Chapter 3
Where Was My Inner Stillness?
The Way That Found Me
I left Saint-Jean at seven in the morning.
In the hostel kitchen there was a cup into which you could put whatever you wished to pay. I had asked the others what was customary and put five euros in the cup. There had been four of us in a dormitory with room for twenty. Now I put the pack on my back and went out to begin the stage I had imagined so many times.
I had forgotten to buy breakfast.
The only thing in my pack was a bottle of water. This was my first real day of walking, the first one I had counted, and before I had even left the town the plan already had to be revised. I hoped to find a shop on the way up towards the Pyrenees.
I had read that walking over the mountains was like touching the sky. The views were supposed to be magnificent. The landscape would open out, and I would take my first steps into the simplicity I was seeking.
Instead, it rained.
Not a gentle summer rain, but driving rain and fog. I pulled the poncho over both myself and the pack, put my hat on, and began to walk.
I smiled a little to myself. It was a disappointed smile.
I had travelled there to meet the spontaneous and the unexpected. Now the unexpected arrived at once, and it did not look quite like what I had imagined. I had wanted to be surprised, but secretly I had ordered a particular surprise: the great view, the light over the mountains, and the feeling of entering something sublime.
The fog answered by taking the view away from me.
◆
A few kilometres up the mountainside, I came to a small village and found a country shop. There I bought a small loaf of bread, cheese, and tomatoes. The food made the day feel safer. One of the large, sun-ripened tomatoes was almost a meal in itself.
Then I walked on.
The route across the Pyrenees climbed from about two hundred metres to nearly fifteen hundred. On the map it was easy to understand: first up, then down on the Spanish side. On the ground it was steep, wet, and far less obvious. Calling it a road was stretching the word, I wrote. For long stretches, sheep tracks crossed one another. I could not always tell which path was meant for people and which merely led a flock of sheep onwards.
What I had to look for were the yellow arrows.
They were painted by hand on stones, trees, and house walls. They could appear almost anywhere, and I would follow them for the next eight hundred kilometres. One arrow was enough. It did not tell me how far remained, what the weather would be, or whom I was going to meet. It said only: this way.
Even so, I managed to lose my way in the fog.
Then I met two young Spaniards who were on leave from the military. They were crossing the mountain, and I joined them until the path began to descend towards Spain. They spoke no English, and I spoke no Spanish. Yet we understood one another well enough to walk together.
They sang Spanish songs as we walked.
I had imagined that stillness would come to me when I was alone in the mountains. Instead, two strange men emerged from the fog and filled it with song. It did not disturb the walk. It saved me from continuing in the wrong direction.
Perhaps this was the first hint that the stillness I was seeking did not mean the absence of other people. Perhaps it could also be found in companionship where no one needed to explain himself.
But I was still mostly concerned with finding the next yellow arrow.
◆
After twenty-seven kilometres I arrived in Roncesvalles soaked through, hungry, and tired. The first thing I looked for was somewhere to sleep. I went to the old monastery and thought this must surely be a suitable place for a pilgrim.
The monastery turned out to have been converted into an upmarket hotel. The only room available was a suite on the top floor. It cost fifty euros.
I took it.
I was cold and wet, and the hot water was difficult to resist. I stood in the shower for half an hour and hung my clothes to dry all around the suite. The bed might have been made for a pope.
Later I discovered that there was a pilgrim hostel right next door. I could have slept there for five euros.
That evening I went out to eat and tried to ask for an inexpensive pilgrim’s meal. The waiter began answering “sí” long before he could possibly have understood what I was saying. I made a swimming motion with my hand to show that I wanted fish. I was served mountain trout, potatoes, vegetables, and wine—and a bill for almost thirty euros.
For the second time that day, I felt slightly cheated.
The first day of my simple pilgrimage ended in a suite with an expensive dinner. I had come to live simply: walk, eat, and sleep. Instead, I was in danger of turning the journey into the trip of a well-off foreigner who chose the first and safest option because he was tired.
It was not the fault of the hotel or the waiter. They had offered me what I asked for, or what they thought I was asking for. I was the one who did not yet know how to be the pilgrim I wanted to be.
I wrote that I had to pull myself together. I had to focus more strongly on finding what I was looking for.
Even stillness had become a goal I could work harder to reach.
◆
Over the next few days I walked fast.
From Roncesvalles onwards, I discovered that pilgrims walked at different speeds. Some took long strides, others short, quick ones. Some stopped constantly to take photographs. I began asking myself what pace I carried within me.
That day I walked almost forty kilometres.
The plan had been to spend the night in Zubiri, but the village was closed because of a cherry festival. I found no people, only empty streets and a closed hostel. On my way out I heard singing from a bar. There sat the two Spanish soldiers from the Pyrenees, each with a mug of beer. They had reached their destination and were not going to take another step.
I walked on.
Flowers, streams, and butterflies absorbed my attention. I lost all sense of time and wrote that I was simply walking and being in the moment. This was exactly what I had wanted.
But the body paid for the moment with almost forty kilometres.
In Arre I found a real monastery. The monks lived on the floors above, while the pilgrims slept in a small building in the garden. It cost three euros. I washed my socks and underwear and hung them to dry between the apple trees. In the evening I ate with other pilgrims. Life was simple and good.
I had travelled to escape routines, but here new routines began to form. Every day clothes had to be washed, damaged skin tended, water bottles filled, and food obtained for the next stage. They were not the same routines as at home. They were closer to the body and to necessity. None of them could be postponed for very long.
