This is a book for people who wake up at 5am (or 4am or 3am) worrying. Maybe you don't call it worrying, maybe you call it planning or organising. Sometimes it is helpful. Sometimes genius and the truth arrives at this time. But sometimes it is just your mind or your ego spinning lies, keeping you awake, freaking out your body, making you sick, torturing you, trying to keep you small.
I've been there. Years, months and just hours ago. And it is so wonderful to get over it, to be able to choose to get up and use this time to greet the dawn, to get clarity and change my life, or to soothe the beast and be able to go back to sleep in peace, and wake again knowing that there is nothing to be afraid of, that I am life and my life is perfect and we are all perfect.
This is a book about faith, about adventure, about living with my heart open and letting go of the fear of being myself.
In June 2016 I decided to sell my house of 22 years and leave my comfort zone. I had no idea where I would go next, but slowly the Camino de Santiago showed itself and I decided, with no rucksack or hiking experience to start...
In the first part of this story, I left England and flew to Seville and travelled on to Granada, where I stayed first in a treehouse and then a cave... before I picked up my rucksack and headed north on the Camino.
Through vineyards and, accidentally, up mountains, I walked, and then back by bus and on, trying somehow to follow the yellow arrows of the Way.
In the second part, I changed direction, up through the heart of Spain, before wandering through Portugal and the land of the stars, finding my way to the sea and to the Route Portuguese. Onwards and upwards, to the official destination, Santiago, and then a little further to the spiritual destination, Finisterre – the end of the earth.
And so I turned homeward, with the warning from Finisterre, that the end of the Camino is just the beginning.