algae, equisetum, willows,

sweet green, noisy

birds and frogs

— Lorine Niedecker

A red-winged blackbird jealously watching over her marsh home, indignant of the passer-bys that get too close.

Nearly nine and a half miles on the Maybrook trail yesterday. We left the house at four, thanks to the beginning of the holiday weekend, drove to lake Tonetta in Brewster, NY, and were walking by just after four thirty. The light held longer than expected. We came home at dusk and made a pizza.

The Maybrook trail used to be the Maybrook Train line. At one time, the Maybrook line carried general freight, lumber, coal, dairy, manufactured goods, and paper moving between the Western railroads at Maybrook Yard and New England destinations. And then, after the Poughkeepsie Bridge fire in May 1974, the Maybrook line was severed in the middle and lost its purpose as a New England gateway. The rails sat unused, and eventually the section was converted to trail as part of the Empire State Trail system. The Poughkeepsie Bridge was eventually restored. It reopened in 2009 as the Walkway over the Hudson State Park for pedestrian use. You walk the Maybrook Trail now and the old track is still there, half-buried in blackberry, wild roses ,and yellow spurge that loves old gravel. The new asphalt runs alongside the old steel for miles. Two ways of crossing the same ground: the old one sleeping under flowers, the new one carrying us forward.

For several miles we walk by marsh, water grass standing tall, birds everywhere, loud green music and the midges, always the midges. I recently came across the Niedecker poem I cited up top when looking for works about marshes. It is not the first time that I am struck by the beauty of Northeast marsh and all the wildlife it contains. Niedecker lived almost her whole life on Black Hawk Island in Wisconsin, in a small house on a slough that flooded most springs. She worked as a hospital cleaner. She wrote short poems in relative obscurity. The marshes were hers.

A female red-winged blackbird watched us from a perch among the foliage, streaked brown and cream, with an apricot throat. I watched her for a long time as she hopped about from perch to perch, keeping an eye on us the whole time. She kept chirping loudly and indignantly, although there were no other birds around. I can only assume she was talking to us. We were the strangers in her marsh, and she made sure we knew it. Eventually we walked on. She stayed, still chirping, perhaps to no one, perhaps to the next walkers coming up the trail. Perhaps she had something to say. More likely, she was guarding a nest we couldn’t see.

The blackberries were already blooming where the old ballast meets the new path. White flowers on a thorny cane growing up through gravel meant to keep nothing growing. I stopped and took a picture of them. They will be fruit by the time I come back from Spain.

This long weekend I am hiking every day. Four walks across four days, at least two of them shooting for 16 miles. I will write about those when they are finished. For now there is only this one, a Friday after work, the bird guarding her marsh home, the rails sleeping under the path, the blackberry flowers.

I wore the Altra Olympus 6 yesterday. I had been alternating between the Brooks Glycerin and the Topo Phantom, and the Altras are a different proposition entirely. Zero drop, an absurd stack of cushion, a Vibram sole that holds on wet asphalt and old gravel without thinking about it. The toe box is the widest I have walked in. Bonus is they do not get wet even when it rains for hours, as long as it’s not pouring. My most likely choice for the Camino now, unless my Achilles objects.

Sometimes the day becomes a blur from trying to fit things in and I am looking at the end of it with 50 grams of protein still below norm, and you should not neglect your muscles. Trouble is, I am also a picky eater and very few things sound appealing after a long hike. This recipe was born of necessity: a protein-rich meal on a weeknight, made quickly, without giving up the pleasure of a golden crust and melted cheese. The crust is a blend of drained farmer’s cheese and ricotta, bound with one egg and two egg whites, then baked until it holds the firmness of a proper pastry base. The Gruyère, generously grated, brings the depth of an alpine pasture. Tomato paste, lifted with some Herbs de Provence, turns an ordinary Friday supper into something that asks you to slow down.

Pizza au Fromage Blanc, à la Gruyère

For one — individual pizza, fresh cheese crust

Ingredients

For the crust:

• 100 g low-fat farmer’s cheese (Lifeway or tvorog style), well drained

• 100 g ricotta, 2%

• 1 whole egg

• 2 egg whites

• A pinch of fine salt

For the topping:

• 2 tablespoons tomato paste

• 1 tablespoon water

• 1 small clove of garlic, finely minced

• A pinch of Herbes de Provence

• 40 g Gruyère, finely grated

• A few leaves of fresh basil or parsley, for finishing

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

2. If the farmer’s cheese gives off water, press it in a clean cloth or fine sieve to remove any moisture. The drier it is, the better the crust will hold. Do the same with the ricotta if necessary.

