The Unbeaten Path

Each step brought fresh, angry protests from deep inside the wool-lined toe-boxes of my new hiking boots. A little rude, but they had a point. My blistered toes, still traumatized from yesterday’s descent down the backside of the Pyrenees, had been howling their seesawing lamentations all morning long; first left, then right. “We’re pilgrims now!”, I chided them, “Remember what I’ve been telling you? Pain in the body is penance for the soul!” They scoffed from their tortured cocoons, finding little solace in my high-minded consolations. We agreed to not talk about it anymore and walked on in silence.

Temperamental toes be damned! Three days earlier, I’d left behind the sleepy, suffocating tedium of the American suburbs, in search of spiritual serenity in the lowlands of Northern Spain. And I was determined to find it on the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrim’s path that has drawn people to its peripatetic powers for a thousand years. And now, having once again silenced my melodramatic toes, I focused my gaze to the dusty path ahead. Lined with cheerful red poppies on either side, the path gently carved its way through the rolling hills of the Navarra valley, giving it the appearance of a rustic Hollywood red carpet. Beyond the poppies, an endless sea of verdant wheat fields waved lazily under the Spanish sun, promising a bountiful harvest.

But it wasn’t red poppies or waving wheat that held my attention as I cast my eyes ahead. I saw people. As if seeing them for the first time, I marveled at the people on the path. Plain, ordinary people. Like the longest wedding processional in history, people from every walk of life strolled, hobbled and ambled down the sloping path before me, until their bodies appeared like proverbial ants against the horizon. Like me, most of them had escaped the sleepy suffocation of their own suburbias in Germany, Ireland or Croatia and beyond in search of the ineffable meaning of life.

Just a few hundred meters ahead was Marcus from Stuttgart, Germany. A sweet, but troubled man, he’d arrived on the Camino in a last-ditch effort to exorcise the demons of a 15-year cocaine habit that now threatened to explode his marriage and hotel business. Over the next hill was Oscar Fish, a fresh-faced, precocious Irish college dropout, whose quest for the truth had begun in a haze of Iowaska smoke, deep in mountains of Peru. And then there was Sue from Georgia. Just the year before, she’d buried the love of her life after barely walking down the wedding aisle.

In our natural habitats, we were nurses, accountants, web designers and school teachers. But here on the Camino, with our toes blistered, but our hearts wide open, those titles emptied of their meaning and vanished. Gone were the urgent deadlines and screaming emails. Now, there was us and the path, one step at a time. We walked together, sometimes in deep or lively conversation and other times in monastic silence. And with each step, surrounded by rapturous beauty, we began to find ourselves, each other again.