Reflections From My Camino

My Camino

The following is a reflection from my experience of walking across Spain on a pilgrimage to Santiago. 

It is likely you will find these words incongruent, disproportional and mostly inadequate as they stumble along the kilometers of questions. These moments elude the security of sterile boxes labeled with neatly printed identification cards. These moments live only within the pause, between the words. This is why only now I begin to write my thoughts over a month after the walk's end and why even today the story continues to take its shape.

I first offer a few facts about our trip. A “few” facts, partially because recall can only pry selective bits from my memory's tight grasp, but mostly because the trip contains more questions than answers, more feelings than facts. But I know we strongly desire the facts and details that can be catalogued and neatly stored away. Cataloguing helps us forget for a moment that we don't know everything, and makes us believe that even life's uncertainty can be contained with certain labeling. So here are a few:

After spending the night in Barcelona, my wife and I took a train to Pamplona and a bus to St. Jean Pied de Port, France (the start of our foot journey). Here we receive our Pilgrim Passport Booklet, later to be stamped by each hostel and many cafes along the way, and a shell to hang on our backpack – the shell being a symbol of St. James (Santiago). We begin our walk early the next morning.

The path over the Pyrenees was closed due to the late, firm hand winter still held over the mountain range. So, much of our first day's walk takes place on the road. The asphalt road is long and tough on the feet and psyche. The morning is steep with traffic streaming by and rain playing peek-a-boo with the sky only to forfeit to the snow as we reach higher elevation. Towards the top we join the path off the road. Mud, rock, steep snow, legs hurting, cold... very cold. AND, so amazingly beautiful!

It begins snowing heavily after we settle into the hostel for the night. Day 2 we awake to over 2 feet of snow and its accompanied stillness. By the end of the day we will have climbed out of the worst of it and begin our several day thawing period as it gradually gets warmer and greener along the way.

Mountains, hills, long stretches of flat newly-sprouted wheat fields, rocks, dirt, mud, gnarly old hands of grape vines and olive trees bare, sprouting, budding... the path is varied.

Snow, sleet, rain, mist, fog, sun fading contrast in the horizon, windy, breezy, stillness echoing with the sounds of our footsteps, cold, warm, hot sun... the weather is vast.

Retired, sabbatical, wandering, lost, old, young, transitioning, adjusting to a new life, grandparents, grandchildren, mothers, fathers, couples, married and on their way to the altar, Central, Eastern, Western European, Asian, North, Central and South American... the pilgrims are diverse.

32 days of walking 6 – 8 hours each day (with a couple days rest along the way) we arrive into Santiago. Some of the pilgrims' faces - a reunion; while others are new to the community of our shared experience. Unplanned (by us) the Pilgrims Mass we attend the following day happens to be the day of Ascension, May 9, 2013. We arrive at the beginning – the beginning of a new, transformed life.

Facts told, now I share some moments of clarity, inspiration, epiphany, wisdom... These “moments” continue to present themselves to me and shape my steps.

• Everyone has their own Camino to walk. An individual's walk/life is theirs alone. My wife and I choose to walk the camino together, but we walk it as individuals. I play witness to her joy and pains and they are hers to bare. Just as she witnesses my experience. She cannot take my knee pain. We are here on this walk for our own growth, happiness, and our own trials and tribulations. To truly listen and witness the walk of another we only need to “show up” and be present with them. Truly listening requires me to be open and non-judging as others share their journey. Non-judging means that I can listen without the need to “repair” or “fix” the other person. Listening and allowing others to walk their own camino is the most incredibly loving gift I can give.
  
  
• Sometimes the way is cold, snowy, slippery. Sometimes it is sunny, breeze to the back and downhill... muddy, rainy, rocky... Regardless, all of the way moves you in the same direction – forward. The camino reminds me to respect and love all conditions along the course for they all are moving me in the same direction. I find comfort in the appreciation of all paths and conditions. Instead of judging them as good or bad, I thank them for moving me forward. I am defined by how I take the journey, not by the journey itself.
  
  
• I learn to slow down, look around and enjoy the way and to embrace friendship with other pilgrims and nature herself. I listen to those moments that ask me to linger. A bird springs out of the wheat sprouts and hovers as she fights to take flight against the wind. This is the reason I am here, right now in this moment to witness this event.
  
  
• There are always pilgrims in front and always pilgrims behind. The camino is not a race, competition or a challenge to be overcome. It is a moment to be understood.
  More on learning to listen – Listening is the greatest gift you can give others AND it is also the greatest gift you can give yourself. My relationship I have with the body shifted during the walk. Very early in the walk the knee of the right leg started hurting, pain left over from a running injury years ago. The pain was so intense that I feared I was fated for a long, slow shuffle over the next several weeks.
  Then the shift.

A man who we happen across imparts a transformative truth that forever changes the way I interact with the body. He tells me that my knee isn't causing me pain, because the truth is I have no knee. He says the body lies to me in an attempt to convince me it is me. “Don't believe the lies your body tells you,” he says. He goes on to say the body (with all its ills) is only a manifestation of the inner self. I decide to jump in and take off my knee brace and forget about the lies. The seed is planted.

As we walk, this seed is nurtured into a seedling and eventually a full-blown oak tree! As I settle into this way of thinking I realize that we aren't our body, not entirely anyways. At best we have a lifetime lease. The body, its parts and pieces, came from the sun, plants and animals of the earth and when we are finished with it, the body will return to the earth and its elements will be used again. Remember science class, “matter cannot be created nor destroyed” – therefore, our bodies are recycled or upcycled from the earth and again back to the earth. We don't own it and it doesn't own us, nor do we own its pain. The pain that comes up only wants to be listened to, not identified with.

I can't say much more about this other than it helped me. I now practice being a witness: observing and listening to the body and its pains, joys and continuing aging without judging or identifying with what comes up. And by listening without judging I get to hear the lessons the body is teaching me. Listening shows appreciation to what is coming up and through this practice, the pain turns into a lesson and dissolves into personal growth.

The Camino de Santiago is an ancient pilgrimage, thousands of years old. A walk that hundreds of thousands of pilgrims begin each year from their homes to the remains of a guy who knew a guy that rubbed shoulders with the Creator. This is not a walk of religion, it is a walk of faith.

Faith that the walk in our life is significant, no matter how many steps it takes.

Faith that we are all part of a network of paths that intertwine and connect us together.

Faith in the small and invisible moments that speed by in the blur of modern life.

And faith in our resolve to walk our own camino.

Want to see more? See our video slide show here – www.robfannin.com/Camino_Movie.html