10/22/2026
I’ve been a little quiet here on WildTree’s page, but life and the our peaceful northern clinic has been full~ thank you!!
In September, I travelled to Spain with my mother,my brother, and daughter to walk the Camino de Santiago.
So much of this pilgrimage reflects the heart of my work at WildTree — slowing down, coming back into our bodies, listening to what arises when we create space, and remembering the importance of connection, both within ourselves and with the world around us.
I shared these reflections on my personal page recently and wanted to bring them here, too. 🌿
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🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂
So many of you have asked me how my Spain pilgrimage was…
Well, here is the condensed version. 😉
~A Field of Stars~
Sometimes we walk beside one another for years. Sometimes for forty seconds on a stone path across an estuary. And sometimes we take different roads, only to meet again at the end of the earth.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that since walking the Camino.
For those unfamiliar with the Camino de Santiago, it is a network of ancient pilgrimage routes leading to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. People have been walking these paths for more than 1,100 years, traditionally to the resting place of St. James. Although rooted in Catholic tradition, the Camino today welcomes people of all faiths and none, walking for all kinds of reasons.
And there are so many reasons people walk. Perhaps that’s something for another day.
We walked the Camino Inglés, the English Way, historically travelled by pilgrims arriving by sea from Ireland, Britain, and northern Europe. With my Irish ancestry, there was something meaningful about walking a path with those connections.
Our route began in Ferrol and carried us 113 kilometres to Santiago de Compostela in 7 days.
And there was Vera. (My daughter)
Eight years old, walking into the Pilgrim’s Office in Santiago, presenting her stamped pilgrim’s passport and bringing the person checking her credentials to tears.
What a moment. ‘So rare to see the credentials of one so young’, said the officiant.
But our pilgrimage was never simply those 113 kilometres. In the first few weeks of September and early October , Vera walked more than 250 kilometres alongside ( and in front) of me.
People have been asking what my favourite part of the Camino was. I don’t think there was one.
There was the simplicity. 🌿
Wake up. Put on your clothes. Put on your shoes. Walk.
You knew what you were doing that day. You were walking. There was something profoundly freeing in that simplicity. Nothing to accomplish beyond putting one foot in front of the other. And sometimes that was a lot.
And then there was the weight of the pack.
It fascinated me how differently I could feel its weight, even when nothing inside it had changed. Sometimes I barely noticed it. Other times I wondered how the very same pack had become so heavy.
And so I walked with that too.
There was also the privilege of doing it together. My daughter, my mother, and one of my brothers. Sometimes talking, often not. Just walking beside one another- and alone.
I loved the Buen Caminos exchanged between pilgrims and the encouragement of local Spanish people as we passed. How delighted they were to see Vera walking at eight years old. The smiles, the high-fives, the words I couldn’t always understand but somehow understood completely.
And then there were the encounters.
One day, we took a side road to an old flour mill. My philosophy has always been to take the side road when it is offered, even when it means walking a little farther.
Beyond the mill, a narrow stone path crossed an estuary, only wide enough for one person at a time, with the tide moving on either side.
There was wild dill growing everywhere along the stone path, mixed in with other herbs. I kept stopping to smell and look at everything.
Ahead of me, Vera walked with her gramma.
Coming toward us was a woman.
I noticed her from far away because she seemed almost luminous. Her silver hair gleamed in the sunlight, pulled softly back from her face. Her folded skirts moved around her weathered leather shoes, and her hands were tucked into the pockets of her apron.
Her warmth reached me before she did.
When we met in the middle of that narrow path, she took both my hands and pulled me toward her. She spoke in Spanish. I didn’t understand every word, but I understood enough.
She had seen Vera walking ahead with her grandmother. She spoke about what a gift that was, wishing blessings upon our journey.
There were tears in her eyes.
She kissed my cheeks, and I embraced her and kissed hers.
Perhaps forty seconds. Maybe a minute.
Two strangers meeting on a stone path across an estuary in rural Spain, and then continuing in opposite directions.
But she stayed with me.
I remember the smell of lemon and dill and herbs on her. There was something so familiar and earthy about her. For those few moments, she seemed to me to be the land.
Another encounter stayed with me too.
After Santiago, we continued to Finisterre, whose name translates to “the end of the earth.”
Vera and I were playing in the ocean, finding our Camino shells washed up by the tide, when another pilgrim arrived on the beach and set down his backpack.
As you often do on the Camino, we began talking.
He had just finished walking the Camino Francés. His wife had been walking the Camino Portugués. They had spent six weeks walking separate paths toward one another, planning to arrive on the same day.
But she’d told him she was still a couple of days away.
He was disappointed. I could see it and he said so.
Although, I remember thinking, there are worse places to wait for the person you love.
I went back into the water to play with Vera, and a little while later, I noticed a woman approaching him from behind.
She surprised him!
Apparently, she’d been closer than she’d let him believe. After six weeks of walking toward each other, she’d saved one small trick for the end.
She was playing with him.
I loved that.
They embraced and kissed, then sat together on the beach and had a b**r.
There was so much play on our Camino too. Even finding the next Camino marker became a game. Who could spot it first? Vera won almost every time.
