Day 44 - The ‘end’
Day 44 Oct 22 Destination = none / 0 km to go. I will ‘end’ this Camino today with a quick dip in the ocean, When I surface and am back on the beach walking away, I’m now officially heading home.
To Walk Alone
“None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk.
But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze. You hear nothing but the quiet crunch of stones underfoot. An implacable, definitive silence. . Sky of a perfectly detached blue. You advance with eyes down, reassuring yourself sometimes with a silent mumbling. Cloudless sky, limestone slabs filled with presence: silence nothing can sidestep. Silence fulfilled, vibrant immobility, tensed like a bow. There’s the silence of early morning. For long routes in autumn you have to start very early. Outside everything is violet, the dim light slanting through red and gold leaves. It is an expectant silence. You walk softly among huge dark trees, still swathed in traces of blue night. You are almost afraid of awakening. Everything whispering quietly. There’s the silence of walks through the snow, muffled footsteps under a white sky. All around you nothing moves. Things and even time itself are iced up, frozen solid in silent immobility. Everything is stopped, unified, thickly padded. A watching silence, white, fluffy, suspended as if in parentheses.”
-Frederic Gros A Philosophy of Walking
When I’m home, to those that ask if will I do another Camino?
My response is simply, “I’m still on my Camino”
stay tuned…….
The famous 0.00 km marker ! Much joy in this moment ! Notice there is no yellow arrow on this last marker.
Last sunset (7:42 post meridian), baptismal swim, and official end to this Camino
An emotional last sunset… what weather ! what a journey !
-To the pilgrim,
“Follow, follow forward and do not return, faithful until the end of the road and your life, do not miss for (for sake of) an easier destination, your feet on ground before not trodden, your eyes in front of what has never been seen before”…….
“Yo soy el Camino, y la Verdad, y la Vida;
nadie viene al Padre, sino por mí”…
Jesús le dijo
