A PILGRIMAGE IS NOT ONLY in SPAIN

My first pilgrimage started before I had words for it. In a childhood that taught me things no child should have to learn. I did not understand what had happened to me until I was forty years old. And when I finally did it was not dramatic. It was just a picture. One image that suddenly made the pieces of my life make sense. The guilt I had carried without knowing why. The patterns I had lived without understanding them. All of it suddenly had a shape.

Nothing was wasted. Not one single thing.

That knowing did not come from rewinding the trauma. It came from finally being able to see the road I had actually been on all along.

That is what a pilgrimage is.

Not all pilgrimages are planned. Most of the real ones are not. They arrive as a childhood that shapes you before you can name it. A job that costs more than you expected. A loss that reroutes everything. A season that breaks you open before you had a chance to prepare. A road that chose you long before you chose it.

I was a young wife and mother of two small children. One was three. One was seven. I was in nursing school and EMT school at the same time because I had fallen in love with trauma medicine and I could not get there fast enough.

Nobody called that a pilgrimage. It was just Tuesday.

I eventually made it to the helicopter. Life Flight. Dropping out of the sky to stand beside someone in their worst moment. That felt like arriving. Like I had finally found the road I was made for.

And then one day my friend came through the doors of my ER.

He was a police officer. Someone I had laughed with and worked alongside for years. He came in already gone before the doors opened. And we worked on him anyway because that is what you do. You do everything you know how to do. And sometimes it does not work.

And then you walk across the hall.

And you take care of the men who shot him.

Because that is also what you do. That is the oath.

I left the ER after that. Not dramatically. Just quietly. The way you leave something when you have nothing left to give it.

For years I could not hear gunshots on television. Not in a movie. Not in the background of a scene. Something in my body refused to let it be ordinary.

I did not have a name for what had happened to me. I just knew something had broken open and I had to find a way to keep going.

So I became a hospice nurse. Then an open heart nurse. And eventually I found my way back to the ER.

Not the same woman who left. A different one. Quieter in some ways. More certain in others. Carrying something she had not carried before. The particular knowledge that comes from surviving the thing you thought might break you.

I did not call any of that a pilgrimage at the time.

I called it my career. My life. My Tuesday.

But every step of it was sacred. Every loss was part of the road. Every return was a crossing.

That is what I want to say to you today.

You have already been on a pilgrimage.

Maybe it looked like a childhood that did not make sense until much later. Maybe it looked like a career that cost you more than you expected. Maybe it looked like a marriage or the end of one. Maybe it looked like raising children or losing a child. Maybe it looked like a diagnosis or a decade of grief or a season where the road disappeared entirely and you just kept walking anyway.

Whatever it was it cost you something real. And it changed you in the crossing. And you are not the same person who started it.

That is a pilgrimage.

You do not have to walk 500 miles across Spain to know what it means to be transformed by a road.

The road has been right here all along.

That is what the Everyday Pilgrim will be. A community for women who are ready to name the road they have actually been on. We will meet once a month. We will gather in circle. We will do the quiet honest work of looking at our own lives honestly. It will be free. It will be real. And the only requirement is that you are willing to keep walking.

And if you are looking for practical gear for whatever pilgrimage you are on right now.

The Stealth Skort, is what has been birthed for the pilgrimage that is my life. Patent pending. Made by women in the USA from recycled materials. Four pockets., you know women really do need pockets. An unsnappable brief. Designed so you can move through whatever the day hands you with ease. On the trail. On the boat. On the golf course. In the garden. Anywhere life takes you.

Because every pilgrim deserves gear that was actually designed with her in mind.

Visit us at www.coveryrassets.com.

And if this blog resonated with you share it with one woman whose pilgrimage you know about even if she has never called it that.

The river always knew she was on a sacred road.

Buen Camino.

Reverend Morgan Patterson

Founder Cover Yr Assets and The Everyday Pilgrim

www.coveryrassets.com​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​