3. In a mixing bowl, combine the two cheeses, the whole egg, the two whites, and the pinch of salt. Mix thoroughly until you have a smooth, thick but supple preparation.

4. Spread the mixture onto the prepared sheet, forming a disc of roughly 8 to 9 inches in diameter. Leave the edges slightly thicker so they will form the crisp rim of the pizza.

5. Bake for 15 to 18 minutes, until the surface is set, dry to the touch, and the edges have taken on a good golden color. Do not cut the bake short: an undercooked crust would collapse beneath the topping.

6. Meanwhile, thin the tomato paste with the tablespoon of water, then stir in the minced garlic and Herbes de Provence.

7. Remove the crust from the oven. Spread the tomato sauce evenly across the surface, leaving a thin border at the edge. Scatter the grated Gruyère across the top.

8. Return to the oven for 5 to 7 minutes, until the cheese has melted, bubbled, and begun to color in places.

9. Scatter with basil or parsley leaves. Let rest for two minutes before slicing.

A note from the cook

Gruyère melts with an elegance that mozzarella cannot match, and its more pronounced character justifies using less. One can substitute an aged Comté for a rounder, fuller flavor.

The pizza is roughly 487 calories, with 53 grams of protein. For a fuller lunch or dinner, serve it alongside a green salad, simply dressed with a teaspoon of unrefined sunflower oil or a squeeze of lemon.

The farmer’s cheese crust is a versatile base. It works equally well topped with smoked salmon and dill, sautéed mushrooms and thyme, or roasted peppers and crumbled goat cheese. In each case, the topping is added after the first bake. The second, brief one will not be long enough to cook raw vegetables through.

27 days until the Camino

In the Byzantine room the most

Beautiful cabochon is the missing one.

— Patricia Lockwood

Fourteen and a half miles in the rain today. My longest by far, and I felt wonderful the whole way through.

April still in bloom along the trail.

I had been reading Patricia Lockwood’s poem “Byzantine Room” in The Atlantic on the drive over, and the first two lines kept turning in me as I walked. The most beautiful cabochon is the missing one. Of course it is. The mind goes to what isn’t there. I had been telling myself that I prefer to hike in dry weather, that rain is something to plan around, something to wait out. The grass on the other side of the rain was always greener. Then I spent five hours partially soaked through at forty-four degrees and discovered that the rain was not a problem to solve. It was just weather. The system worked. A Lululemon hiking jacket on the inside, the pack over it, and a Patagonia shell pulled over everything, pack and all. My feet were wet and the rest of me was not, and the cold never reached me. I will not think about avoiding the rain again. It turns out the problem had never existed there.

Looking down the New Croton reservoir from the bridge deck

The shoes were Topo Phantom 4s today, swapped in for the Glycerin 21s. My plantar fascia thanked me. Better ground feel, almost no break in needed, less of the dull ache that had been creeping in on long walks before.

Lockwood’s poem stayed with me past the first two lines. She walks through a museum looking at relics, and what she sees is not just the history of civilization or art or religion. She sees what has been looted. The cabochon pried from its setting. Mary Magdalene’s tooth removed from its reliquary, removed to fill some cavity. The praying hands snapped off the statues and stolen. Museums are invisible monuments to what is missing as much as they are houses for what survived. The unbelievers have been pillaging the sacred for centuries, and the sacred keeps teaching the unbelievers something anyway. It is a strange circle and I cannot quite see the shape of it yet.

The donors in the poem catch in my mind too. Two brothers, Pons and Armand, who paid for a Pietà and had themselves carved smiling on either side of the dead Christ, then sequestered the whole sculpture in a private chapel for their personal devotion. Probably they thought of themselves as spiritual people. Probably the people who later pried the rock crystal out of Pons’s stone knee thought of themselves that way too. Possession dressed up as reverence, then reverence stripped back down to looting, then the looter eventually looted in turn. I do not know what to make of it except that the poem will not let go of me.

The water beside the path for miles

Along the trail today, so much that was simply present and unstolen. Violets. A goose. A bridge. A bird I did not recognize. Long stretches of walking beside the water.

Violets, simply present

A goose, watchful, unhurried, reflecting

I stopped at Trailside Cafe in Yorktown and had what might be one of the best coffee of the year so far. Warm hands, warm cup, the rain still going outside the window.

