There are moments when that solo walk across mountains
Floats back to me
My feet
Following the dirt paths beside verdant fields
Through silent forests of ancient, gnarled trees
Whose wisdom and endurance is palpably felt
Those miles
Wandering through Spanish villages of stone rowhouses
chapels
Rock-walled pastures and gardens
The music of cowbells
Underscores the slow fade of the mist
As it rises from its early morning rest
In the softened valley.
It leaves behind bejewelled spiderwebs
Delicate yet weighted with its touch
These memories feel like this;
A grounding in beauty
Almost too abundant to hold
It’s as if I’d walked
Two centuries back in time
And into a painting
Yet I remain so fully present
in the moment
These sensory memories ~
The sweet, sharp taste of grapes, fallen from a wagon
That my hands rescue from the ruddy earth of the vineyard road
Evening meals
Shared with fellow Peligrinos
And prepared from the harvest
Of the fields just journeyed through.
We find a common language,
If not through words
then through the dialect of the heart
and the intensity of our shared path
By day, I chose to walk alone
But friendships are woven nonetheless
And I relish
The companionship of Santiago at journey’s end
Finesterre must be a solo moment
The bittersweet triumph of standing
On the sea cliff, the definitive end of the road
Gazing across impossible miles of churning ocean
Toward home
These memories flow back to and through me, some days
In full-body flashes; vivid and close
And it yet feels surreal
A dream version of myself
Who was brave enough to walk across Spain
For 200 miles
Trusting my body would
Carry me.
All I needed
Contained within myself and my pack
The memories are an elixir
My marrow recalls
The euphoria of transcendently magnificent landscapes
The wonder of being alone in a space
so utterly remote
vast
and steeped in beauty
What’s next
for this 54-year-old soul and body?
Who has danced through life
Whose high mileage
Is like a car
With parts starting to wear out
The kind you worry
About taking on a long road trip
I tell my PT
As she manipulates an injured hip
“I want to be able to hike the Camino
All 450 miles this time
At age 60.”
But I wonder
If my body
Will allow it
And if my courage
Will not wither away bit by bit
with the passing years
I wonder
What new adventures
I can conjure
What new peaks to climb
To chase that transcendence
To stave off the
The narrowing
To keep my world
expanding
Amanda Cantrell Roche