Transcript 0:00 [gentle music] Welcome to The Crone Stories. I'm Karen. Every woman carries a story. Most of them never get told. I sit down with women and gather those stories, 0:16 the breaks, the leaps, the things they carried, and who they became on the other side. I shape each one into a narrative, read it back to the woman it belongs to, and then bring it here to you. 0:32 After the story, you'll hear her answer the same three questions I ask every woman in her own voice. If you haven't followed the show yet, do that now wherever you're listening, 0:46 and if these stories mean something to you, you can always leave a five-star rating. Both help other women find the show. I'm gathering stories for season two right now. 1:01 If you've lived through something or built something or become someone you didn't expect, you can always tell me your story at karenamy.com/tellmeyourstory. You can share under your own name or stay completely anonymous. 1:19 And now this is one of those stories, and today just happens to be mine. Every year, people from all over the world walk into Santiago de Compostela at the end of the Camino. 1:37 In 2025, a record 530,987 people received the Compostela, the certificate given by the pilgrim's office in Santiago, the one that says, "You made it." 1:55 Just over half of them were women. Most of them didn't walk the whole way. Nearly a third started in Sarria, the last stretch before Santiago. 2:08 Only about 6% started where the traditional route begins in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the French side of the Pyrenees Mountains, nearly 800 kilometers away from Santiago. 2:23 Last year, that was about 30,000 people. Here's another number. In Canada, about half of new small businesses are still open five years later. About a third make it to 10, 2:42 and most of us never start at all. In 2023, 55% of Canadian adults said the fear of it failing would keep them from starting a business, and women tend to carry that fear a little more than men do. 3:01 Women in midlife keep starting anyway. A study in the UK found that middle-aged women were starting more businesses than any other group, with the peak being between 45 and 55. 3:18 We count the starts and we count the finish lines. We don't count much of what happens in between or how long it can take for a woman to look back at all of it and feel proud. This story lives in that in between. 3:37 When Karen was a little girl, her mother would take the kids out for drives and let them decide which way to turn. The point was to get lost. Karen has been good at it ever since. She still does it on purpose. 3:56 At 25, Karen was working in an aromatherapy shop when two women came through the door. They were both about 50, and they had just come home from walking the Camino, a pilgrimage across Spain. 4:11 They told her their lives were forever changed, and if she ever had the time in her life, they said she needed to look into it because it would change her forever. Karen was not Catholic. 4:25 The Camino had never been anywhere near her world, but something that day sparked in her when they said it, and it stayed. 4:34 Over the years, more would come to her, a mention here, a story there, and each time she would think, "Oh, the Camino." She didn't think much about what the walk might give her. 4:49 In her 20s, she used to joke that she wanted to move away at some point and live in a hut. Six weeks on a path in Spain sounded a lot like that. "I've always liked to extract myself from life," she says. 5:05 "It's the way that I process. It's the way that I get clear." There was not much room for extracting in those years. 5:15 Karen started her adult life as a single mom, and she was always on the hustle, always finding a way to make the next buck. Later came a career in real estate and a three-year-old daughter at home. 5:30 The deals kept Karen away too much. She wanted a small business that could bring in some money and keep her closer to home. Around that same time, her mother passed away. 5:44 Karen is the youngest of five with eight years between her and her next sibling. She was 40, and she was orphaned. Her mother never really asked questions. She was simply there, a soft place to land no matter what. 6:03 "She was, and still is, the only person I could fully fall into," Karen said. A bit of her mother's inheritance is what made Earth's Berries possible. Karen often jokes that her mom would never have been a customer. 6:22 She would have supported her daughter, bought the product from her, and stuck it in the back room because she would have never believed that a berry from India could clean her clothes. 6:35 Looking back, Karen thinks the business was partly a way of processing her grief and partly something more. "Maybe just trying to make her proud," she says. The idea came out of a meditation. 6:50 Karen had heard Wayne Dyer talk about picturing your life not as what you should be doing, but how you want your life to be. Not long after, she found soapberries through a company in Saskatchewan. The plan was small. 7:06 Farmers markets, grocery money, more time at home with her daughter. Then a company called Ethical Ocean featured the berries on a newscast. Karen was at her sister's cottage. 7:21 She woke up the next morning to 600 orders, and by the end of the day, there were 1,000. Everyone she knew came to her house to box them up and ship them out. "Holy shit," she remembers thinking. 7:37 "This can maybe be bigger than I ever expected." So she made it bigger. She was on the Home Shopping Channel. She had a chance to be a vendor at the Golden Globes. 7:51 She got a patent that she really didn't need, incorporated the business, and expanded online, and it did grow. In its third and fourth years, Earth's Berries brought in more than $100,000 a year in sales. 8:07 Those were the peak years. And then Ethical Ocean closed. After that, sales went down every year. Shipping was eating the profits. 