I slowly discovered that simplicity does not mean the absence of repetition. It has its own rhythm. Walk, eat, wash, sleep. When everything superfluous was removed, freedom did not remain alone. What remained was necessity.
Perhaps this rhythm could have helped me towards stillness if I had allowed it to. But I was still more concerned with progress than with repetition. The socks hung quietly between the apple trees. I myself was already on my way towards the next day’s stage.
My mind, however, remained a few steps ahead of my body.
On the descent from Alto del Perdón, my ankles began to hurt. I walked in zigzags to take the strain off them. I pushed aside the thought that this might become a problem. I had barely begun and still had hundreds of kilometres ahead of me. The pain did not fit the plan.
The next day I continued along old Roman roads in intense heat. My feet ached, but I turned my attention to the shadow ahead of me. I talked to it when no one could hear. The shadow could entertain me. The body was asking for something else.
Only in Estella did I properly look at my feet.
Under one foot I had developed a large blister. The ankle was hot and tender. I had been absorbed by the landscape, the history, my thoughts, and everything I encountered. The feet that were actually doing the walking I had taken for granted.
“Are you all right?” I could ask myself. But then I also had to wait for the answer.
My mind and my body moved at different speeds. My mind wanted to reach Santiago. My body was in Estella.
I bought a walking staff to take some of the strain off my legs. On the train to Saint-Jean I had thought poles were for wimps. Now I had become a member of the club for people with sore legs, as the Danish pilgrim beside me cheerfully put it.
The way had begun to correct my pride.
◆
Between the villages I walked long stretches alone. The air shimmered with heat, and my sore feet felt every small stone. I walked beside my shadow and asked why I was there.
What was the purpose?
I walked and walked. The stillness I had longed for was not peaceful. It opened a space in which the questions could repeat themselves. Then I began to sing a song I had learned as a child in the United States:
“One hundred bottles of beer on the wall …”
I sang my way down from a hundred bottles until none remained. It took half an hour. As a child I had used the same song on the school bus, during boring lessons, and when I was trying to fall asleep. Now I used it on a Spanish country road to fill the stillness.
The song carried me back to childhood. Episodes I had not planned to think about surfaced as I walked. The way asked questions without using words: Who are you? Where do you come from? What do you want? Where are you going? How are you going to continue?
I had thought inner stillness would be a place where the questions fell silent. Instead, it made the questions audible.
Perhaps that was why I sang.
◆
In Viana I could hardly walk on my left foot. The pilgrim hostel stood beside the Church of Santa María and was run by a French couple who spent their holidays helping pilgrims. The woman was a nurse. She examined my foot, shook her head, and said that both the blister and the ankle were inflamed.
She advised me to stop the journey.
It was as though something broke inside me. I nodded and said I would think about it.
She treated the foot thoroughly. When I asked what I owed her for the help, she was almost offended. She did this out of love, she said, not for money.
Out of love? She did not know me.
That same evening the pilgrims were invited to Mass in the church. Seven of us from different countries sat on the same pew. The priest asked us to come forward to the altar. He did not know why we were walking, he said, but he believed that we had set out on an inner journey that could change us if we opened ourselves to the possibility.
Then he blessed us.
Afterwards we ate at a long table in the hostel. A Japanese violinist took out the instrument she was carrying and played for us. We slept on thin mattresses on the floor, surrounded by quiet conversation, singing, and violin music.
I had been seeking stillness and was met by music, care, and companionship.
The priest had called the walk an inner journey. I found it easy to understand “inner” as something that took place alone, inside me, while I walked and thought. But that evening the inner became visible between people: in the nurse’s hands around my inflamed foot, in the water from the priest’s silver bowl, and in the violinist’s music at the table.
I was not the one who brought these moments about. I could only receive them.
But the next morning I walked on against the nurse’s advice.
The only thing that helps an inflamed ankle, she had said, is rest.
Rest was precisely what I could not manage.
◆
I walked almost twenty-five kilometres on the inflamed foot. Going through Logroño, I wanted to escape the noise of the city and return to the country road. Outside the city, an Italian pilgrim shared a basket of cherries with me in the shade. We talked about the way and about life for an hour, then went our separate ways.
Such encounters made me calmer, but they did not make my foot heal.
When I reached Navarrete, I went to the medical clinic. It was closed. In the end I checked into a simple hotel and booked a room for three nights.
When the shoe and sock came off, I saw how inflamed the foot was.
Now I could no longer think my way past the body.
The pack remained where it was. The walking shoes rested. I raised the foot and tried to do what I had been told: nothing.
This was not how it was supposed to be.
In the hotel room I had no books, television, radio, or any of the other things I was used to filling time with. I lay there thinking about childhood, my youth, family, and friends. I did not know whether the journey would continue or whether I would have to go home.
I had wanted stillness. Now I had been given it in a form I could not romanticise: a hotel room, an inflamed foot, and a decision that had to wait.
Where was my inner stillness?
It was not in the view across the Pyrenees; the fog had hidden it. It was not in the long day’s walk; there I had walked past the body. It was not in solitude; there I had sung a hundred bottles down from the wall. Nor was it an outcome I could force by concentrating harder.
Perhaps it began only when I could no longer walk away from myself.
To rest was not to do nothing. It was to accept that the body was not a tool the mind could use until it broke. It was also me. Choosing rest was therefore not choosing against the journey, but choosing the person who was to walk it.
That was harder than walking twenty-five kilometres.
I did not find stillness as a peaceful state. I was stopped long enough to hear a simple answer from the body:
Now you must rest.
It was not much.
But it was the first obedience.
No comments:
Post a Comment