s compass points the way.”

H. Richard Niebuhr

So, cultivating inner space is becoming an enduring part of being a pilgrim for me, and it is what makes my spirit’s compass points available to me.

This week I made another discovery about what it is to be a pilgrim.

Under various circumstances, I started asking the question: What would a pilgrim do?

Here’s an example of that practice.

I woke up on Monday to a list of undesirable administrative tasks, a mile long. I so wanted to convince myself that I was ill and needed rest, or just need a huge amount of self-care, in service of taking good care of myself.

But that wasn’t true, so I was just stuck with a huge inertia, resisting doing the list.

Then, I suddenly remembered that I am a pilgrim.

What would a pilgrim do, if they woke up, and didn’t feel like walking?

They would walk anyway.

So, I walked. All day I walked through that list, ticking off each item as I went.

And whenever I lost desire or momentum to do the list, I just remembered to ask: What would a pilgrim do? A pilgrim would keep walking.

That day I got an amazing amount done. And, even better, it felt really good, because I honored my commitment to being a pilgrim.

So if you get stuck this week, ask yourself “What would a pilgrim do?” and see what happens.

One of the gifts of this pilgrimage – already – is that I have realized that I live expecting myself to be either “All In” or “Not In”. This thought occurred to me as I was walking the other day.

That way of living leaves no space or permission for Not Knowing.

I saw a social media meme that said: “Be all in or get out. There is no halfway.” (Couldn’t locate attribution.)

If there’s no halfway, where are:

• exploring
• discovering
• not knowing
• on the way to figuring it out, and
• a million other in-between points that represent being-in-process?

What about being all in, fully committed, to walk the path, and to discover what is right for us as we go along?

I know that I have ditched some potentially worthy projects over the years because I didn’t feel “All In” for the outcome as I thought about starting the project.

As I let these projects go, I told myself two very questionable and related “truths”:

• It takes “all in” to get it done (anything else is simply not enough).
• If I’m not “all in” for the project, I’m not committed enough.

I was living All In or Not In.

Now I question this way of living.

Momentum and commitment can build along the way to a very successful conclusion.

Sometimes being fully committed to “finding out” is the best place to be. That gives me room to discern what is truly mine to do.

I’ve learned from this pilgrimage that “all in” is not really the most useful criteria for whether to proceed or not, on a journey or a project. This will open up a lot more potential opportunities for me in my life.

What is important is to keep walking, until I find out whether the journey is mine to do.

Whether it is raining or sunny, and whether they want to or not, pilgrims keep walking, unless they are too injured or sick to walk.

They may not feel “all in”. “All of them” may not be “in”. But they walk anyway.

Maybe that is really what “all in” is.

I am All In for walking, and I am All In for discovering what is mine to do.

What are you All In for?

I started this week with one of those undeniable urges to clear out my office space.

As a creative person, I always have a lot of projects on-the-go. I’ve long ago accepted about myself that I work best with my in-process projects stacked all around me, where I can see them, so that I can just pick them up and work on them when inspiration strikes. It maintains a feeling of connection and momentum with them for me.

But there is always a limit. One day I wake up and I just cannot stand those stacks for one more minute.

Then I have to stop everything and clear my space, and then re-organize it.

This is what happened this week in my pilgrimage.

I could not believe the breathing room I had when I was done.

Then I noticed that it wasn’t really about outer clearing at all. Well, it was a little bit…..

Even more, it was about a craving for inner spaciousness.

“Presence is an inner state of spaciousness.”

Eckhart Tolle

I am always stunned at how precisely our inner world is mirrored in our outer world, and vice versa.

So this week, I have respected my need for more inner spaciousness, and I have given myself more meditation time where I can just sit and experience emptiness.

I don’t know what this space is for, or why I needed it so much right now, but I trust these strong inner signals, and I try to be present to them and honor them.

What is the spaciousness that you need?

My intentions for how I want to be as a pilgrim have been slowly revealing themselves to me in the last few weeks.

I’ve just been letting them arise from within, rather than to try to push to consolidate them.

In my blog post on Sustainability, I mentioned that there were two things that would help sustain me through the long haul of the journey: patience to wait for the answers, and space to be open to receive.

Those qualities still feel essential to me, so here they are, stated as intentions:

• to be patient with myself, and with the journey of being a pilgrim, and
• to be open to receive: help and support, answers to my questions, and direction, for who to be and for my life

And, to those, I now add two more:

• to be grateful, and
• to love

Part of being a pilgrim, to me, is to commit to being more conscious and grateful of all of the blessings in my life.

“There are only two ways to live your life: Nothing is a miracle, or everything is a miracle.”

Albert Einstein

One of the gifts of pilgrimage is slowing down. When I slow down, I have more space to take in and appreciate my life. I want to live as if everything is a miracle.

“To love” is how this intention came intuitively to me. I changed it to “to be loving”, and then to “to be a loving presence”, but neither of those felt right.

I think “to love” means to love, every chance I get. This could mean to love the circumstances, my experiences, myself, others. Just “to love”. I guess I’ll learn more fully what that means as I walk.

I can ask, as I walk: how can I love?

What are your intentions for your life?

Summer Solstice Greetings to you!

Summer Solstice is June 21 for Europe and the UK, and June 20 this year for those of us in the United States.

You can download your free Summer Alignment Kit for this year here.

Apologies to those of you who are also on my mailing list (different than the blog distribution list). You’ll receive two notifications.

Summer energy is about growth.

The Kit this year is about discovering the growth that is authentic to you (as distinguished from all of those pesky “Shoulds” that creep into our consciousness).

As we open to Summer’s gifts, we can replenish our inner wells and recharge our energy.

Your soul knows whatever you need to know right now. Trust it, and access that inner wisdom.

Enjoy this conversation with your soul.

With much love to you, and many blessings for your well-being,

Lynne

“Walking brings me back to myself.”

– Laurette Mortimer

I loved this quote as soon as I saw it, because that is what walking is for me too.

I love the simplicity of walking.

I love the ease with which I become fully present when I walk (much easier than in other areas of my life, it would seem).

There is something to just walking. Nothing else to do, just walk. And walking brings me back to myself.

Camino pilgrims often mention how being on the Way strips life down to its essentials: through the ups and the downs, you just walk. And they talk about how they gradually learn to trust that, as they walk, their needs will be met. They will find food along the way, and they will find a place to stay.

This week I am asking myself: what if it could really be that simple?

In a way, it is that simple, because when we come back to ourselves, we have the inner resources that we need to know and to take the next step in our lives.

In another way, it’s a metaphor, because it is not just that simple in our “real lives”. But what could this way of being, walking, on a pilgrimage, teach us about how we live our lives?

What is walking, for you? And, what brings you back to yourself?

As pilgrims, we think a lot about sustainability.

What will sustain us for the long haul?

What will nurture us on our journey?

I could, of course, review all of the self care protocols that sustain me in my daily life: physical, mental, emotional, creative, spiritual. There are the usual suspects such as good food, good sleep, meditation, art, movement. These are essential in my everyday life, and even more so for a pilgrimage.

But those are the things that get me through the everyday. I need to stay faithful to them, but there is probably more, now, because I am taking it up a notch, not only physically, but spiritually as well. So, what does that mean?

At this stage, I have way more questions than answers about sustainability in my pilgrimage.

I could make up what I think will sustain me, but the truth is that sustainability is something that I need to pay attention to as I walk this journey. I think I will learn what sustains me over the course of the walk. And, I think the practices will likely change over time, during the journey.

Right now, it feels like patience and space sustain me. Patience to wait for the answers, and space to be open to receive my inner guidance.

What sustains you?