Our flight to Spain is booked, and we’ve secured bunks at Le Refuge Orisson for our Pyrenees crossing. We’ve even bought those tiny travel towels.
It’s all getting very real.
I’ve been thinking about walking el Camino de Santiago since I read Shirley McLean’s bonkers book about it in 1994. But when my mum died, leaving me with the words ‘leave nothing undone’ in November 2023, I stopped thinking and started doing.
I mentioned my plan to a few friends, and fellow writer and sister-from-another-mister, Penny Fields-Schneider, jumped at the opportunity to join me. She had a long-held desire to walk ‘the Camino’ too.
My husband wasn’t interested in walking with us until he ruptured his Achilles tendon last year and couldn’t walk. We humans are funny the way we take things for granted until they’re gone. But while he was booking my flights, he decided to come! He realised we had walked around 15km each day while in Europe last year, and the only difference is we’ll be carrying our packs. We’re both in the gym 4 days a week now, improving our strength and walking for miles on the treadmill. And we will be packing very lightly.
The plan is to buy some nice new clothes in Madrid or Barcelona after our walk.
A few weeks ago, Penny and I reached a critical point in our training where we had to actually go outside and walk about in the hot Australian sun rather than enjoying the comfort of a treadmill in an air-conditioned gym. We walked from Lennox Head to Shelly Beach and back, with a pit stop at a cafe at the turnaround point.
Luckily, the weather in that area of Spain/France in May is mild. Rainy, I’m told, so we’ll need ponchos and rain covers for our packs, but at least it’s not tropical, like where we live.
We were tossing up whether to walk the final 150km or the first 150km. I didn’t really want to walk from Sarria as it’s far busier and less beautiful, I’m told, so I’m happy we decided to walk from St Jean Pied de Port, over the Pyrenees and into Spain. But of course, that means we don’t get to end at Santiago de Compostela.
This seemed important at first, but we all feel while this trip will be our first experience on the Way, it won’t be our last. Santiago de Compostela has been there for over a thousand years. It will wait for us.
Some people simply walk the Camino while to many it is a sacred and symbolic experience.
I’d describe myself as a spiritual person. I’m open to anything on the Way, I guess, but I’m also trying to avoid having too many expectations.
Ours will be a kind of Middle Way I hope, open to the mystical but also rooted in the practical.
I had a funny experience recently when interviewing a new staff member. She was obviously passionate about her spiritual journey and talked non-stop about her lineage (Quan Yin, the Buddha and Jesus! What are the chances?)
This might have been useful if I was running a spiritual business but I’m not. We needed a new cleaner and I didn’t give her the job because she talked so much – mostly about her incomparable spiritual “skills.”
Before I gave her the bad news, she said to me, “You know, I’m racking my brain, but I’m just not sure what I’m here to teach you.”
Interesting take. I do believe we’re all “just walking each other home” but this didn’t bode well. It came across as arrogant but the next day I realised she had indeed taught me something and that was to not be a spiritual wanker on the Camino.
A very important lesson.
Judgement is so easy. I’ll be aware of this and working extra hard to let people do their own thing. I can be a control freak so it’s something I’ve been working on for years.
I heard this quote recently ~ “Stranger, pass by that which you do not love.” It’s an old pilgrimage saying by author Phil Cousineau in his book, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred.
If I meet a hundred or a thousand people on my walk, everyone will be on their own pilgrimage, even if we’re all walking in the same direction. I might walk in a place that’s not so beautiful. Not much I can do about that except pass by. If I meet someone with whom I don’t have a rapport, I’ll pass by.
The Course in Miracles suggests we tell ourselves I am that about things, people, and experiences we encounter, both good and bad, great and small. It evens us out – lifts us up and keeps us humble.
If I can say I am that about a stunning sunset, I must say it about a smelly bathroom!
Who knows what I might learn by allowing myself to be grateful for an unpleasant view, a lacklustre meal, or time spent with someone I’d rather not be around. To see the world in a grain of sand or to accept that any bad luck I encounter has possibly saved me from worse luck!
And that everyone can teach us something!!
Every moment is an opportunity to learn something even if that’s just to be grateful that the moment has passed.
