A pilgrim's progress

As I prepare to walk the Camino de Santiago, I want to heed the advice of poet David Whyte: "Don't make new declarations...bring what you have." But how do I know if what I have is enough?

In April of 1969 my maternal grandparents Marion and Leonard Goldman set off on the pilgrimage of a lifetime. It was their first trip abroad. They flew first to London, then to Madrid and Rome before arriving at their ultimate destination: Israel. My grandmother carried with her a slim journal, embossed with the words Travels Abroad, a gift from her sister Julia and her husband Lou.

In Rome, Marion writes in her beautiful script, “I threw three coins in the fountain for luck. It was a beautiful sight, even in the rain.” In Jerusalem, she visits the Western Wall, putting her hands on it. Forty-five years laters, I stood with her great granddaughter Marielle (named for Marion), and we put our hands on that same wall.

This September Marielle and I will make a new pilgrimage, on the legendary Camino de Santiago, and I will be carrying my grandmother’s travel diary, just as I did in 1981 on my first trip abroad to spend a semester in London. As I was packing, my mother handed it to me. “Take this,” she said. “I know your grandmother would have wanted you to have it.”

“Dear grandparents,” I wrote at age 21. “I am proud and pleased to continue my journey where you left off, to share this diary with you.”

Now I am sharing it with my mother, too. She will be with Marielle and me on the 240-kilometer (120-mile walk) pilgrimage from Porto, Portugal to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the shorter Camino de Portugese route of the classic Camino (which is 500 kilometers starting in France). I will carry a small vial of my mother’s ashes and her photograph. I will see things through her eyes as well as my own. I will hear her voice, reminding me, “You’ve have always had exactly what you needed, Amy.”

I will need that reassurance because my expectations for this walk, my Camino, as pilgrims or “peregrinos” refer to their walks, are quite high. As it is a route of great spiritual significance, I am hoping for a revelation along those many days of walking, for a clarity that will dawn like the sunrise of a new day in the hills of Galicia. I envision any doubt or hesitation about my purpose in life evaporating with every step.

That is too much to carry.

I am reminded of David Whyte’s poem:

For The Road To Santiago
For the road to Santiago,
don’t make new declarations 
about what to bring
and what to leave behind.
Bring what you have.
You were always going
that way anyway,
you were always
going there all along.

Photo by Max Kukurudziak on Unsplash

Bring what you have

I wonder what declarations my grandparents made, as they boarded their flight to London. My aunt Julia and Uncle Lou were there to see them off the night before their departure, as were my cousins, their daughters, Ellie and Debbie, and Debbie’s husband Alan. I was there too, with my parents and my siblings. I was nine years old. The trip seemed exotic, momentous. Even then, I longed for my own travels abroad. My grandmother records in the diary that the next morning, back at the airport, her younger brother Steve hands her “a lovely orchid corsage for me to wear en tour.” I can picture her, proud and lovely and expectant. Did she know then that she’d see two more generations of pilgrims follow in her footsteps, a legacy of seekers?

“Bring what you have,” the poem invites us to consider. So what will I bring?

I will bring this beloved travel diary, trading it back and forth with Marielle so it can reflect three generations of women travelers in the family.

The question that has no right to go away

I will also bring, as

David Whyte

suggests in this essay, “a question that has no right to go away,” a question that may have waited for me my whole life, a question that can make or remake a life. The question that is still making itself known to me.

“Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation. They almost always have something to do with how we might be more generous, more courageous, more present, more dedicated, and they also have something to do with timing: when we might step through the doorway into something bigger, better—both beyond ourselves and yet more of ourselves at the same time.” —David Whyte

Beyond the new pair of hiking shoes that I still need to break in and acquiring the other items on my packing list including a good rain jacket to protect from Galicia’s sudden downpours, I am preparing myself for my Camino with a journey inwards.

As David shared in the first of his current Three Sunday Series, The Road to Santiago: The Life Long Adventure of Getting Where We Want to Go, I am preparing myself for “the intimate road we have to walk inside ourselves, the road along which we give our best gifts…We’re all on some kind of pilgrimage.”