8:20 Karen was robbing Peter to pay Paul, putting money into opportunities she believed would turn things around. She had gone from planning a few farmers markets to running something far beyond her experience. 8:35 But she kept going anyways. "The dream got a lot bigger, and yet it didn't really have the foundation to stand on," she says. She could see that it was not going in the right direction, and she kept trying anyway. 8:52 Then one day, she arrived at a farmers market where she had sold for nine years and found they had let another soap nut vendor in, who, by the way, was saying that she was a liar and her product wasn't good. 9:08 She had already been thinking about closing. That day felt like the last nail in the coffin, and she took it as her sign. Within four months, after almost 10 years, she closed Earth's Berries. 9:25 The business was left with a lot of debt. Karen comes from a small town, and she could almost hear what people were saying. "There she goes again, starting a business and not finishing it and failing." 9:40 When she actually talked to people, most of them did not see it that way at all, but most of them had no idea how much debt she was carrying. But she knew. 9:51 "I had put my family in a financial spot that we're still climbing out of," she says. Her marriage had been through hard years. Family life was complicated. 10:06 By the time she closed the business, she felt defeated by almost everything. Karen had always been the woman who would try something. If it worked, great. If it didn't, she would figure something else out. 10:22 This was the first time taking a chance had cost her family so much. "I lost a lot of the I'll give it a go," she says. The ideas kept coming. 10:38 Karen has always been creative, but acting on them got harder. She needed more certainty before she decided anything, and she worried about getting it wrong again. 10:51 For a woman who had spent her life trusting herself to figure things out, that was a hard place to be. Karen was turning 50. The business was closed. The debt was still there. 11:06 Her mother had been gone nearly 10 years, and Karen was still carrying things she had not worked through. She knew she needed distance from everyday life, 11:20 and there was the walk she had been thinking about for 25 years. 800 kilometers from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port over the Pyrenees and across Spain to Santiago de Compostela. 11:38 The trip would cost about $5,000. With the family's finances the way they were, it was not the obvious choice. But Karen knew this about herself. 11:52 When life got overwhelming, she needed space to process it. This time, she was going to do it on foot. With her husband's support, she planned to be away for eight weeks. 12:07 Her daughter was 13, and Karen would be home in time for her graduation She booked the walk for April. She had a list, of course. 12:17 She would start fresh, get her A1C under control, lose 50 pounds, meet new people, clear her head, maybe figure out what came next. John Kabat-Zinn says, "Wherever you go, there you are." 12:36 That is exactly what happened. On the Camino, I was still the intimidated woman and still afraid to open and start conversations with people. 12:51 She set out from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port weighing 225 pounds with a 25-pound pack on her back. She had not trained by walking long distances. She had been teaching Nia four or five days a week, and that was it. 13:09 But she had done her research. She knew how many pilgrims had their walks cut short by blisters, and she was not going to let that happen to her. She was going to look after her feet, come hell or high water. 13:25 She changed her socks. She used her powder. Within a week or two, she watched people far more athletic than she was leave the path because their feet were covered in blisters and they could barely walk. 13:41 Many pilgrims carried a day pack and had the rest sent ahead. Karen carried her full pack the whole way. 13:50 "There was an aspect of it that I was carrying my pack to carry this weight," she says, "the weight that I had built upon myself." 14:05 She was up at 5:00 and out the door by 6:00, and she was, in her words, "Honest to God the slowest walker." Pilgrims who left an hour or two after her would pass her somewhere along the way. 14:20 Sometimes they walked together for a while. Sometimes she met them again in the next village. Now and then, they passed her twice 14:29 because Karen, who had always liked getting lost, was finding out that getting lost on the Camino was a different thing. One kilometer the wrong way meant a two-kilometer correction, 14:43 and those were kilometers she did not have to spare. Most days, Karen walk-danced. [laughs] People would come up behind her on the path, and before long they were calling her the Dancing Pilgrim. 14:58 There were friendships, small villages, shared meals, glasses of wine, and people from all over the world walking the same road. One of the things Karen loved most was that the Camino put everyone on the same level. 15:15 You could be walking beside a king, a CEO, or a waiter and never know it. Nobody knew what you earned or what kind of house you lived in, and if they did, it didn't matter. 15:29 Everybody was carrying a pack, looking for the next yellow arrow, wondering where they would sleep that night and whether their feet would hold up another day. You were all pilgrims. 15:43 You walked together, shared food and stories, and most times walked in silence. Nobody out there knew about the business. Nobody cared whether she had been a success or lost everything. 