Camino de Santiago — Camino Francés
The French Way is the best known of the Caminos, a long thread across northern Spain toward Santiago de Compostela. It is sociable and solitary at once: shared tables in the evening, long quiet hours of walking in the morning. The route asks little except that you keep going, and it gives back more than you expect.
[YULIA: how you accompany people on the Francés — guided sections, preparation, or simply walking together. Dates if any.]
The Via Francigena — Canterbury to Rome
The Via Francigena was my first pilgrimage, and the one this whole site grew out of. It runs from Canterbury down to Rome — roughly two thousand kilometers across four countries, England, France, Switzerland and Italy — an older and quieter road than the Camino de Santiago, with fewer walkers, longer stretches of solitude, and far less waiting for you along the way. I walked it in ninety days.
I did not set out for the scenery. I went to close a chapter — to set down what I had carried too long, to understand myself a little better, to deepen my spiritual practice, and, if I am honest, to find God, whatever that word turns out to mean. A road that long has a way of arranging the meeting: whatever you bring will eventually have to be set down or faced head on. The walking, it turned out, was the easy part.
It began not with a step but with a stamp. In Canterbury Cathedral, at the worn ledge where pilgrims have knelt for nine hundred years, a volunteer pressed the first seal into my credential, and I was a pilgrim whether I felt like one or not. Then came the long agricultural solitude of France, the days when the land offers little and you are left alone with your own mind; the great climb over the Grand-Saint-Bernard Pass into Italy; the rice fields and wide rivers of the north; and at last the Tuscan hills — the towers of San Gimignano, Siena, the road tipping south toward Lazio and Rome.
The road is a patient teacher. It shows you exactly where you are still holding on, where control has become habit, where pretending has gone so deep you mistook it for yourself. It is not always flattering, but it is clear. Ninety days of walking a mantra under my breath, morning and evening, changed something no single revelation could have.
Rome, when it came, was not an arrival. Standing beneath Michelangelo's Creation of Adam — the Divine reaching out with full intention, the human hand not quite committed, the small gap still open between them — I recognized a space I had lived in my whole life, and understood the walk had been teaching me to close it, just a little.
I have recorded the whole route here, town by town, on the Books page — and told the fuller story in Beneath Heaven, All Kilometers Turn Inward.
The walking had stopped. The journey had not.
Machu Picchu
Further from home, the high paths toward Machu Picchu are a pilgrimage of a different altitude — thinner air, older stones, and a sense of the sacred carved into the mountains themselves. Walking here is slow by necessity, which is its own teaching.
[YULIA: the nature of this journey — when, with whom, and what it involves.]
Beneath Heaven, All Kilometers Turn Inward
Beneath Heaven, All Kilometers Turn Inward is my account of that walk — a walking companion in paper form, less a guidebook than a record of what the road gives you when you stop hurrying. It is honest about the whole of it: the roles that fall away, the long silences, and the slow turn toward the Divine, one footstep at a time.
The book is coming in 2028. You can follow the whole route — the six parts, Canterbury to Rome, town by town — on the Books page, and join the waitlist there.