Day 166

Let's get real here. I am walking the Camino de Santiago in May 2013. I'm almost at the halfway mark in my year of preparation. In the past couple of months, it has become something that I say, not something that I do. Won't I be surprised, when I stand ready to take that first step in St. Jean Pied-du-Port, and I realize that just saying it hasn't prepared me physically for the walk. So now I must forgive myself and change it.

As I have said before, there is no distinction for me between the road to the Camino and the actual Camino itself. I am already on my Camino. The journey began the moment I first uttered the words to myself. "I am walking the Camino de Santiago." In the beginning it was a romanticized version of what it would be. The beauty. The art. The architecture. All of those things I would experience by foot, allowing me the time to fully take them in and to feel their energy. A traveler, not a tourist, truly immersing myself in the culture of a foreign country. As I began to prepare, however, I realized that while I will have those amazing experiences, there is much more to what I have undertaken. There is the spiritual journey within and without. I will be asked to face my fears and, rather than walk around them, instead to walk through them. In preparation for that, and without even consciously knowing I was doing it, I have begun to draw things to myself that need to be fixed. Situations I would have run from in the past, I have faced up to. I have looked fear in the eye, and I haven't backed down. I have gone deep within and found my shadow self, that part of me that I didn't want to be. I have embraced my shadow. I have found the good in it. I have found the good in me. I have learned to love me, shadows and all.

Lately I haven't had time for meditation. Truth be told, I just haven't taken the time for meditation. I haven't put myself first. So this morning, I took the 20 minutes I needed and I spent some time with God. Typically, when I meditate, I imagine myself at the top of a staircase. As I would take each step down, I could feel myself going deeper and deeper inward. But today I got to the staircase and I put my foot out, ready to take that first step down, and instead I took a step up. As I often do, I tried to "fix" my visualization. No, no, Callea, you need to go deeper into meditation. You need to step DOWN. And then I heard a gentle, quiet voice that told me, "You've been down there. You've done what you need to do in the darkness and the depths. Now it's time for you to learn how to step UP. There are lessons to be learned up here as well. It's time. Leave the darkness behind. It will still be there when you need it. It's where you feel most comfortable and that's OK. But now you are ready to face your fear of the light and step into it." Now to be honest, I don't know that I heard those exact words. I know that I felt the words. And I know that it was very important to me, after the meditation was done, to immediately write this so that those words I had felt could become a reality. Something I could look back on when I needed a reminder.

And so, there you have it. All my life, I've thought I was afraid of the dark, but now I know I'm really afraid of the light. My light.