Santiago de compostela pilgrimage1/17/2024 I have used the word “emptiness” to describe the spaces between the Camino’s towns, and perhaps that is how we would experience them – if we were driving. What counts for us today, however, is that this alternation between habitation and emptiness creates another rhythm: the rhythm of solitude and community. It was shaped by the pilgrimage, too – big towns pop up at roughly the distance of a day’s walk from each other. This pattern was laid down in Spain’s olden days of chronic warfare, when people went out to farm the fields by day, then huddled in their villages at night. What we find instead are long stretches of emptiness punctuated at regular intervals by a compact village or town. At least until we reach Galicia, with its loose scattering of farms and byres, there is little continuous human settlement on the Camino. View of the Camino from La Casa de los Holandeses, a pension run by a Dutch couple.Īnd as we walk through this particular landscape, we become aware of another rhythm: the rhythm of the rural and the urban. To follow the ribbon of the Camino ever westward across Spain is to rediscover another way of walking – strong, calm, purposeful.Ī simple bar sign and the reassuring Camino scallop shell symbol keep the pilgrim on track. And city journeys are Ulyssean, returning us at the end of the day to the place we left in the morning. The leveled surfaces meant to facilitate our progress are rock-hard, we pay for convenience with sore feet. A city is a choppy sea for walkers, with its crowded sidewalks and stop-and-go traffic lights, its traffic and distractions. We are the creature who goes on four legs in the morning and two in the afternoon.īut walking is a rhythm that’s hard to find in the life most of us live today. What rhythm, save our heartbeat, our breathing, is more basic to life? It was the steady metronome of footsteps that took our kind out of Africa a million years ago and carried us to the farthest ends of the Earth – for better or for worse. What, then, were the rhythms I felt? Well, first and last, the rhythm we pound with the steps of our journey, the rhythm of walking. Robert and his wife, Michiko, have clearly enjoyed their time on the Camino. But the only fixed star in my pilgrim sky was a morning coffee. This is not to say that other pilgrims didn’t find or create order in the Camino’s rush and flux. I’ve learned not to argue with the Camino. I usually set out in the morning with an idea of where I wanted to end up that night, but if it transpired that the Camino had other ideas for me, I didn’t put up a fight. There were nights I slept the sleep of the just. Some days I walked fifteen kilometers, others forty. though for me, I never established much in the way of a daily rhythm. I suppose the obvious one is the rhythm of the pilgrim’s day, the waking and walking and eating and sleeping and waking and walking and…. For while half the appeal of the Camino is the surprises, the eternal newness of the familiar, the other half is what does not change: the deep, persistent rhythms of the road. I do the Camino again because every time it ’s different.”īut that’s still not the whole answer. But most of all, I meet a whole new cast of pilgrims, all with their own stories, their own novel ways of looking at our shared experience. I turn left where before I turned right, look up where last time I looked down. “Every time,” (I explain) “I walk it in a different season, sleep in different places, find new ways to get somewhere familiar – and new ways to get lost. Meseta (Great Table) Road is a picturesque contrast to the more mountainous terrain closer to Santiago de Compostela. But in the meantime, I’m still far from wearing out the novelty of the good old Camino Francés. I tell them they’re absolutely right, and swear I’ll someday walk to Rome, and make the Buddhist pilgrimage to the Japanese island of Shikoku, and check out the Portuguese route to Santiago …. “It’s a big world, there are other experiences to be had, other roads to walk. “You’re in a rut,” the questioners seem to imply. People ask me – often in solicitous tones – why I keep coming back to the Camino de Santiago, or more precisely, to the Camino Francés, the great pilgrim trunk-road that runs from the Spanish Pyrenees west across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela.
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