Le Chemin

(Day 11 – Rieulhès > Pau – 10 July 2025)

It is a short cycling day, and my reflections are equally short.

As I leave the haunted house just outside Lourdes, it is the first time I take notice of being along one of the pilgrimage routes, although most pilgrims passing through Pau are likely headed further south, to Pamplona, then across the most common Camino route, whereas I designed my own path to Toulouse, plan to only partially come in an out of the less travelled Camino del Norte along Spain’s northern Atlantic coast, and will merely cut down to the most common part of Camino at the tail end and via a mountain pass that is pretty much only frequented by cows, goats, and hay trucks. And yet, there is something about crossing one of the still quiet French branches of the Chemin, about the first faint glimpses of others also guided by a mission (missions known only to them), that warms me and connects me.

My mission — to meditate in motion, to reflect, to let the present tell me what it needs to tell me (more on this on Day 23), to accept — is nebulous. My journey, like the word itself, is nothing more than one day after the next. And all the sensations of path, journey, mission, meditation, presence, acceptance roll round and round, over and over, to the constant, steady, hypnotizing turn of my wheels mile after mile after mile.