The most frequent question that people asked me when I told them I would be going to Spain to walk a segment of the Camino de Santiago was, “You’re going alone?”
On May 11, 2019, after arriving and spending a restful night in Sarria, I was ready to begin my Camino. As I found and started down the Camino path that stretched west out of Sarria, it was not long before I felt the company of all those whose feet had previously stepped on the very earth beneath mine. Pilgrims had been walking this way since the 10th century. As I looked at my feet, I began to come alive, knowing that I was joining a sacred story along with so many others who had traveled this way before me. How many prayers must have been uttered along this portion of the path? How many souls had found rest in the beauty and solitude experienced along the path? How many burdens were lifted and hearts healing? How many conversations started and how many friends were made right in this spot? What about the bodies that were weary and blistered from the 400 miles already walked by the multitudes traveling the French Route? How many kind acts of hospitality were shared along this kilometer to ease the struggle for a fellow pilgrim?
I was now entering this story, this song, of pilgrimage. Me. What a rush to my spirit this was! There was such an intense sense of connectedness as I added my steps to the path. Such a sense of every person’s common humanity and divinity as I considered this beloved community of pilgrims. Millions from every continent over more than one thousand years have woven both their unique but also common stories into the Camino de Santiago. There was something so holy about this…. this larger, universal truth about humanity’s common path of life, life mixed with sorrow and joy, weariness and strength, aloneness as well as in the company of neighbors….all of this captured and made manifest and offered to me on a literal dirt path marked by arrows in Northern Spain.
Alone, but not alone, I began to offer my gratitude for those who have walked before me, and I began to offer myself for those who would come after.
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