Camino de Santiago - Final Steps

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

~Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

Do not seek the footsteps of the ancients; seek what the ancients sought.

~Matsuo Bashō, Words of Farewell to Kyoriku”(1693)

A couple of weeks ago, September 24th to be exact, Shane and I walked into Santiago de Compostela. Over five years, starting on August 31, 2022 in St. Jean de Port in France, we walked around 500 miles. We didn’t do it all at once, as many do, but in five segments, one per year.

There is much to be said about our journey, which I’ll post over time as I process it. I’ve pondered how much to talk about - one sees video, and books, and merchandise, and guided walks all over the place, so there’s no lack of information, wisdom, stories, and how-to’s out there. Indeed, taking that in is part of how we prepare ourselves for this kind of endeavor. Phil Cousineau, an excellent writer, gave me the best introduction to this kind of experience before, during, and now at the end, through his book The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred. In the last chapter of that book, Bringing Back the Boon, he writes:

...the pilgrim feels a different call and is changed by the journey. The deepest of those changes is the need to share the gold, the wisdom, the boon of the journey. But the bitter truth about coming home from a long journey is that we soon learn that one man’s mystery can be another man’s superstition. How do we describe the ineffable?

And yet we must, he says. In fact, Cousineau notes that this quotation from René Daumal might be called, “The Pilgrim’s Law.”

A soulful traveler replenishes the camp before moving on for those who will follow, and you must share whatever wisdom you’ve been blessed with on your journey with those who are about to set out on their own journey.

In other words, we have a responsibility, a duty, to share whatever we may have learned with others. Given the scope of all the sharing that preceded us, however, that is quite a humbling ask, and I know how boring it can be to see another person’s vacation slide show. (My first advice - read Cousineau’s book.)

“The challenge,” Cousineau says, is to learn how to carry over the quality of the journey into your everyday life. The art of pilgrimage is the craft of taking time seriously, elegantly.

Elegantly. There’s an aspirational word indeed.

I’ll be writing a bit about this pilgrimage over time. In the meantime, let me mention that the most powerful and meaningful takeaway from this pentacade, shall we call it, was doing this with my son, Shane. I could go on and on about the value of doing this with him and it wouldn’t come close to describing how much fun it was to go on this adventure with him, how significant it was to learn from him and with him, how he planned for and arranged the entire journey, and solved every obstacle that popped up along the way. Our traditional beer and toast after every daily segment was a celebration, a recognition that we had accomplished another mini-test, another inter-personal learning module on the path of life. My admiration for him could not be greater, nor my love.

We carried, as pilgrims have for centuries, scallop shells on our backpacks the whole way. The shell is the sign of the pilgrim—the sign of a journey in progress—and it also served as a sign of completion when pilgrims returned home afterward. The scallop shell has been compared to the fingers of an open hand. To me, its radiating lines also look like many paths converging toward a single point. The twelfth-century Veneranda dies sermon in the Codex Calixtinus says that the shells signify the commandments of charity: “to love God above all things and to love one’s neighbor as oneself.”¹

For us, it became important to have a lasting reminder of our journey, and of our journey together. So we had these shells tattooed on our right calves.

¹ Veneranda dies, in Codex Calixtinus, Book I, chap. 17, trans. Thomas F. Coffey, Linda Kay Davidson, and Maryjane Dunn, The Sermons and Liturgy of Saint James (New York: Italica Press, 2021), 250.