16:00 She was just Karen walking across Spain. After years of judging herself by what had happened with Earthberries, she loved that. 16:13 About halfway through, Karen reached the Meseta, a long, flat stretch that some pilgrims skip. There's not much to distract you out there, and for Karen, that is where a lot of what she had been carrying came up. 16:29 On the hardest day, she decided to walk 40 kilometers. Somewhere out on that stretch, it all started coming out: the business, the debt, the decisions she had made, and the ones she wished she had made differently, 16:45 and her mother. She cried, then she screamed. She was angry with her mother for not taking better care of herself, for not living those last years the way Karen wished she had. 17:02 Underneath all of that was something simpler. "I was mad that she left me," she said. She had been 40 when her mother died, and she had lost the one person she could always fall into. 17:21 Nearly 10 years later, in the middle of Spain, she was still angry that her soft place to land was gone. She cried, she got sunburnt, and by the time she reached her bed that night, she was done. 17:34 "What did I say to myself on that day? 'Why the fuck are you doing this?'" The next morning, she got up and walked 13 kilometers. Karen kept getting lost, and without fail, someone would point her the right way. 17:53 A Spanish local would see her wandering off course and send her back to the yellow arrows. 18:00 She would worry that she was going to arrive too late, that there would be no bed, that the next town was another 10 kilometers away. Then she would arrive, and there would be a bed every single time 18:17 "At the end of the day, it's all going to work out," she says. "So you can either bawl your eyes out and have a horrible time, or you can just know that it's going to work out." 18:30 Because at the end of the day, it always worked out. Always. On the Camino, it did. Not on her schedule and never fast, but she always found her way. 18:49 Reaching Santiago was magical. The cathedral, the square, the people she had walked with, all of the exhaustion was worth it. She had walked the whole way across Spain with her own pack on her back. 19:06 Then she came home. The debt was still there. The business still weighed on her. She had not come back a new person or with all the answers she went looking for. But one thing was very clear. 19:21 She did not wanna start another business. She wanted a job and a paycheck. After years of being responsible for every decision, every dollar, and every problem, she wanted something different. 19:37 For the time being, knowing that was enough. Anyone who has walked the Camino will tell you it keeps working. For Karen, it kept working for years. 19:52 People had called her an inspiration while she walked, and they kept saying it after she came home. She pushed back against that word for a long time. She did not see herself as inspiring. 20:06 She was the woman who got lost, the slow walker, the one who had made so m- many expensive mistakes. She knew her flaws, all of them, and it was hard to match the word to the woman she knew herself to be. 20:23 Forgiveness came slowly. For years, when Karen looked back at Earth's Berry, she saw the debt, the mismanagement, and the choices she had made without understanding where they would lead. 20:37 She could not change any of that, and the cost to her family was real. But over time, she started remembering the rest of those 10 years. 20:50 The customers, the friendships, the people she worked with in India and Nepal, the children she sponsored, 20:59 the people going through cancer treatments who wrote to tell her that for the first time they could wear their clothes without discomfort. 21:05 "It's hard to believe that a laundry detergent can change the lives of people," she said, "but it did. It honestly did." She started to see what she had built as well as what it had cost. 21:20 "I can acknowledge the mistakes and the consequences without dismissing everything I accomplished." Full forgiveness took years. 21:35 Only in the last year has Karen felt she truly has made peace with that part of her life. She says the Camino had something to do with it. 21:45 Walking across Spain did not fix the business or change what happened, but what she started to understand on that road stayed with her. She would start Earth's Berries again. 21:57 She would take it slower and make different decisions, but she would never regret starting it. Eight years after the Camino, Karen began collecting women's stories, 22:11 women who had lived extraordinary lives and did not see much that was remarkable about them. 22:17 They told her what they had been through, the choices they had made, the people they had lost, and the women that they had become, often as though it were just an ordinary life. 22:31 Karen listened and asked questions, and sometimes a question made a woman stop and see her own life in a way she never had. 22:41 Then Karen shaped those memories into a story told in third person so the woman could hear her life through someone else's eyes. Eventually, Karen decided to go through it herself. 22:57 She filled out her own story form, she answered the questions she asked the other women, and she sat down for her harvest interview. It was harder from the other side than she expected. So here it is. 23:12 This is me telling you my story the same way I've told theirs. For a start, she was not convinced her Camino was much of a story. Thousands of people had walked it. She had been surrounded by them the whole time. 23:29 It was simply something she had done. Then preparing her story, she looked up how many people actually walk the full route from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Santiago. 23:42 She knew people who had walked shorter sections, sometimes over several trips, and she did not think their walks meant any less. But the numbers for those who start the long walk and finish it put her own in perspective. 