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I was surprised that I was able to take a few photos on a long walk in the park and woods on Sunday. So stunned and scattered had I been by disappointment in myself, regret and loss, I didn't know how much of me was still here.
Well, much love for all of you is still here, and a lot of sweet memories; they swell and fill me up.
My warmest thanks to all who've read and commented on my posts about the Camino de Santiago. It means a lot to have finally shared something so close to my heart, all these years later.
I'm hoping to apply the lessons recalled to a forthcoming trip that is also, perhaps, a kind of pilgrimage.
Alone again, in the very flat lands.
Photo: Michael Krier, UK Confraternity of St James
At the spanking new refugio in Burgo Ranero a note was pinned to the noticeboard from the sweet Spanish woman with whom I'd walked for a while back at the beginning. "Jim" [sic], she had written, passing through a day or two earlier, "I hope it goes well with you and you're loving the Camino as much as I am." Yes, I thought. Yes, in spite...
In Burgo Ranero I bumped into S and E again and their breezy wit swept me along towards León. We arrived there together. A lovely, cultured city, we thought, blinking a little, surprised to be in busy streets. In the cathedral we sat beneath the high rainbow windows and let the warm light fall through us. It felt good.
I was tired, though, tired from walking 300 miles, but tired mostly from fear and then from love. More than three weeks of my month off work had passed, and I was only about two-thirds of the way to Santiago. As we were returning to the hostel that night after dinner, the cathedral's silhouette bent over us, it came to me that León could be, for now, my Santiago. I wasn't going to walk any further.
León Cathedral: photo by Michael Krier, UK Confraternity of St James
After spending a day or two there, I caught a bus to Madrid, which was hot and surprising - another country.
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"Mmm. Lovely. Interesting. Very old path, you know. More than a thousand years..." My busy, workaholic colleagues didn't really want to know, and the lessons of the Camino sat in my mind, seeds germinating slowly.
Six months later, I saw a small ad in a Sunday paper for a holiday on the Greek island of Lefkada. Quiet, green. Guided walks, and an opportunity to learn about the Alexander Technique. Among the lessons of the Camino was how much energy I spent when walking on bodily tension. So my mind pricked up. I'd never been on an organised group holiday, never thought I was the kind of person to do that. Perhaps I was becoming a different kind of person. I went, and learned, in a blue-green, sparkly, relaxing place, a little of how to be in my body and let it flow forwards, instead of clenching and pushing it. And there I took the decision to leave the job that had consumed me for years.
Agios Nikitas, Lefkada. Photo: Images of Greece
An odd Summer it was, 1997. A long Summer off, when tensions broke and assumptions shifted. The 'New Labour' government took power and I realised I had no great hopes of it, not much faith left in the party politics that had been the centre of my life for so long. Princess Diana died - the random, dramatically unexpected.
I could have gone back to Spain and completed the walk then, but didn't. Instead, I went back to Greece - Lefkada had been my first visit - and spent a long time looking at ancient ruins, thinking: huh. what now?
Back home, scrabbling to make some money from temporary work, I came upon a Buddhist meditation class in Central London, and many lights went on in my head and heart.
Back in a full-time job, I missed the daily multilingualism of the political organisation, and went back to college in the evenings to get my post-graduate qualifications in translation. In that class I made new friends, something I hadn't done in all the years I was just working, and never thought I would again.
Things were not wonderful, but in small, important, increasingly pervasive ways, they changed. The Camino was a walk back towards a self I'd lost by fleeing from difficult emotions into compulsive overwork. I learned there to trust myself and others a little more, to be a little more open and kind. The small things that change everything.
Things are not wonderful, but I've never again thought about killing myself, as I did often when I'd worked all the time for weeks and weeks, and then spent a whole weekend in bed. Although it's elusive, there's a faith in something I can reach out and touch. Not something 'out there', but right in here; a capacity to breathe through the barrier between self and time, space and others. I learned to touch this from Buddhist teachers and from many hours on a cushion. But I felt it first on the Camino, walking until I stopped thinking, feeling tentatively through that barrier to those walking alongside me and those who had walked before and were still in the stones under my feet.
I've never been back to walk the last part, from León to Santiago, though I always thought I would one day, when the time was right. The Camino de Santiago has become hugely popular in the intervening years. I doubt I would enjoy walking with crowds. I could do it in Midwinter, perhaps. And perhaps I will, one day.
But in a way it doesn't matter, because what I learned there is that the path isn't linear, there is no destination. It's not all about control and striving and pushing. It is qualitative, not quantitative. It is here, now, going deeper, this breath, this look. Never finishing, but always complete.
Photos: Michael Krier, UK Confraternity of St James
I forget these things constantly. Then something reminds me, like Dale saying 'pilgrimage' the other day. And I reach for it and try to bring it to the next thing - not to control and stress and worry, not to mistrust and clench and withdraw again, just to really be here.
...to flip over a rock.
click on photos to enlarge.
Centipede, millipedes, pill bugs (wood lice) - thanks Dave.
The meseta. Photo by Michael Krier, UK Confraternity of St James.