There was laughter, teasing, silliness, and the little games that emerge when you have hours and kilometres ahead of you and nowhere else you need to be.
Play and lightness have always mattered to me. So much of life asks us to hold things that are difficult, tender, complicated, and sometimes heartbreaking. My work asks that of me too.
But seriousness doesn’t have to take everything. There can still be delight and mischief.
And I loved watching that woman arrive after six weeks of walking towards her person, with a little mischief still tucked in her pocket.
I never spoke to them again.
Two people taking different roads across a country, each carrying their own pack and walking their own miles, trusting that somewhere ahead their paths would meet.
And they did.
At the ‘end of the earth’.
That may be one of the things I loved most about the Camino: moving slowly enough for these encounters to happen. Slowly enough to enter the cool stillness of old churches and sanctuaries, to notice the rocks, water, herbs, weather, and changing light. To allow the language to saturate.
My mother and I had been planning this journey for almost a year.
I’ve been a map girl for as long as I can remember. I love studying the shape of a place before I arrive, its coastlines and roads, the way the land rises and falls. There is something I love about knowing a place that way first.
And then putting my feet on the land.
Because there is always something that can be known, and something that remains unknown until we encounter it. Touch it.
Perhaps places are a little like people that way.
We can study them, learn their histories, know their contours, and arrive with all kinds of ideas about what we might find.
And then we meet.
Perhaps knowing, in the end, is less about having authority over something and more about being in relationship with it.
I love that space between the known and the unknown. The slower I move, the more available it seems to become. Stillness gives a place time to reveal itself.
Time. Like the chef I met when he delivered so much delicious food to our table… “take your time, you have time, take it” what a blessing when one feels overwhelmed- to not rush the deliciousness of life.
🌿
In my journal, I noted somewhere between twenty and thirty medicinal and edible plants growing along the trail in September. Plants growing through stone walls, along estuaries, at the edges of fields and beneath our feet.
The coast, the steep inclines, the trees, the abundance of what could grow there, and the way people seemed not simply to live upon the landscape, but within it.
I revelled in that.
I have written before that moving slowly lets the landscape move through me.
That is what it felt like. Not simply passing through a place and carrying home photographs, but allowing the experience to work its way beneath my skin.
The land beneath my feet, the herbs in my hands, the weather against my skin. The vibration of the people.
Perhaps we work our way beneath each other’s skin. Maybe the earth’s?
Perhaps that is part of pilgrimage too. To move slowly enough to be reclaimed, even briefly, by the place we are passing through.
And I keep returning to the feeling of walking into Santiago de Compostela.
There is the cathedral, of course, immense and majestic. I could stand before it and admire its architecture with my eyes. And walking the rooftop ~its roots.
But when I closed my eyes, I could feel it.
Maybe that is how I experience architecture. I can admire its form and beauty, but somehow it is better felt.
Standing there after all that walking, I could feel the shape of the place in my body. And with my eyes closed, the stone almost disappeared.
What remained was the ‘field of stars’.
Compostela is often poetically associated with a field of stars. Whether or not that is its literal linguistic origin, that is what arriving there felt like to me.
A field of stars.
Maybe because after walking for days, I had begun to understand something I already knew but had forgotten.
We are walking each other home.
Every day.
Sometimes we walk beside one another for years. Sometimes for 113 kilometres. Sometimes for forty seconds on a stone path across an estuary.
Sometimes we take different roads and meet again at the end of the earth.
Sometimes we greet each other with words, sometimes only with a smile, and sometimes we simply walk quietly beside one another.
But what a privilege it is that, for whatever stretch of the road we are given, we get to be here together.
And perhaps that is why the image of a field of stars stays with me.
Some of the stars whose light reaches us tonight have already changed, or are gone. Their light has travelled an impossible distance and still arrives.
So too with the people we have loved and lost.
Their absence does not mean their light has stopped reaching us.
And the people we encounter here—our mothers, our brothers, our daughters, strangers crossing toward us on narrow paths—carry light too.
We meet one another in this field of stars.
We shine for ourselves and each other. We shed a little light on the life path.
And then we keep walking.
I am immensely proud of Vera. Of all of us.
But more than the distance, I think I will remember the shape of it: the walking, the togetherness, the land, the encounters, the cadence, the light.
And the extraordinary privilege of having had this little stretch of the road together.
Walk well,
###e
Commercial break but seriously 😳
Ps: tagging the makers of the only clothes I wore this trip. Cannot rave enough about Unbound Merino and Simply Merino.
A pair of wool leggings, a wool dress, wool tank, wool zip hoodie and wool bathing suit(doubles as body suit). Always looked and smelled clean and fresh- temperature regulating and was perfect for lightweight packing. And it all looks pretty much un-phased by the trek so I’m wearing it now back at work.
- Honestly, that travel dress- I slept in it, hiked in it and then wore it out for dinner- it has super powers.
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And a little note on bookings: October has been full~ thank you! It has been so good to see you all. I’m currently booking into mid-November and December. If you’ve been hoping to make some time for yourself and your own work before the holidays and to set yourself up for January now would be a good time to reach out. 🤎
