Dear Friends and Supporters,

I'm proud to share with you that, yesterday, 316 days after I left Vancouver, Canada, I arrived at Border Field State Park, at the fence that divides the Californian beach between the US and Mexico.

On my final day, I walked 7 miles from the wooden pier at the San Diego community of Imperial Beach; past the naval airfield, where helicopters circled above, practicing their take-offs and landings; through the dry bed of the Tijuana River, littered with plastic bags, beverage containers, solitary flip-flops and decapitated doll's heads; through an overgrown estuary, where radar triggered cameras and officers on ATVs searched for wayward illegal wanderers (heading the other way, of course); and, finally, down a pristine white sand beach, where beautiful young women cantered bareback on horses shin deep in the clear surf. As I approached the border, I was stopped by a patrolman in a Jeep who warned me that I was unable to touch the fence itself and interact with any Mexicans on the other side. I explained my achievement and we compromised on a secondary fence, 30 or so feet away. So, I'm proud to share with you that yesterday, 316 days after I began this journey, I walked as close as was legally permissable to Mexico.

What surprised me most about the end was that the trip concluded so calmly. There were no wild displays of emotion, no fireworks (although some came later - in my honour, I'm sure - from out my hotel balcony looking back towards SeaWorld), no mad dash to the finish. I was overcome with the grounded, subtle feeling of a job well done. Perhaps that's appropriate: I had said at the beginning that pilgrimage is about the outer journey mirroring the inner one, and insofar as this trip has been a lesson in patience, trust, and discipline, that it culminated so calmly feels just right. On my final day, I wore a t-shirt that I had been given by the atheist society at Cal Poly University in San Luis Obispo. It said "Question Everything." To me, that means: Question your boundaries. Question your limitations. Question your doubts. That's what I think I've done.

I suppose that, today, the most pressing question is what I'll do next. A few weeks ago, I decided against going into Mexico, figuring that my trip was best completed at the border. Instead, I plan to head slowly back to Canada, taking some time to visit friends. I am looking forward to completing the postings on my blog and soliciting your choices for photos to suit your rewards. I will be in touch with more information about that when I'm back in Canada in the early fall.

In the meantime, I want to thank you once again for your support, for being part of this trip, and for helping to afford me the luxury of this spectacular creative and personal journey. On this trip, I've collected nearly 30,000 photographs, dozens of auduio recordings, and hundreds of pages of writing, and I am excited to see how they will fit together into something beautiful. More to come on that too once I catch my breath.

These lessons that I've learned can be for you too: Trust your heart. Give yourself permission. An honest smile opens all kinds of doors. The most important journey is the inner one. Listening says more than talking.

Thanks for listening. I hope you have a great summer.

Sincerely,

Jordan.

Hi Friends and Supporters,

I want to send you a big thank you for funding the final leg of my walk to Mexico.  I feel really grateful and excited to have your support for the road ahead.

Today finds me in sunny Monterey, anticipating the upcoming stretch of wilderness along the Big Sur coastline and into Southern California.  A landslide has closed the road along the isolated cliffs, a boon to a people-powered traveller keen to avoid the usual stream of coastal traffic along the narrow route.  I'm excited to discover what I've heard to be the most spectacular scenery on the American West Coast in relative solitude, and to inject that learning into my exploration of love. 

When I was in Crescent City, California, in mid November, I met a woman who had worked for many years as a college professor studying relationships.  Her focus had been on "synergistic relationships": in her words, any kind of relationship where the whole became greater than the sum of the parts.  She had spent years studying hundreds of different types of relationships - romantic, academic, athletic, familial, religious, and so on - trying to discover what gave rise to those moments of sustained synergy.

When you think about it, synergy is another word for love.  Love, after all, offers a nourishing foundation for personal growth and allows us to redefine our own perceptions of our boundaries and our potential. Given my journey, I was curious to hear her conclusions. 

In her research, she told me as we approached her house in the Redwoods, she had discovered two broad trends that seemed to apply across all the studied subjects.  One was that synergistic relationships didn't tend to have clearly defined relationship roles.  There was no sense of a repetitive pattern, no "you're the cook and I'm the dishwasher".  Instead, these types of relationships were guided by fluidity, where partners would swap tasks and even leadership without guidelines.  Instead of each person acting as a specialized expert, holding dominion over a particular knowledge base, partners set off on a kind of mutual exploration, offering their respective experience and skills through a kind of creative collaboration.  Each partner was simultaneously teacher and student, athlete and coach, giver and receiver, shifting seamlessly between roles depending on the particular needs of the moment.

The second trend was this notion that she called an 'adjuvant'.  In chemistry, she told me, an adjuvant is a substance similar to a catalyst. A catalyst is an agent that modifies a chemical reaction in two discrete substances while maintaining its essential character.  An adjuvant, on the other hand, similarly modifies a chemical reaction, but in doing so, it undergoes a fundamental change in itself, becoming something new in the process.  Creating synergy and triggering any kind of creative growth, she concluded, requires each participant to enter the relationship with an expectation of personal change and the openness and courage to become something new.

I want to offer that anecdote to you, particularly if you - like me - spend time thinking about how to create meaningful existence in a time where many voices sound overwhelmed by fear.  What makes life exquisite is that it is endlessly creative, filled with infinite potential of growth.  Every interaction we have with another being - whether with a family member, a good friend, a total stranger, or a member of another species - offers extraordinary, even daunting potential.  The difference between a happy life and a sad one, a prosperous life and a poor one, a fearful life and a loving one is how we approach those interactions.

The challenge before each of us is: can we have faith in the potential for synergy?  And so: are we willing to lead if that also means being led?  Are we willing to catalyze a change if that also means being changed in the process?  Are we willing to offer the other our genuine, sacred, vulnerable truth and to receive theirs in return?

My experience has been that exposing our truth makes us both vulnerable and powerful.  It makes us both playful and focused.  It enables us to both give and receive.  It helps us to both live and die.  There is no contradiction in these roles because they require one another.  They are synergistic; they are love; they are shards of the same fundamental, ineffable thing. 

I feel lucky to have entered into this relationship with you.  Thank you again for your support.  I can only hope, for both of us, that it's a synergistic one.

Onwards to Mexico!  Be sure to visit my blog at www.walkingtomexico.com for updates once I emerge from the wilderness into Southern California.

Best wishes,

Jordan.

PS Check out this great piece and video published about my journey in the Huffington Post last week:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/toan-lam/make-the-connection-why-o_b_839195.html