Chapter 8
The Stone I Carried
In my pocket lay a small stone from the garden.
It was the last thing I took with me from home.
The pack was ready. The boots stood waiting. The plane ticket, pilgrim passport, and route descriptions were in place. I had weighed everything I was going to carry and considered every single item. On an eight-hundred-kilometre walk, even small things had to justify themselves.
Even so, I went out into the garden and picked up a stone.
I did not choose the most beautiful one. It had no special shape and would not have been noticed among the others. It merely filled my hand. I brushed off a little soil and put it in my pocket.
The stone had a task.
I was to carry it from Sandefjord to the Iron Cross in Spain. There I would put it down.
It sounds simple.
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I had spent four years working on my doctoral dissertation about shame and sexual abuse. The work was academic, but the material did not remain within the boundaries of the discipline. The stories I had listened to, the questions I had asked, and the experiences I had tried to understand followed me after the working day was over.
Shame cannot be observed from a safe distance.
It moves between the person who tells and the person who listens. It can fasten itself to the gaze, the body, and language. It can awaken memories one thought were finished. It can make the listener feel something that cannot readily be separated from what the other person has told.
Some of the shame was my own.
Some I had encountered through the lives of others.
I knew that shame was not an object. Yet I needed to give it a form. Hence the stone.
It was not a scientific decision. Nor was it a method I could recommend to others. I simply needed to let the body do something that words had not managed to do.
I would carry the shame for a particular distance.
Then I would put it down.
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During the first few days I felt the stone every time my hand went into my pocket in search of something else. It lay among the small things I carried on my person. Now and then I took it out and let it rest in my palm. Then I put it back.
Gradually it became part of the daily routine, one of the things I automatically returned to my pocket each morning.
I did not think about it all the time. That would have been impossible. My feet demanded more attention. The water bottles, the heat, the food, the yellow arrows, and the search for a bed filled the days. Yet the stone was there, from village to village.
It had crossed the Pyrenees.
It had been with me through rain, dust, and heat.
It had lain in my pocket while I limped, while I sang to the shadow, and while I asked why I was there.
In the evening I took off my clothes and emptied my pockets. In the morning I put the things back. The stone followed the same simple movement. Out of the pocket. Into the pocket. A new day.
It was not the weight that made it heavy.
It weighed almost nothing compared with the water and the pack. Yet this was the only object I had brought precisely in order to leave it behind.
Everything else was meant to help me onwards.
The stone was to be abandoned.
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On the way towards Reliegos I had stopped at a memorial to people who died under the Franco dictatorship. At its foot there were already many stones. I picked one up from the roadside and placed it among the others.
That act was spontaneous.
The stone belonged to the place. I found it, bent down, and put it there. In that way my respect took bodily form. I could not know the dead, nor could I understand the extent of what they had lived through. But I could stop. I could allow my walk to be interrupted by their history.
Then I walked on.
The stone from the garden remained in my pocket.
The difference between the two stones was small to anyone looking at them, but great to me. I found one at the memorial and returned it to the place. The other had crossed a border with me. It carried not only a thought from the moment. It carried an intention decided before the first step.
It was not yet time.
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For a long time the Iron Cross had lain ahead of me as a point on the map.
I knew what pilgrims did there. A simple iron cross stood on top of a tall wooden pole. Around the pole, people had for a long time left stones they had carried from home. Some let the stone represent a prayer. Others a person, a grief, a guilt, or something they wanted to let go.
I had read about the place before I left. I knew the photographs.
As with so much else on the way, I therefore had an idea of the Iron Cross before I had seen it. I knew where it was, what I was going to do, and what the act was supposed to mean.
I was going to leave the shame behind.
The words were clear.
The experience was not.
The closer I came, the more often I felt for the stone. Not because I was afraid I had lost it, but because the task was drawing near. My hand went into the pocket. My fingers found the rough surface. It was still there.
I had carried it for almost three weeks.
Now I began to wonder what I expected to happen when I no longer carried it.
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On Saturday, 11 July, I left Rabanal before sunrise.
The day’s destination was Ponferrada, almost thirty-five kilometres away. First I had to cross the mountain. After the days on the high plain, it was as though the landscape were rising around me again.