Trailside Cafe, Yorktown

Fenêtre sur pluie

A good day. A long one. The rain belongs in it now.

54 days until Camino

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, 

Healthy, free, the world before me, 

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. 

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune, 

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, 

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, 

Strong and content I travel the open road.

- Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”

North County Trail, New York, April 2026.

Ten miles and change. A trail called North County, a sky so blue it seemed painted with watercolors, and a back that got with the plan and didn’t hurt today.

The path opened ahead of us flat and long, sometimes bordered by split-rail fences wearing soft green light. I had the feeling I get sometimes on a good walk: the sense that the path doesn’t end, it just continues past where you can see. That the horizon is not a wall but a door. It’s the same feeling I expect to have in June, somewhere outside Astorga, entering the long stretch of the Camino Francés. The anticipation of walking the Camino has been teaching me things from a distance, and one of them is this: the path looks impossible until you are on it, and then it becomes simply the next step.

Red, white, and the tufted crown. North County Trail, April 18, 2026.

Today, spring was performing at full volume. The redbuds had gone full magenta against the blue sky. Crabapple branches held their buds like small fists of deep pink, each one about to open. And there, along the edge of the trail where the leaf litter meets the grass, I found bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis): three flowers in a cluster, each one an almost embarrassing white, with a crown of yellow at the center. Bloodroot blooms for two or three days. That’s it. The petals fall at the lightest touch, the faintest breath of wind. It doesn’t waste itself on longevity. It shows up entirely, and then it goes.

Rousseau wrote that he could only meditate when he was walking. “When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.” I’ve come to believe the same is true of something else: that joy is not a condition the body happens to be in, but something it generates through motion. Walking doesn’t just cheer me up. It thinks for me. It remembers things I’ve forgotten.

We played frisbee on the way back, which is either an extremely sensible strategy for forgetting you’ve already walked nine miles, or proof that the body has its own wisdom separate from the part of us that keeps a running tally of suffering. I threw badly, retrieved enthusiastically, and felt unreasonably happy about it. By the time we finished, I had forgotten to be tired. The body, given joy, simply continues.

I’ve been training for the Camino since early Spring began: longer walks, more strength training, paying attention to what the body tells me between sessions. Last week, during our first 10-mile hike with backpacks, my back spoke up, loud and insistent. This week it was quiet. That’s the thing about physical training that no one explains clearly enough: it’s not linear, and it doesn’t always feel like progress while it’s happening. The adaptation is mostly invisible. And then another Saturday morning you walk ten miles on a trail in New York and realize, somewhere around mile eight, that the back is not hurting (can’t say the same for the feet yet). The body has been quietly doing its work all along.

Walt Whitman called it “the long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.” He was writing about freedom, about the road as a kind of birthright. I’ve been thinking about it differently lately: not as freedom from something, but as movement toward. Toward Astorga. Toward Santiago. Toward whatever version of myself arrives on the far side of 17 days of walking.

Violet and yellow, playing within me.

The violets were everywhere on the margins of the trail below the fence, small and purple and unbothered. The lesser celandine had taken over the verge entirely, yellow beyond yellow, a color that invades and insists on itself. A pond appeared through the trees, the water grey-blue and still. A rusted gate opened onto rolling fields so green in this still early Spring they looked invented rather than sown.

This is what I came outside to remember: that beauty is not a reward for effort, and joy is not something you earn after the hard part is over. They are threaded through the hard part. They are the reason you go. Hiking really brings me a lot of joy and happiness. Every movement does that.

61 days until we board the plane to Madrid.

The body is nearly ready. I am getting there.

61 days to go

A black cat perches on the white porch railing, still as a carved figure, commanding the whole of his small kingdom. The boxwood rises beside him like a green attendant, and he regards the street with those pale, ancient eyes — not suspicious, never cold, but deeply, unhurriedly present.

He has appointed himself to this post. No one asked him. No one needed to.

The afternoon light catches something almost auburn beneath his black coat, a secret warmth the sun draws out of him that wouldn’t exist in shadow, the way certain people only show you what they’re made of when the light is just right. His paw rests over the railing’s edge as though he might, at any moment, extend a greeting… or simply continue watching. Both are equally possible. Both are equally deliberate.

The white clapboard house holds him like a frame holds a painting it knows is good.

He has seen everyone who matters pass this way. He remembers. He will see them again. And if he decides you are worthy — if something in your walk, your scent, the particular quietness you carry — he will descend from his height and come to you, unhurried, certain, a small and sovereign act of grace.

