Ise Does It - Day -3
02.11.24
Hi there friends!
My name’s Drew Smith, this is my pop-up newsletter, and if you’re new here, welcome!
If this email is landing in your inbox after a two-year break then big hugs. The love so many of you shared with me on my last journey is what’s brought me back here for another round.
And if this is all coming as a rude shock and you want out, then you can unsubscribe here (no hard feelings, I promise!).
But if you’ve made it this far and think you might want to keep going, learn what this is about, and why I’m here: then hello from 33,985 feet somewhere far west of Brisbane, Australia.
On this day in 2022, I was just one excruciating day away from finishing a 300-odd km walk across the top of Spain. You might know it as the Camino de Santiago.
Along the way, every day, I published pop-up newsletter called A 600 And A Scallop Shell.
A mash-up of memoir, travelogue, and photo essay, it was a way to collect my thoughts and share a perspective from a moment of presence in an otherwise chaotic life.
And that’s what I’m gonna do here, starting now, if you care to come along.
In the two years since A600AASS, I’ve
- Quit big consulting,
- Swapped Amsterdam for Sydney,
- Married my partner Chris,
- Moved in to a home we bought together,
- Begun rebuilding community and family after 17 years away,
- And started a business.
Just looking at those things there in a list — right there, inescapable in black and white — makes me realise that that’s a shit tonne of change for a 24-month period.
But in between all of that polite life milestone stuff, the kind that everyone talks about when catching up with friends after an extended absence, there’s been some rather profound, somewhat challenging other stuff going down, too.
So I decided to take a breather, to collect my thoughts, to see if I can find my way back to presence.
Yes, I decided to take a walk.
This time, I’ll be travelling one of the old Kumamo Kodo pilgrimage trails in Japan, ambling along a 170km stretch known as the Ise-ji. It’s that little rainbow snake in the image above.
Running north-south from the city of Ise-shi to Shingu, I’ll wind my way through forested hills, across farmland, and along the coastline of a country I scarcely know, where I don’t speak a word of the language.
That sense of dislocation I’m bound to feel? That’s kinda the point: a shock to the system to effect, I hope, a kind of sensory and spiritual reset. It’ll be grand to have you with me.
But first, a few rules, because a walk is nothing if not an opportunity to introduce some useful forcing functions in to a life feeling adrift:
- Write 1000+ words a day,
- Take one portrait a day,
- Publish those words and a selection of photos from the day, each day,
- No social media, no news, no email,
- Feel in to each decision that comes up. Allow my response to be an empowered “yes”, or and empowered “no.
I think that’ll do it for now.
It’s the grey, wet, limpid morning of Day -2 now and I’m comfortably ensconced with friends Aidan and Yukari and their Golden Retriever, Nina, in the country at the foot of Mount Ashio. I need to remind myself of how to get this damn thing published.