April in Paris | Fred Houten

Well, it’s May now, but I got there three weeks ago, and so the quote is legit: “April in Paris.” I turned back to resume my journey along the river Vie Francigene as it is called here.

This was a journey that was planned to begin right after I retired from spiritual life, literally the next day. My last Sunday was Easter and the ticket was for Easter Monday. Only I chose the wrong year: 2020.

By Easter, Covid was global and terrifying. “April in Paris” was nothing like that year’s song.

My first day of full-time Pilgrim life

Had to wait. It would be postponed for almost two years. My first post-Covid venture was not the Via Francigena but Israel, in January 2023. It wasn’t until September that I started the trip planned for spring 2020. And only now could I hum that other tune: ‘I love Paris in spring.”

I sat in my small hotel room on the seventh floor of my little hoptel with almost a view of the Heilige Coeur, and started writing this long-awaited post. Now I’m back in Michigan (although jet lag is still very much present) and between the time I arrived in April and the time I composed this post, I walked over 200km through the fields of northern France, from Arras to Reims. I could and should also add about 30 km around Paris itself.

And it was all written down.

My tablet tells me I’ve written 45,756 words. That’s a book. Not one worth reading, but my attempt to record what I did, felt and thought.

I’ll spare you the rough draft, but will say that pilgrim life is an internal and personal version of Base Communities, a Catholic movement in Latin America in the late 20th century that consciously combined action and reflection as a discipline.

Every day I walk for hours, and as I walk I take in the world and my sense of it. Every evening I write down what I saw and thought (as far as I can remember) and try to extract some meaning or insight from it.

The hardest part comes next:

reflection on reflection. Call it editing or revising, it comes down to removing what is ephemeral. Knowing the impermanent is difficult because everything is ultimately impermanent. As I noted in my daily report, pilgrim walking means embodying the premise of Buddhism: that everything is impermanent.

That task, separating the meaningless ephemeral from the meaningless ephemeral, will not occur until long after I return home; at which time the ordinary tasks of life, postponed so that I could do this, will demand their rightful attention. Cataract surgery will follow in two weeks. The garden needs attention, I’m sure. and then there is my grandson.

Pilgrim life is much more than walking.

The easiest part is the walk.