Things you will learn on your pilgrimage

1. You will forget that you are wandering. One day you will be walking through Matagalpa and give someone directions without thinking and you’ll know which is the best bakery and you will walk through the city without a jacket when it rains.
2. You will know who your friends are. This does not mean that you will discover who is not your friend—instead you will be buoyed by your beloveds from afar on tough days. They will send you cat photos and jokes and good articles, and remind you of your spirit.
3. You will walk through Matalgalpa at night by yourself and suddenly everything you’ve been working on in therapy for the last three years will click into place and you will feel the strength of your heart and will not be afraid.
4.  You will make friends whenever you open your heart up to new people. You will meet Megan at an art gallery when she asks “Gringa or Nica” and then you will spend a week trying to figure out how you didn’t know her before. You will meet Itsel and her family on the side of a mountain when you can’t breath and your heart needs a boost. You will have dinner with Erika the night when all you want is a friend to have ice cream and a beer for dinner with and that is what you’ll have and you’ll remember that no one really knows what they’re doing anyway.
5. You will drink too much Coca-Cola with real sugar and small loaves of bread. You will forget to bring water on your runs and you will get dehydrated.
6. You will forget the English words for indignity and suffering and tolerance.
7. You will walk down a mountain barefoot, remembering that every rock is sacred. You will take your time and fall in love with the dirt that gets ingrained between your toes.
8. One day you will be sitting in the garden and the sun will be peeking over the roof and you will get an email with a poem from your mentor and you will burst into tears in gratitude for this space and time… and for emails with poems that always arrive just when they are needed… and you will be grateful that this mentor has spent hours sorting out concepts of place, home, earth, and self.
9. Your heart will break open with fear and mourning and grief. You will hold onto a longing for what cannot be, and you will offer that pain to the earth again and again, not because it will not take it but because you keep snatching it back.
10. Your heart will hold so much joy that you feel like your skin might burst.
11. You will be lonely some nights, so much that the tears you hold back will be a flood. You will sit with that loneliness and find strength in your own vulnerability. You’ll still be lonely, but then you will remember to text your people and Skype your parents, and you’ll be grateful.
12. One night you will be painting a llama and singing to yourself and discerning some big questions, and your mentor will send you a poem at that moment and you will realize that you are grateful beyond words for a mentor who has almost singlehandedly reshaped your sense of people of a certain gender and age.
13. You will run up a mountain and walk next to a river and count bridges. Dogs will bark at you.
14. You will yell in Spanish at a man who thinks you need help. You will dream in Spanish about ecofeminism. You will bless the work of the land in Spanish.
15. You will cut open your foot, skin your knee, get the flu twice, fall down the stairs twice, split your toe, and burn your eyebrow. You will keep getting back up, ready to face the world.