The red sun rose in the east after about an hour. The path climbed steeply, and the heat quickly followed the light. I had two litres of water in my pack. My legs worked uphill, and my breathing found a slower rhythm.
Gradually the view opened in every direction. I was approaching fifteen hundred metres above sea level. The straight roads of the high plain lay behind me. Now I stood in a mountain landscape that demanded different steps.
It was beautiful.
But I was not walking only to see.
Every kilometre brought me closer to the act I had planned at home in the garden.
In Foncebadón, old stone houses stood along the road. Many were abandoned or had collapsed. Some were used in summer. The village bore the marks of people having left it while the pilgrims continued to pass through.
A few kilometres later I saw the pole.
The Iron Cross was less solemn than the image I had carried with me. A simple iron cross stood high above the ground. Beneath the pole lay a great mound of stones.
This was where the stone was meant to go.
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Four other pilgrims were there at the same time as I was.
We had all walked the same path up, but we came with different burdens. No one asked the others what their stone meant. It was not necessary. The silence around the actions protected what was not meant to be explained.
I put my hand into my pocket.
The stone lay there as before.
When I lifted it out, it had not been changed by the journey. It had not taken on the colour of the landscape or acquired marks telling how far it had travelled. It was still a small stone from the garden.
But the hand holding it was not quite the same.
It had gripped the staff through rain and heat. It had tended feet, tightened the belt, lifted food, and received help. It had felt the stone each morning and put it back in the pocket.
Now it was going to open.
I climbed onto the mound of stones.
Among the stones lay letters, wedding rings, jewellery, and small toys. I saw a teddy bear. Every object had been carried there by a person who had given it a meaning no one else could fully know.
Someone had left something valuable.
Someone had left something ordinary.
Everything lay together beneath the same cross.
I bent down.
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In my travel account I wrote that the stone represented the shame I had taken on during my doctoral work. I called it irrational. Then I wrote that I had to decide, there and then:
I am finished with this shame.
I am putting it down and moving on.
That was how I understood the act in 2009.
I do not want to correct the man who wrote it. He had walked a long way to get there.
He needed the sentence. Sometimes a person has to speak clearly to himself in order to open his hand.
But today I also hear how harsh the sentence is.
Shame does not obey a decision.
It does not leave the body because we command it to. It cannot always be divided into a rational part that can be kept and an irrational part that can be thrown away. It can return in a smell, a voice, a look, or an old thought.
That does not mean the act at the Iron Cross was empty.
It means that it did something other than what I first believed.
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I put the stone down.
There was no revelation.
No one could see that anything had happened.
The stone found a place among thousands of other stones. In that moment it lost what had made it recognisable to me. I might perhaps have found it again immediately, but before long it would simply be part of the mound.
I took a few photographs.
Then I walked on.
In my note from that day I wrote that it felt a little strange. It is a modest expression, but perhaps a truer one than the grand words I had prepared.
I did not feel cleansed.
I did not become a new person.
The pack was not noticeably lighter.
But the pocket was empty.
When my hand later went down into it, it found nothing.
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A symbolic act does not change the past.
It does not undo what has happened. It absolves no one of responsibility and cannot take away another person’s pain. Nor can it guarantee that the feeling one wants to put down will remain there.
Yet it can create a before and an after.
Before the Iron Cross, shame had been something I carried without a clear boundary. It was present in my thoughts, in the work, and in the body. By giving it the form of the stone, I could bring it forward, hold it in my hand, and put it in a particular place.
The shame did not disappear.
But my relationship to it acquired movement.
I had carried.
I had stopped.
I had bent down.
I had opened my hand.
Then I had stood up and continued.
It was not healing in a single moment. It was an act the body could remember when the words once again became unclear.
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When I later reread Kierkegaard’s discourses on the lily of the field and the bird of the air, I understood obedience differently from the way I had understood it before leaving.
I had thought obedience meant carrying out what I had decided. Walk the whole way. Keep to the plan. Put down the stone. Be finished with shame.
On the way I learned that obedience can also mean relinquishing the demand that reality conform to the decision.
The lily and the bird do not argue with the day. They do not turn life into a project to be mastered. In Kierkegaard they become teachers because they are present in what has been given to them.
The stone taught me something similar, but in its own wordless way.
