I was Surprised to Discover that my Co-Host Doesn’t Want a Salary

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Crosswords Conversation

When I first started hosting Camino de Santiago walking retreats in rural Gascony, the French Tuscany, I assumed I would be the one doing most of the teaching.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Over the years, dozens of people have arrived at my farmhouse carrying backpacks, walking boots, and lives that had gradually become much too heavy. Some were still working. Some had retired. Some were rebuilding after loss, illness or divorce. Others simply couldn’t explain why they felt so restless.

They thought they had come to walk a couple of sections of the Camino.

In the end, they became MY teachers. The CrossRoads Conversations blog post series explores what my guests have taught me over the last twenty-odd years.

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For years, I planned reflection exercises the way I imagine a nervous conference organiser plans icebreakers — carefully, a little anxiously, with a backup in case the first one fell flat. A guided journaling prompt after brunch. A short silent walk with a question to chew on. A candle, occasionally, if I’m honest, which in hindsight was probably one prop too many.

Then, one grey, misty morning between Eauze and Manciet on the Via Podensis, the weather did more emotional work in forty minutes than any exercise I’d ever written had managed in a week. And I had to admit, slightly grudgingly, that I’d been out-hosted.

The Morning That Changed My Mind

It wasn’t dramatic weather. No storm, nothing worth mentioning on a forecast. Just a low mist sitting over the vineyards, soft enough that the group ahead of me kept disappearing and reappearing like they were being gently erased and redrawn. Nobody had to be told to be quietly present in the moment. The mist did that on its own — it has a way of making conversation feel slightly out of place, as though you’d be talking into the void.

By the time we reached Manciet, one guest, a management consultant who’d spent the first two days rather effectively deflecting anything resembling introspection, said quietly that the walk had reminded him of a fog he used to watch from his grandmother’s kitchen window as a child, and that he hadn’t thought about that kitchen in decades. I hadn’t asked him a single question. The weather had done it for me.

Why the Weather Works Where My Exercises Sometimes Don’t

I think the honest answer is that a planned reflection exercise always carries a faint whiff of being asked to feel something, and most of us — sensible, self-protective creatures that we are — resist being asked to feel. We read the prompt already slightly bracing – or is that just us introverts?

A misty morning asks nothing of anyone. It simply changes the light, softens the edges of things, and quietly rearranges the inside of your head as a side effect, with no one watching to see whether you’re doing it “correctly.” There’s no wrong way to experience fog. There’s no journal page to fill in afterwards, proving you engaged with it sincerely. It just works on you, if you let it, and most people do.

Rain has its own effect, incidentally — a different one. Guests tend to walk closer together in rain, shoulders in, and conversation gets more practical and oddly more honest, the way conversation does when everyone’s slightly uncomfortable and no longer bothering to perform composure. Bright, cloudless mornings do something else again — they tend to loosen people rather than quiet them, more laughter, less confession. I’ve learned to read a forecast now the way I once read a guest list: as a fairly reliable clue about what kind of retreat day we’re about to have.

Learning to Get Out of the Way

The shift for me has mostly been about restraint. I still plan a loose shape for reflection during a retreat, because guests generally want some structure, and I don’t think I should abandon that entirely. But I’ve stopped scheduling it rigidly against the clock, and started watching the sky instead. If we wake to that particular soft grey mist over the Gers countryside, I quietly shelve whatever exercise I’d planned and simply let the walk do it instead.

It’s a strange thing to admit as someone who spent a career trusting careful planning over instinct, but the weather has turned out to be a better therapist than most of my prompts ever were. It just shows up as itself, and lets people meet it however they need to that morning.

If you’d like to walk a misty morning on the Via Podensis yourself — and see what comes to the surface — I’d love to hear from you. Write to me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com, and I’ll tell you honestly whether a walking retreat would be a good investment in YOU.