The Truth Beneath Words: Walking myself home on the Camino: Part 3

On the final days of this 300-kilometer pilgrimage, my focus is on the road ahead as it reveals new vistas at every turn on the path. I learn to see the truth beneath the words.

Hello and welcome back to the Camino de Santiago series!

My daughter

Marielle Velander

and I are co-authoring an account of our 15-day, 300 kilometer journey by foot across two countries along the ancient pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. We are 64 and 32, each at decisive turning points in our lives. The Camino opened up vistas as much within ourselves as in the beautiful landscape we crossed. Our intention is to offer an exploration and interrogation of a journey that is both physical and spiritual. The Camino is a metaphor for life. We make this passage alone and as part of the great current of humanity walking the same path. This, I find, is our saving grace.

My burning question for the Camino was How can I live in grateful acceptance of my one precious life with all its beauty and struggle? Over many miles, the question invited me to look in equal thirds at past, present and future: Can I be at peace with the past, live with a full heart and ready spirit in the present, and be patient with the future as it unfolds? Here’s where you can find Part I: Looking Back and Part 2: Looking Within.

In Part 3, today, Looking Ahead, my heart and my eyes are on the road ahead as it reveals new vistas at every turn on the path. I realize that my destiny is not something to be managed but a gentle unfolding that invites the grateful acceptance of my whole self that I seek. The deep, full, healing breath in each step is the only answer I need.

Throughout these essays you’ll see frequent quotes from our nightly ritual on the Camino: Each of us writing in my maternal grandmother’s travel diary; reading Mark Nepo’s daily reflection from The Book of Awakening, and poems in David Whyte’s collection Pilgrim. These sources of inspiration were uncanny in delivering precisely the guidance we needed that day.

The Truth That Lives Beneath Words

“To care is to rise above things without leaving them. When we care, we receive the truth that lives beneath words.”—Mark Nepo

Climbing hills was an aspect of the Camino that I knew would challenge me physically and mentally, yet I longed for the views that a mountain can provide.

In the two years since leaving my marriage and in the six months since my mother had died, I had been ascending my own personal mountain. Through a lot of deep and sometimes difficult self exploration, I had developed the inner strength and safety to view my life from a higher vantage point. On my mountaintop, the air was fresh and clear, the views expansive, affording a 360-degree view of my past, present and future. Difficult decisions and conversations gained a clarity that illuminated my path.

Now on Day 12 of our Camino, we faced the most arduous section of The Way so far. We had turned onto the Spiritual Variant, adding a couple of days to our journey. The name spiritual derives from the fact that the route follows the last part of the journey of the remains of the Apostle St.James, and we were curious to see this particularly beautiful section. But the climb from the coast towards our destination for the night, Armenteira, is daunting, with 420 meters (1380 feet) of elevation gain to accomplish over about 6.75 kilometers.

My daughter Marielle had been looking forward to this. She has been a mountain goat since she was a child; mountains are her happy place. Give her a hill and she takes off running. Me…not so much. But I knew I had untapped reserves of strength. And so off we went, making our way from Pontevedra on the Central Route (where only one other pilgrim joined us at the turnoff for the Spirtual Variant), stopping for lunch in the charming fishing village of Combarro along the Rías Baixas in Galicia, Spain.

Combarro, a charming fishing village

Fortified by lunch, we began our climb. Before long, the coast receded in the distance and we began climbing a wide paved road lined with forests on either side. Eventually we reached the Igrexa de San Pedro in Campaño, the ringing church bells guiding us long before it came into sight. Up and up we went, the only hikers for most of the way.

At this elevation, we were closer to the birds of prey that soared above the tree tops. I recalled a reading from Mark Nepo’s Book of Awakening from a couple of days before, “In An Eagle’s Eye.” He writes: “To care is to rise above things without leaving them. When we care, we receive the truth that lives beneath words.” His invitation was to meditate on the heart of someone you admire. And so Marielle and I shared our thoughts about this person for each of us, how we may have benefited from their grace and where it may live within us.