24:01 She had walked the entire way with her pack every kilometer, and for the first time, she let herself be proud of that. Karen is nearing 60 now, and she says there's a difference between 50 and almost 60 24:20 At 50, there was still an angst in her, a feeling that she needed to figure things out, achieve something, become something. Now she describes it as a settling. 24:34 When she heard Gertrude talk about a slow settling of the frequency in her life, it resonated with her. "I've done some cool shit," she says. 24:45 "There's lots of people that have done cooler shit, but for me and for my life, I've done some pretty cool shit." She still has ideas, and she still wants to make things. 24:58 She still notices the hesitation that was not there before Earth Berries. She has not gotten all of that confidence back, but she has stopped letting that business be the one thing that defines her, 25:13 and she has started to count some of the other things that she has done. When Karen was a little girl, her mother would take her out driving and let her choose which way to go. Getting lost was fun. 25:28 On the Camino, it was not always fun, [laughs] but she found her way every time. In the years since, she has had to find her way through other things, too. She still does not know exactly what is next. 25:45 She knows what she would tell the woman standing at the start of the Camino at 50. Everything is going to be all right. Don't worry. Put one step in front of the other, and it's all going to be good, 26:01 and there doesn't have to be a goal with it. Just enjoy and be present for the journey. Eight years after walking the Camino, she is still figuring a lot of things out, 26:18 but she will not let her mistakes erase everything else she has done. When she looks back at that walk, she can finally say, "Fuck yeah, I did that. I don't need to be anybody's inspiration," she says. 26:33 "I just needed to finally be my own." That's my story. Every woman who sits with me hears her story read back, and then I ask her the same three questions. This time, I'm the one answering. 26:53 What was it like to hear your own story told back to you? It was interesting. 27:01 I don't think it has as much distance as the other women, but when I read it in third person, it did give me more distance, and it released more of the guilt and shame around the business 27:13 because I could see the story as someone else's, and I think of how supportive I would be to them if I was able to be there to comfort them. What is alive in you right now? 27:29 I'm really excited about the stories that are coming and the podcast and starting the interviews for season two. If a woman listening is three steps behind you on this same path, what do you want her to know? Be present 27:47 and be kind to yourself. But being present almost feels more front and center for me right now. I realize that most of my life I was always looking forward. 28:05 I am blessed with a meditation practice that keeps me grounded and present for 20 to 30 minutes a day, but outside of that, I've spent most of my life looking forward. 28:17 I am learning to be really present to life [gentle music] and I do wish that I had learned that sooner. Before you go, stay with me for one small piece. I call it the sitting, 28:33 a few quiet minutes to carry something with you. The thing I keep from my own story is not the walk, and it's not the debt. It is the forgiveness, the kind that took me eight years and the kind that only really came 28:51 when I heard my story as if it belonged to another woman. Once I could see her, I knew exactly how I would comfort her. So that is what we will sit with, setting something down for someone else 29:10 and offering that same kind of kindness to yourself. Find a comfortable place. You do not need to do anything but listen. 29:30 This is the sitting, a few quiet minutes just for you. If you can close your eyes, let them close. 29:50 Take a slow breath in and let it out slowly. Let your hands rest in your lap 30:09 and close them gently as if you were holding something. Let that be everything you have been carrying, the old hurts, the things you wish had gone differently 30:26 Just notice how long you have been holding on. 30:29 [gentle music] Now bring to mind someone you have been holding something against. 30:50 Not the biggest hurt, something smaller. 30:53 [gentle music] See them doing the best they could with what they have, 31:14 even when it was not enough. Forgiveness is not saying it was okay. It is only setting it down. 31:32 Silently say to them, "I am setting this down now." 31:39 [gentle music] Let them go. 32:04 [gentle music] Now bring to mind yourself in a hard season, 32:20 the one who made the choice you still replay. See her the way you would see another woman, a friend, someone you love. 32:34 [gentle music] Look at what she was carrying. 32:54 Look at how tired she was. 32:56 [gentle music] If she sat down beside you and told you everything, 33:22 what would you say to her? Say it now, silently, in your own words. 33:32 [gentle music] If the words don't come, try these. 33:48 You did the best you could with what you knew. You can set this down now. 33:55 [gentle music] Breathe in and let her hear it. 34:31 Breathe out and let her rest. 34:34 [gentle music] Now slowly open your hands. 34:52 Let them rest open, palms up. [gentle music] You may not let all of it go today. Forgiveness takes as long as it takes. 35:11 Sometimes it takes years. But your hands know how to open. 35:18 [gentle music] Bring in one more breath, in [gentle music] 35:44 and out. [gentle music] Begin to feel support underneath you. Wiggle your fingers and your toes. 36:04 And when you are ready, you can open your eyes. Welcome back. [gentle music] Thank you for sitting with us. 36:21 If a woman came to mind while you were listening, pass her this story. Send it to her or share it wherever you are. That's how these stories find the women who need them. This has been The Crone Stories. 36:37 In love, light, and laughter, Karen. [gentle music]