I began the next day alone, but wasn’t alone for long. Squatting on my back-pack under a hedge eating a late breakfast of salami sandwich, I was overtaken by the first walker striding out early from Burgos, an elderly, energetic man from Toulouse, so pleased to meet someone he could talk to in French that he didn’t mind halving his pace to mine for a while.
We walked on, chatting, and the sun came out, and somehow I didn’t tell him what happened the day before. The Camino was smiling, reasserting its positive spirit. I never did tell another pilgrim that I was robbed. Why cast a shadow on their positive impressions? I couldn’t. I told no one when I returned home either, and I’ve rarely spoken of it since (what is it about blogging?).
But that didn’t mean I buried the bad thing, hardened my heart. Far from it. It completely changed, for the better, the rest of my journey. I was so grateful thereafter for the company and friendship of other walkers, for the good spirit of the path, the spirit of those who had walked before us for more than a thousand years. My heart opened then to all of it. Without the shock of fear, I don’t think this would have happened.
So we chatted along through flat, flourishing fields, and much later reached a straggling village whose pilgrim refugio, unusually, was offering lunch. As we slumped against the long table, waiting, other walkers came, and the pile of back-packs in the corner grew. This was where I met the old hippy, the bank-manager, the psychiatrist, and others.
Lunch was long and we all set out again together, on a path that now followed a country road, winding through woods, and out again across the fields. I found myself talking, first, to the Dutchman. He was friendly, but made me feel obscurely uncomfortable(I found out later that he was a psychiatrist. Ah.) So after a while I fell back, and into step with another new arrival. He was another Frenchman, tall and loose-limbed, with a long, shy, clever face. This was H. He’d walked from the Pyrenees to Burgos back in the previous Summer, with his girlfriend, then had to return to his work as a busy, globe-trotting engineer employed by the French airline. Now he was back to continue the path – his first day’s walking, still weary and stressed from work, and his feet hurt, so our strides were well matched.
We walked and talked all afternoon, and for the next week.
Blistering and despairing, he took off his boots and walked in his socks. I laughed at his very large bright blue feet tiptoeing on the stony road, and he was indignant, and indignation kept him going. My own trauma began to recede.
Castrojeriz (so remote it has no English-language website) was the next town we came to, and the next refugio. A quiet, dusty, rambling place, the road spiralling around a hill, and no sign of the hostel, or by now of our fellow walkers, who had all left us behind. Finally, a woman with a shopping bag in the distance, and I pounded after her, panting under my back-pack. "Señora, estamos perdidos – we’re lost! Where is the refugio?". I had to ask her to repeat her instructions. My brain was busy computing what I’d said. I’d just become 'we'.
In the hostel kitchen, H produced camomile teabags and offered me one. We sat down and eyed one another through the fragrant steam rising from our cups. This was not a stranger. I felt familiarity, ease and affection, as I had never felt with someone I’d just met.
A communal meal was cooked in the ramshackle kitchen, and while some of us fell early into bed in the dormitory upstairs, others were still down there talking until very late. Lying in bed, sleepy, with voices drifting up the stairs, I felt safe, like a child in bed and hearing the adults of her family still awake and talking. H was in the next bunk. That night and the following nights, our eyes met and smiled before we slept.
H was many years younger and about a foot taller than me. "You go ahead", I would say every morning, "You don’t want to walk at my pace". And off he would go, sometimes, but there he would be at the next village, the next crossroads, with a sight or a thought to share. So we shared the weather that rapidly changed from sun to rain and back, and the land that grew flatter and bleaker as we entered the meseta, and we shared conversations as long and as deep as I’ve ever known.
At Carrión, before the lovely tour of the church, we had sat on a bench overlooking a precipice, with misty ruins and tall trees and a river far below, and talked of how the city and work were hard, too hard, sometimes. And we grew silent, looking down, and we knew we both were thinking it wouldn’t be a bad place to end all the busy-ness.
"I wish", H said one day, "that I could walk and walk until I stop thinking. I get so tired of the nagging, worried voice in my head". I stared, realising with amazement that I, who’d been walking longer, had actually found this state for brief periods. Thus the seed of meditation was planted.
It wasn’t all po-faced taking ourselves so seriously. There was the bad-tempered, toad-faced hostel keeper who barked at the pilgrims and cooked us peculiar food. When we left next morning, his cross face loomed up in the window and he silently, grimly, waved. Bizarre. We looked at a each other and doubled up, giggling helplessly, floating away down the path on a cloud of incredulity and silliness.
But H’s time was limited and he wanted to get to Santiago. One day, as I struggled to keep up with him and the old Swedish hippy, who was also tall and robust, resolve and generosity seized me. "That’s it. I’m staying the night in the next town. You go on. Yes! Go!" And they went. And I checked into a cheap hotel, in the absence of a refugio, and cried, as I hadn’t cried when I was robbed and threatened and frightened.
I don’t know quite how I believe this, how I conceptualize it. But I do utterly believe, on some level, that H was my guardian angel, who came because I needed him.
