remembering The Walk … (06/10/12)
“For in their hearts doth Nature stir them so
Then people long on pilgrimage to go
And palmers to be seeking foreign strands
To distant shrines renowned in sundry lands.”
~ Geoffrey Chaucer
3 years 7 months & 9 days ago, I completed my first Camino de Santiago; walking for 40 days from the French Pyrenees all the way to the northwest coast of Spain.
It was one of the more amazing adventures of my life; a Journey that seemed to take me much further within myself than the 555+ miles my feet carried me … It is a journey I still enjoy incorporating into my current life; a journey I still enjoy sharing with others.
For those who don’t know, the Camino is a pilgrimage route that has been used consistently for well over 1000 years. I find it amazing that this Path remained so constant despite the volatile changes that repeatedly swept over Europe during the past 12 centuries.
And this is especially remarkable to me when I consider the fact that folks have been drawn over & over & over again to walk its length from all corners of the globe and for all sorts of different reasons — to test their faith, to find God, to find themselves …
I have traveled all over the world and I have visited quite a few “sacred spaces” while doing so, and yet for me the Camino remains in a class all by itself. Simply stated, it is one long ribbon of Transformation … It seems safe to say that those who walk its length cannot help but be touched by the Divine; that to walk it humbly & earnestly is to be truly reBorn.
“Pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys.” ~ Richard R. Niebuhr
Of course, not everyone in the world will make it to Santiago, which is perfectly fine. Each one of us is walking a Pilgrimage with even greater transformative power — the Pilgrimage of Life. You certainly do not need to go to Spain to rediscover your True Self … you can do that anywhere.
And yet, there really is something to traditional pilgrimage; there really are some places on this Earth that seem to assist one’s journey of Self-Discovery. Some of you might be interested in making the Camino a part of your own awakening; some of you might hear It whispering on the wind; calling you to come and go for walk …
To honor this interest (and to honor the Camino), back in the fall of 2010 I posted 499 images from my journey on Facebook, and then later I released the same visual “travel journal” in pdf format to some Friends per email. It felt good to let folks “walk with me”, even though I had long-since returned … Recently I have felt called to make the Camino available to everyone, so I’ve spent many hours over the past several weeks updating each entry — resizing images, editing text and adding quotes, and the finished product is now online.
So …. enJOY the Trip!
http://inspiringthealtruisticmoment.com/blog/?cat=1265
“Stripped of all its outer encrustations, spirituality emerges as a science, as scientific as any other, as verifiable in its results. Let any seeker take it up and let him create in the laboratory of the soul the conditions that are prerequisite; and as sure as the day follows the night shall he rise into the Kingdom of God.” ~ Sant Kirpal Singh
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