I thought of my mother—her kindness, unfailing love and gratitude, generosity, and clarity in guiding me through many difficult times in my life. Even with her dementia, when she could not summon the words, the truth was there in her smile, in the touch of her hand on mine, in the constancy of her love and her ability to receive love so gratefully. These are the qualities I aspire to, the grace I know lives within me, too.

Turning Pain Into Wonder, Heartache into Joy

On Day 13, the second day on the Spiritual Variant, we rose early before sunrise to attend the 7:30 a.m. Eucharist service of the Cistercian nuns at the twelfth-century Monastery of Santa María in Armenteira. Against an inky black sky, the moon rose high above the Romanesque-Gothic church, highlighting its distinctive rose window.

Given my matriarchal Jewish heritage, this was an unlikely place to find myself, sitting in a chapel for the Holy Communion service. But Marielle and I had arrived too late the previous day for the evening blessing of the pilgrims and we wanted to experience the nuns singing. We were not disappointed. Their voices rose as clear as a church bell. I knew that my mother, with respect for all religions, would have understood our presence in that chapel.

In The Book of Awakening that morning, Mark Nepo spoke of how fish, with their “tiny, efficient gills live the mystery of how to live as a spirit on Earth [by] turning water into the air in which it lives.” He asks:

What in us is our gill? Our heart, our mind, our spirit, a mix of all three? Whatever it is, we, too, must turn water into air in order to live, which for us means turning experience into something that can sustain us. It means turning pain into wonder, heartache into joy…we must keep swimming through the days. We cannot stop the flow of experience or the need to take it in. Rather, all our efforts must go into learning the secret of the gill, the secret of transforming what we go through into air.”

Leaving the monastery with the nuns’ blessing for our continued journey—it was all part of the flow of experience, sustaining us in unexpected ways. The phrase “turn pain into wonder, heartache into joy” stayed with me as we made our way to my favorite part of the entire Camino Portugese: the unforgettable, enchanting path along the Ruta da Pedra e da Auga (the Route of Stone and Water), which ends in the heart of the Rías Baixas wine region. For eight kilometers, we were enveloped in an otherworldly magical forest bordering the small river Armenteira, framed by dense vegetation with peaceful bends, gentle waterfalls, moss-covered trees and stone mills.

The Route of Stone and Water

A couple of kilometers down the path, we turned to each other, understanding that this was the place my mother would wish to have her spirit roam. She loved trees and hugged one every chance she got. We stepped down to the river bank and cast the second vial of my mother’s ashes into a tiny waterfall. In a tearful moment, my pain turning into wonder, Marielle sang my mother’s favorite song, “Moon River.” For the rest of our walk, we felt her traveling alongside us, carried by the rushing stream of water. Perhaps her spirit was a fish, turning water into air, inspiring the same of us.

Looking Out At What Looks Back

On the second-to-last day of our Camino, I read aloud to Marielle

David Whyte

‘s poem “Lon’s Fort” from his volume Pilgrim. One section rang with a truth beneath the words—it seemed to invite the answer I was seeking to my burning question:

we find ourselves
by looking out
at what looks back,
the lighted edge
of rock and sky,
the sweet
unmoving darkness
over the horizon….

Dividing the past, the present, and the future into equal distinct thirds had been a faulty perspective, I realized. What if the key to finding ourselves—our purpose and our power—is by “looking out at what looks back,” the forward gaze informed by the backwards glance, always with our feet firmly in the present on our mountaintop.

Now, however, the end of our journey was in sight. Our moving forward was tinged with the excitement of the finish line. The 45 kilometers of overland walking to Vilanova de Arousa on the Spiritual Variant ends with a 26.5 kilometer boat ride, along the only Maritime Way of the Cross, from Vilanova de Arousa to Pontecesures via the Río Ulla. The boat ride was festive, thanks to an effusive captain and first mate offering cake and coffee and dance music that got a group of women on the top deck on their feet (Marielle and I joined in, of course).