We may walk out of a marriage on our life’s pilgrimage, as I did in 2022. For a long time, over three decades, my ex-husband and I walked the same path until the day I recognized that the fork ahead—the solitary route, the one I’d been afraid to travel for so long—was the one that had been waiting for me. Now we walk our separate paths, each of us headed toward a place over the horizon, “not truly knowing what lies on the other side of the transition.”¹

A sacred path of our own choosing

The Camino de Santiago is one of the most ancient and popular pilgrimage routes in the world. It dates back to the beginning of the 9th century (year 814) when the tomb of the evangelical apostle of the Iberian Peninsula was discovered. Pilgrims would make the long journey to the magnificent cathedral in Galicia’s Santiago de Compostela, in search of a way to reduce their time in purgatory. According to the pilgrimage’s official history, the body of the apostle Saint James is buried in the cathedral. Since the early 1990s, the Camino de Santiago has seen a huge resurgence in popularity. In 2023, 442,073 people completed the Camino de Santiago a record-breaking year.

When my grandparents went to Israel, it was also a spiritual journey. In the dark shadow of The Holocaust, the state of the Israel was nothing short of a miracle for my grandparents. After visiting a kibbutz in Jerusalem, Marion wrote that “it was a revelation,” seeing Jews from so many different European countries living in harmony together. Jerusalem, the holiest city in Judaism, was at the top of their list to visit on their pilgrimage.

Their granddaughter and great-grandaughter are on a different kind of pilgrimage. And yet if every “holiday” is “a holy day,” in its etymological roots, we share the same reverence of seeking out what is sacred to us. The history of the Camino de Santiago is rooted in the spread of Catholicism, but today people walk it for a variety of reasons and guided by every spiritual tradition. Marielle and I will walk with our angels—for her, the beloved Stephanie, her best friend who died much too young, and for both of us, my mother and her grandmother Freda. I believe that all of those we have loved and lost will be walking beside us. As David Whyte captures in his poem, “Camino”, referring to how we only need to walk under the name “peregrina”—pilgrim:

But your loss brought you here to walk

under one name and one name only,

and to find the guise under

which all loss can live;

Packing the poets in my pocket

Marielle, my nomad who has traveled to nearly 60 countries in her 31 years, has taken care of all the planning for this trip, with her excellent Google spreadsheet of our daily walks and destinations. We’ve booked accommodation at albergues, or inns, along the way, many of these private homes where the locals are known for being welcoming to pilgrims. We look forward to sitting down and breaking bread together with people from all over the world. Friendship is an ancient theme of pilgrimages—the companionship you find along the way. I am eager to hear the stories of how people came to walk the Camino, and perhaps their question that would not go away.

Not only has Marielle done all the practical planning, she’s offered to carry the backpack with our clothes and gear for the 14-day walk, sparing her mother’s shoulders. In my daypack, I will carry a notebook and pen and a few books of poetry, including David Whyte’s collection Pilgrim. It is here I first read his poem, “Santiago,” its beautiful first stanzas excerpted here but I urge you to read it in its entirety here.

As we approach for the start of our Camino, I wait patiently for what may still be in hiding to reveal itself to me.

Even if there are no answers, the questions themselves can make up an entire journey.

Santiago

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside
hiding then revealing the way you should take,
the road dropping away from you as if leaving you
to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when you thought you would fall,
and the way forward always in the end
the way that you followed, the way that carried you
into your future, that brought you to this place,

no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,
no matter that it always had to break
your heart along the way: the sense of having walked
from far inside yourself, out into the revelation,

to have risked yourself for something that seemed
to stand both inside you and far beyond you,
and that called you back in the end to the only road
you could follow….

From “Santiago,” by David Whyte

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LET’S CHAT: David Whyte says, “We are all on some kind of pilgrimage.” What pilgrimage are you currently on? Is it an internal or external one, or both? What are you learning from it? And if you have walked the Camino de Santiago, Portugese route, do share your experience and your best tips for a “buen Camino.”

THIS WEEK’S MUSIC: From me and

Marielle Velander

enjoy this eclectic Traveler’s spotify playlist:

1. “Pilgrim,” Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, David Whyte