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