I could decide where to put it down.
I could not decide everything that would happen within me afterwards.
Obedience did not consist in commanding shame to go away. It consisted in acknowledging that it had been there, that I had carried it, and that I now wanted to live without letting it own the whole story.
It was less triumphant.
It was also truer.
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I have worked with shame for much of my life.
As a professional, I have tried to understand how it arises, how it hides, and what can happen when a person is met without being reduced to what is shameful. I have written about concepts, experiences, and relationships. I have listened to people who have carried burdens far heavier than a small stone could express.
At the Iron Cross, none of that knowledge was of much help.
I was not a professor there.
I was a man bending down.
Perhaps that was precisely why the act acquired meaning. I did not analyse the stone. I did not explain it to the four other pilgrims. Nor did I have to defend the fact that it represented something that could not be measured.
I simply did what pilgrims before me had done.
I put something down.
The tradition made the act larger than my private decision and smaller than a unique event. I was not the first person to arrive there with something I wanted to give up. The mound showed that for centuries people had had the same need.
Not the same experiences.
But the same movement in the body:
To carry. To bend down. To open the hand. To walk on.
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I sometimes think about all the objects beneath the cross.
The letter that may have contained words no one had managed to say aloud.
The ring that had belonged to a promise, a break, or a person who was gone.
The small toy.
The teddy bear.
The stones from gardens, beaches, courtyards, and roadsides in distant countries.
I do not know whether the people who put them there experienced what they hoped for. Perhaps some walked on with a sense of relief. Perhaps some regretted it at once. Perhaps others had to put down the same thing many times later in life.
The Iron Cross offered no guarantee.
It offered a place.
A place can be enough for an experience no longer to drift freely through an entire life. It can be tied to a landscape, a point in time, and a movement. One can say: I carried this there. I put it down that day. I walked on from there.
That is not the same as saying that everything was over.
It is saying that something had happened.
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The way after the Iron Cross led downhill.
I passed Manjarín and continued towards El Acebo and Riego de Ambrós. The path demanded attention. A descent can be harder on the body than a climb. My feet had to be placed correctly. The tip of the staff had to find purchase.
And so the great symbolic act immediately became mixed with the practical.
I had to walk.
I had to drink.
I had to take care not to fall.
At Molinaseca the way crossed a beautiful stone bridge. Many pilgrims stopped by the river. I continued the final kilometres to Ponferrada. There I found a small hostel, ate packet soup and fresh bread, and went to bed early.
This was life after the shame had been put down.
Not solemnity.
Soup, bread, and sleep.
Perhaps this, too, was part of the truth of the act. I did not leave human life when I opened my hand. I went farther into the ordinary.
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Joy did not come as a cry of triumph at the Iron Cross.
Nor did it come because everything heavy was gone. The body was tired, and many kilometres remained. What I had worked with for four years could not be concluded by placing a stone on a mound.
Yet something had become free.
A pocket.
A hand.
A small part of my attention.
I had spent the first weeks searching for stillness. On the high plain I had struggled with obedience, with boredom, and with the question of why I was there. At the Iron Cross, obedience made a new movement. I stopped demanding that the stone save me from what it represented.
I let the act be what it was.
There joy could begin.
Not as proof that the walk had succeeded, but as a greater receptivity to what came. When my hand no longer closed around the stone, it could more easily receive something else.
A piece of bread.
A cup of water.
A stranger’s hand.
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The stone may still be there.
It may long since have been covered by new stones. Rain, snow, and sun have passed over the mound. Pilgrims have come with letters, rings, toys, and new pieces of their home places. No one can now point out which stone came from my garden in Sandefjord.
That does not matter.
It was not meant to be a memorial to me.
It was meant to become part of something I shared with people I would never meet.
I went to the Iron Cross to leave shame behind. Today I would phrase it more cautiously. I did not leave all the shame on the mountain. I put down the idea that I had to carry it in the same way for the rest of my life.
That was the difference.
The stone did not take the shame.
The act gave me another way to meet it.
When shame later returned, I could remember the hand that opened. I could feel that an emotion can be real without being the whole truth about a person.
I could also remember that I stood up.
And that the way continued.
The pocket was empty, and the hand was freer to receive the next person the way sent towards me.
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