It’s hard to believe a year has passed since I started walking the Camino.
I could not have imagined all the ways that journey would shape and remake me, the parts of my life it would bring up, and allow me to put down. So much has transpired between now and then, it’s sometimes hard to clearly remember the entire journey. It pops up at me in small glimpses of memory. My baby, who traveled all those miles inside me, is now nearly 10 months old, learning to walk and feed himself.
Last December, I bought a house. Technically, of course, we bought a house. But being even a co-owner of a home was a life milestone I thought I might never achieve, and even this time, almost didn’t. Getting denied a mortgage before ultimately getting approved by a different lender is one sure way to appreciate how fragile and tenuous the real estate market in America really is.
The past month has been a blur, of packing, painting, moving, cleaning, constructing, unpacking, organizing, and still more cleaning, all while also keeping Felix fed, clean, and on his nap schedule. Moving is a familiar pattern, one I repeated endlessly throughout my childhood. The Camino was an echo of this–each day repacking and unpacking my backpack, making my bed in a new inn or hostel. I am accustomed to a transient, nomadic life, but the idea of home beckons me with increasing forcefulness. As boxes give way to furniture, life in our new house (home?) is starting to feel settled, just in time for the one-year anniversary of my walk.
In the conversations I’ve had about the Camino in the past year, I’ve always felt like the details are a bit illusive. I gesture vaguely at the significance of the journey without providing the rubber-meets-the-road details of exactly what happened. I’m working on a long-form essay about the experience which I hope will be published somewhere, soon, but in the meantime, I’m taking advantage of this one-year anniversary to more diligently log the details.
Each day until May 1, I’ll share a summary of the day’s travels. How far I walked, who with, and what I experienced. I was careful to keep a diary of each day of the journey, and I’ll be sharing those notes with some hindsight color of my own.
The material in some of them is sensitive, things I’m sharing with all of you but don’t want widely searchable on the internet, so most of my daily diaries will only be shared with paid subscribers. If you aren’t yet a paid subscriber and you’d like to follow along, I hope you’ll join us.
So here it is, the first day:
March 20, 2022
Today, I woke up in a hostel bed built into an alcove with a curtain across it, which provided enough privacy I could turn on my light and write without disturbing others. Yesterday, I traveled from Paris to St. Jean Pied-de-Port, eating my way through France in a series of food choices that left me with horrific and overwhelming heartburn. A dinner of trout, potatoes, and vegetables seemed to tamp it down a bit. Of course, I woke hungry again, hoping whatever is for breakfast doesn’t set my esophagus on fire.
I’m working on a post about God so I’ve been doing some good thinking about faith.
Where does it come from? How do we find it? How do we keep it?
I’ve also been thinking about a multi-level player analogy: maybe we’re just the Sims in the gods’ game? Maybe Jesus and Muhammed and Ghandi and whoever else are just the player avatars of various Gods.
Is that sacrilegious? Probably.
Possibly true? Who knows.