But until then, he watches.

He always watches.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

— A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896)

It is Monday morning. I am sitting quietly in my dining room, having a coffee. Warm candlelight lifts the rainy morrow, highlighted by the subtle scent of hyacinths. Like Adaline Bowman, I have wandered long enough to know where the coffee is better.

Outside, the cherry tree is blooming. I only have it for a few days every year, but every year it takes my breath away. I love the look of baby leaves waking up, renewing themselves. They give me hope for the future.

This kind of rainy morning makes me want to dig into my reading. Alas, it is a work morning, so reading will be professional. A French china cabinet is getting delivered today. A good day to cozy up at home and contemplate.

Tomorrow I leave for Miami — another whirlwind work trip, last one this quarter. Today is the quiet before the storm.

The cherry tree outside does not know about Miami. It is only blooming, in the light drizzle, for as long as it has.

“The love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1904

Reservoir in Brewster, New York. Where it begins.

This morning we left one car at the bottom and one at the top of the Putnam Trailway and walked 10.7 miles through the spring that is still debating its arrival, from Brewster to Mahopac, point to point. You can only go forward.

The Putnam Trailway runs on the bones of the old Putnam Division Railroad, the Old Put, which carried passengers between the Bronx and Brewster from 1881 until 1958. Thousands of people made that journey, north and south, day after day, for decades. Now it carries only footsteps and bicycle wheels. There is something quietly moving about walking a path that so many others have walked before you.

We walked for four and a half hours. This is my first day training with a backpack, about five pounds in it to start, which felt entirely manageable, though I reminded myself that on the Camino I will be doing this every day, adding three to five miles more each time. Wore Brooks Glycerin 21s and Darn Tough merino socks. No blisters. These are small things, but on a long trail, small things become the difference between joy and suffering.

The Putnam Trailway, April. You can only go forward.

At some point in the first hour, the conversation quieted naturally. Not because there was nothing to say. Because there was something better than talking: the particular silence of two people who know each other well enough to share it without explanation. We walked side by side and each of us went somewhere interior, somewhere the other is not meant to follow.

I imagine that this is what Rilke understood. That love, at its highest, is not fusion. It is not two people dissolved into each other, finishing each other’s sentences, unable to exist independently. It is something harder and more beautiful than that. He called it the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. I am currently reading his Letters to a Young Poet, which he wrote between 1902 and 1908 to a young military student who had written asking for his assessment of his poetry. Rilke gave him something far more valuable: a philosophy of how to live. Love is difficult, he wrote. Perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks. But difficulty is not a reason to turn away. It is a reason to lean in.

I was thinking about all of this on the trail today. About what chosen solitude actually is and why we need it so badly and how rarely we allow ourselves to have it. We have built a world that shuns silence. Every idle moment is an opportunity for a notification, an email, a scroll. We have cancelled boredom without realizing that boredom was never the enemy. Boredom is the catalyst of creativity. It is the condition the mind needs in order to generate anything original, to make the unexpected connections, to hear itself think. We have taken that catalyst away and we wonder why we feel hollow.

Rilke also warned against something else: paying too much attention to the opinions of others. Let them crowd in too far, he suggested, and they will consume your entire inner world, leaving no room for your own voice. Walking a trail for four and a half hours with no content input of any kind feels like the practice of reclaiming that room.

Somewhere between Brewster and Mahopac. Spring arriving quietly.

But there is another kind of solitude I was thinking about. The kind that is not chosen. The kind that arrives not from silence and open sky but from being in the presence of someone who does not see you, does not hear you, has shut you out while remaining physically present. Evelyn Waugh in Vile Bodies paints the portraits of the writer Adam and his on-again-off-again fiancée Nina that exist in a kind of mutual invisibility, circling each other without ever truly meeting. That is not solitude. That is loneliness wearing solitude’s clothes.

Chosen solitude builds the inner world. It is the silence you step into deliberately, the quiet you protect, the space in which you become more fully yourself. Imposed solitude of indifference hollows it out. One is a room you enter by choice. The other is a room you cannot leave.

J’aime, j’aime, j’aime la solitude parfois, Zaz sings. I love, I love, I love solitude sometimes. The solitude one chooses to talk with oneself. The kind that doesn’t hurt and can be quieted. She is not singing about loneliness. She is singing about this, about what I experienced today on a paved trail through bare spring trees in Putnam County, walking beside someone I love, each of us magnificently, peacefully alone.

