On a quiet winter’s day, with heavy snow falling outside my windows, I found myself turning inward. Something about the hush of the world outside made space for a deeper listening inside. As I prepare to leave nearly a decade of my life behind, I’ve been thinking about what truly guides me, what steadies my heart, what whispers yes. What reminds me that I am held.
This reflection emerged from that snowy stillness.
The Camino Template
There is something bigger than I am, a force, an intelligence behind the light in my eyes, behind the warmth of a hug, the brim of tears, and the deep accumulation of the wisdom I’ve earned.
It is the shimmer of my future self that beckons me to Ojai. It is the visceral energy of the Camino, the steady hum of life itself.
It is the voice of my ancestors.
It cannot be named, yet it has a thousand names.
It is part of a vastness that I cannot comprehend,
yet it is also the tenderness and melancholy that lives in my heart.
I don’t feel relief or fear.
“You are the right choice” doesn’t hit me as reassurance, it feels like a Camino de Santiago truth. The kind that comes when I pause at a crossroads with no clear yellow arrow pointing the way.
I have a choice. Always.
Neither direction is wrong.
Both will deliver me to a destination,
mine or otherwise…
but I’ll never know which path would have been easier, because I can only choose one at a time.
Every choice I have made along the Way,
literally and figuratively,
has led me to the altar of my own heart.
I don’t say this lightly or in a woo-woo kind of way. I say it because my inner compass, my inner teacher, my future self has never faltered.
Many paths have been beautiful, loving and mesmerizing while other paths have been steep, rocky, muddy, and yes, unnerving.
But I have always arrived exactly where I was meant to land, guided to the ground like a feather, even when I feared the fall.
Even when the destination wasn’t the one I expected.
Even when the stay was longer or shorter
than I imagined.
Today, I’m not looking for a sign.
I’m not lost.
I’m standing at a crossroads
with the same clarity I’ve had on the Camino.
Both paths will lead to Santiago… eventually
to the real Santiago,
the one deep inside my heart.
There is no relief in that knowledge.
It’s sovereignty.
A wild sovereignty.
A true north of my inner compass.
I’m not choosing right versus wrong.
I’m choosing among the many rightnesses on my path.
Maybe that’s why there is no fear
only the ache of leaving those I’ve met along the Way.
Those who have walked with me,
steadied me, or whom I have steadied.
Fear is for moments when the stakes feel like
life-or-death, or the choice is between the soul quest or abandonment.
But my wisdom is older than that.
I’m beginning to understand the geometric kaleidoscope of changing, of evolving. Well, not really understand it but softening into the witnessing of it.
In its beauty, there can be discomfort and wiggliness not unlike a tattered tired body, with swollen and blistered feet taking in the unimaginable, breathtaking vista before it.
Every path, every sorrow, every joy
has led me again and again
to the altar of my heart.
This is not a phrase I toss around casually.
It is the language of pilgrimage…
seeing my life as a long walk,
with stretches that are open and direct,
and stretches that are narrow, overgrown,
difficult.
Still, I always have a view of the horizon.
It is the stops and the people along the Way that matter. The rest, the healing, the lingering, the moving on, these shape the care of my feet,
my heart, and those I meet.
It has become clearer, with age and experience,
that I choose meaning over bitterness.
My spirituality isn’t linear.
It’s cyclical, experiential, relational.
full of questions,
often challenged,
rarely convenient,
always alive.
The Camino is no longer just a memory
it has become a template, and a geography for my life’s journey, a terrain through which guidance always arrives.
Guidance from something immensely bigger than me.
Guidance from the long, enduring intelligence
from which we all descend.
The voice of my ancestors is not metaphorical.
It is lineage.
It is presence.
It is a clarity that grows louder as I age, and ever louder as the sun begins its slow descent
on the horizon of my own life’s Camino.
~Leora Ann Ellis
Thru soulful eyes 