Trail Marker |
Last week I ate lunch with a woman who had been weighing shirts, shampoo, and
blister bandages as she computed the options possible within the 12-pound limit
she had set for her backpack. It had to be lean, yet adequate to sustain her on
a 200-mile trek along the venerated Camino de Santiago de Compostela in
northern Spain. By now, she’s on the trail.
Along with assessing the priorities of what she’d
carry, we chatted about the motivations behind this undertaking. There’s a
physical challenge, of course, for one who loves walking. But the Camino de
Santiago is a pilgrimage trail, which somehow differentiates it from, say, the
new 800-mile coastline trail in Wales. She pondered what the trek would mean
for her, approaching the path and the unknowns with curiosity.
The conversation followed
me home where I opened my well-worn copy of The
Spirited Walker and reread the comments of a man I interviewed several years
ago. James Carse walked 300 miles of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in a
period of grief and transition after the death of his wife. It was, he said, “a
physically and spiritually challenging journey into the unfamiliar.... from these
efforts you get things you couldn’t have imagined.”
Two days later an email message arrived from another woman—a
nurse in Illinois whom I met last year on the Coast-to-Coast trek in England.
This year she’d made plans to walk a section of the Camino de Santiago and we’d
hoped to meet up along the path in September. Instead, she reported, a
diagnosis of breast cancer had changed her route and set her on a different
journey into the unfamiliar. After one chemotherapy treatment, her hair was starting to fall out.
Having
walked both paths myself—the one
in Spain and the one through cancer treatment—I‘d call both journeys a
pilgrimage. Both involve the classic components of pilgrimage--surrender, sacrifice,
and service. Both provide a physical and spiritual “journey into the unfamiliar” and yield “things
you couldn’t have imagined.”
If a
choice were offered, I’d take the challenges of the Camino de Santiago de
Compostela over the Camino de Cancer any day, even if it meant sleeping in
those hostels where Martin Sheen at least pretended to seek lodging in the
popular 2010 movie The Way. But in
the end, both Caminos forced me to face limits, values, and priorities. Both
brought me home to a deeper, cleaner connection with myself. I wish the same
for the two pilgrims whose journeys touched me this week: “Buen Camino, Perigrinos!”
Read
more about the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Chap 10 of The Spirited Walker, or about my 2004
trek in Week 7 of Healing Walks for Hard
Times. Keep up with my training for a 2013 return to the Camino by signing
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Ah Carolyn, I love reading you!
ReplyDeleteAnd I love hearing that! Thank You, Jan! Actually, I love writing these blogs--they seem to keep me aware and alert in my daily life. But I'm also most grateful when someone lets me know they've read it.
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