At last we were on our final 10 kilometers of the 300 kilometer walk. I felt a mix of emotions as my steps slowed. Suddenly, I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to linger in this in-between space, this underneathness, living beneath the words, in this time out of time where we spent our days out in nature walking and talking. Had all the big questions been answered? Had I spoken to Marielle of all the things I wished to share? Was there time enough? My pulse was quickening, my breathing rapid. There I was again, stuck in old stories, forgetting that my life wants to reveal itself to me, and asks only for my patience. I put in my earbuds and put on a song that would remind me to stay right here, in the present moment.

“Come on, come on, lay your baggage down, it will set you free.”

It is hard to describe the feeling of walking into the enormous square of the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, where all pilgrims, no matter their route, end their journey. The cathedral towered above us as we finally laid our baggage down. We sat on the ground, exhausted and proud with, as Marielle said, “triumphant hearts and tired feet.” We ran into some of our Camino friends who had just finished their walk as well. We hugged, congratulated each other, posed for photos, soaking in our victory. Then we made our way to the office where we would each receive a certificate that we had walked the full Camino, having collected the required number of stamps to qualify (and then some—because we’re overachievers!). I asked for an extra copy in Latin script with a handwritten phrase at the bottom, attesting that I had walked the Camino de Santiago for my mother, Freda Brown.

The end of our walk in Santiago de Compostela. That ray of light is no accident; the angels who had walked with us made their presence known.

On that day, September 16, the Book of Awakening reading was titled aptly “Where We’ve Been.” Nepo asks us to imagine the passages that have brought us to who we are, to inhale and see which passage holds the most feeling, and to breathe steadily and ask yourself:

The next day we gave our weary legs a break and took a bus for 2.5 hours to Finisterre, a mythical place on the rough Costa da Morte (Coast of Death). The name of the village comes from the Romans who saw the village as ‘the end of the world’. Today, Finisterre is for many pilgrims the end point of their Camino. With an extra three to four days to walk it, we did not have time. But I’m so grateful we chose to see it. Here we could stand behind the final Camino marker showing we had reached 0.00 kilometers. Just beyond us towered a lighthouse and the stunning rocky coast over the Iberian Peninsula. A man stood by offering a final stamp for our pilgrim passports, The End of the World, it read. He smiled at us. “It is the end of the beginning,” he said.

The 0.00 kilometer marker at Finisterre

The end of the beginning. Yes. That seemed to me exactly right. The Camino was the culmination of a two-year passage of my life that had been like no other, asking me time and time again to pick myself up and keep going. I was living in the passage of the past but it was not holding me back. The past was in the waves that would carry me forward. I was held by all the ways I had loved and been loved. Most crucially, I was held by myself. I had asked the Camino a question and my heart had answered.

There is no better way to end this essay than with David Whyte’s beautiful poem, “Finisterre.” You can hear David read it aloud in his beautiful voice here.

Finisterre

The road in the end taking the path the sun had taken,
into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you
as you stood where ground turned to ocean: no way
to your future now but the way your shadow could take,
walking before you across water, going where shadows go,
no way to make sense of a world that wouldn’t let you pass
except to call an end to the way you had come,
to take out each frayed letter you had brought
and light their illumined corners; and to read
them as they drifted on the western light;
to empty your bags; to sort this and to leave that;
to promise what you needed to promise all along,
and to abandon the shoes that had brought you here
right at the water’s edge, not because you had given up
but because now, you would find a different way to tread,
and because, through it all, part of you would still walk on,
no matter how, over the waves.

—David Whyte

Next week Marielle will share with you Part 4, her reflections on her burning question for the Camino: How can I live with more ease? Then keep watching for Part 5, We Are All Rivers, the story of our Camino project where we asked other pilgrims “What song keeps you going when life gets hard?” and finally In Part 6, Planning Your Camino, Oct 29, we share all the practical tips and resources we used in planning this journey so you can plan yours. For paid subscribers, there’s an hour-long live Zoom call Saturday November 2 at 8am PST/11am EST/5pm CET to answer all your questions.

LET’S CHAT! How would you answer the question: Is the past living in me, or am I living in this passage of the past?