Camino de la Luna

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.

This is a book about faith, about adventure, about living with my heart open and letting go of the fear of being myself. In the second part of the story, 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, in this new part, I turned homeward, with the warning from Finisterre, that the end of the Camino is just the beginning.

In June 2016 I decided to sell my house of 22 years and leave my comfort zone. Slowly the Camino de Santiago showed itself and I decided, with no rucksack or hiking experience, to start... But that’s another story, the one that led to this one. My Camino in Spain taught me to let go of everything I didn’t need, to travel light and wash my clothes in the shower, but most importantly it taught me to trust my heart and my feet, to let my journey unfold naturally, instinctively, intuitively.

It takes something really powerful to make you leave Hawai’i (or you know, running out of money). I found myself called back to England by my heart, but not for long. It wasn’t yet time to settle, it was time to explore another country I’d once fallen in love with, Croatia and to see if I could find a home, a place to rest and write. I didn’t have any idea quite how much more I had to learn, to understand and this journey was going to show me, above all things, the power of forgiveness.

I had found forgiveness in Switzerland and now I was heading to friends in Rome before taking the leap to South East Asia, to Sri Lanka, to a new understanding of compassion and self compassion. The fourth in the Camino de la Luna series by Pearl Howie. From Genoa (or Genova), through Rome and on to Sicily, I finally make it back to London and from there continue falling forwards to South East Asia, hoping for a soft landing in Sri Lanka. It's in Sri Lanka that I open my heart and discover a new understanding of what compassion is…

The moment I felt my real feelings, back in a Native American healing in 2016, I discovered what a great liar I was. Lonely, depressed, desperate… the lowest of the low… No matter how my life looked to anyone else the only thing that mattered was being real with myself. But I was still lying, so poetically, so romantically, tricking myself, that my lies grew even more dangerous. Luckily life protected me from myself, from acting on what I thought was real. Instead I got on a plane to Spain and started hiking, each step bringing me closer to the truth.

What divides us? What sets us against each other? What stops us from being able to come home to our true selves? I had found truth in Thailand, discovered another wall inside me and freed another part of my soul. There were things to be done, journeys to be taken, strangers to meet, mistakes and regrets to put right and only some of them were mine. But my mistakes alone were enough to change everything.

I had found truth in Thailand, discovered another wall inside me and freed another part of my soul. There were things to be done, journeys to be taken, strangers to meet, mistakes and regrets to put right and only some of them were mine. But my mistakes alone were enough to change everything. I had started in Spain, this Camino de la Luna, though it started long before and will not end until I die, but where next?