Spring insisting on itself after all. Almost here. Almost daffodils.

Wordsworth knew it too. He wrote about lying on a couch in vacant or in pensive mood, and how the daffodils he had once seen flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude. The inward eye. The one that only opens when the outer world goes quiet.

I ordered our Pilgrim Credentials this week. The official document that marks you as a walker of the Camino, stamped at each stop along the way, proof that you walked the road. I don’t need proof for anyone else. But there is something about the experience and the process of it that feels right. You are declaring an intention. You are saying: I will show up. I will walk. I will be quiet enough to hear myself.

10.7 miles. 4 hours 22 minutes. 22,541 steps.

67 days to go

— Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

_____________________________________

Outside of The Market at Union Hall, North Salem, New York — where the planning begins

It is a Saturday morning in April. The light is doing what spring light does in New York/Connecticut, arriving at a slant, tentative and golden, as if it isn’t quite sure yet it’s allowed to stay. I am sitting outside with a latte and a bag of dark chocolate covered pistachios, which tells you something about me. I am making plans.

On June 18th, I will begin walking a portion of the Camino Francés.

Not the full route. Life has its constraints, and seventeen days is what I have. But more than the minimum. More than the cautious choice. Twelve to eighteen miles a day on foot, through a landscape that has been receiving walkers for over a thousand years. A 25-liter backpack containing everything I need, which, it turns out, is considerably less than I thought.

People have been walking this road since at least the 9th century. Perhaps earlier. Pilgrims, penitents, seekers, wanderers. The stones know the weight of a thousand years of human footfall. There is something about that, the sheer accumulated humanity of it, that stops me every time I think about it. This road is real in a way that very little in modern life is real anymore.

We get very comfortable in our stories. We wake up, we follow the grooves we have worn into our days, and we stop noticing the life that is quietly passing by.

I think this is why I am going.

Not because I am unhappy. Not because I am lost. But because comfort, unchallenged, becomes invisible. We get very comfortable in our stories. We wake up, we follow the grooves we have worn into our days, and we stop noticing the life that is quietly passing by. The practice of doing one thing a day that frightens you is a good practice. The practice of doing one large, defining thing that frightens you is something else entirely. That is a recalibration.

In the modern world, we do not walk. We do not stay in simple spaces alongside strangers. We do not share meals with people whose names we learned an hour ago on a path in the mountains. We have engineered away the friction of human contact, the discomfort of proximity, the particular intimacy of shared difficulty. We have lost something in that engineering. I am not sure we have fully noticed what.

I work in artificial intelligence governance. I spend my days thinking about what technology is doing to us: to our privacy, to our autonomy, to the way power moves through the world. And the longer I sit with those questions, the more certain I become of this: it has never been more important to tend to our humanity. To go back to the root of it. To walk an ancient road with strangers and remember what we are made of.

The Camino does not care about your title, your schedule, your carefully constructed life. It only asks: can you keep walking?

So. I found the Osprey 25-liter pack at REI last week. I held it in my hands and tried it out for a long time before I put anything in it. There is something clarifying about the constraint of it. This is all you carry. Choose carefully. I find myself thinking about that instruction in contexts well beyond backpacking.

On the pack

The Osprey 25L Sportlight, women’s fit, injection-moulded frame sheet. The decision to go small was deliberate. If I can only carry 25 liters, I have to decide what matters. This feels like the right question to be asking right now.

This blog, Escribo Mi Camino, begins here, on this April morning, 68 days before I step onto that road. It will follow me through the preparation: the training walks through Connecticut in spring rain, the research, the packing and repacking, the questions I haven’t thought to ask yet. And then it will follow me onto the Camino itself.

But it was never going to be only about walking. It is about food and beauty and design and the way certain places hold light. It is about the people you meet on the road, the strangers who become, over shared miles and simple meals, something closer to family. The Camino has always been this: a temporary community of people who chose to show up, put one foot in front of the other, and trust that the road would provide what they needed. In an age when we are losing that, losing the instinct for real presence, real conversation, real communion, I find that radical. I find it necessary. It is about the vie publique and the vie privée, the full demanding professional life and the interior life that runs alongside it, quieter, less visible, equally real. It is about what it means to choose a hard, beautiful thing simply because it calls to you.

Qu’importe là où je vais. No matter where I go.

I am writing my path.

Days until the Camino

68

Camino Francés · → Santiago de Compostela