My Mum used to say my Dad was born under a wandering star as he liked to travel. That immortal song from the musical Paint Your Wagon came out as a movie in 1969 and Lee Marvin’s gravelly voice was a favourite in the family home for a while around this time. We had just returned from living in the UK for a couple of years and prior to that in PNG, so it seemed appropriate. Decades later he continued travels around the world as a tourist. I too love travel and perhaps the wandering star shines on me too.
I decided over a decade ago to identify as a pilgrim, a willing wanderer, trying to travel with an open heart and open mind, to accept the kindness of strangers, to be in other landscapes and allow those places to come up to meet me knowing they were just waiting for my arrival. I don’t always meet the expectations of the journey, nor openly ask for help when I might need it, although I am getting better with that over the years. I do look up, to the stars and to the sky and to the clouds to find my way and to be inspired by the cosmos and things I don’t understand. Wonder and awe keeps this human experience humble.
I have had cause to revisit some of my walking experiences given my knee continues to be uncooperative to anything beyond about 5,000 steps. So I took myself to see Bill Bennett’s movie adaptation of his book The Way, My Way. The movie was at walking pace, my kind of walking pace, and the centrality of his bad bone-on-bone knee certainly resonated with me! I only did just over 200 kms of the Camino and I went the Portuguese way, but there was more than enough in the movie for me to feel connected. I know when I walked into the square in front of the Cathedral I was so proud of myself, I had backed myself and I had got there. After a truly horrific time in my life full of loss after loss, and deep rivers of grief, I had turned to the Camino thinking it might help me process some of it all. It didn’t, I was just weary beyond words. I was relieved to arrive. It was a quiet internal celebratory triumph. But watching the movie, I found myself having a little weep more than once and realised the journey and practice of the Camino and being a pilgrim is a constant unfolding and unravelling.
Travelling is a wonderful way to let go to unravel, and Michael Leunig’s lovely little poem to that effect, is a treat we sing in choir making it a doubly valued gift.
Let it go. Let it out.
Let it all unravel.
Let it free and it can be
A path on which to travel.
The path and the way you travel on that path were the reminders from Bill Bennett’s movie. Because it is not just the path, but how you actually navigate and interact and respond and take instruction from the path itself, that brings you to your knees, that helps you work out how to travel. Maybe you need a staff that is all gnarled and romantic, perhaps though the high tech hiking sticks will be the best equipment for what you are about to traverse? Maybe you need to borrow something, accept medication, take a rest day, listen to someone in distress, witness vulnerability, in order to get closer to what is calling you from your own deep recesses? Maybe there are signs you need pointed out before you get to be on the path to take you to the destination you were planning to arrive at?
As I am writing these questions, I am remembering with deep affection Rilke’s writing to his young poet friend in 1903 to love and live the questions. I feel this too is a prescription for any pilgrim.
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
In the Ignatian tradition of doing a forty day retreat there is the instruction that the fifth week is the rest of your life, and I suspect that is true of the Camino as well, the journey continues. How is the road calling you forward, how is that wandering star showing up in your life? I will give these questions a big hug as I did get some answers to some of my camino questions as they unfolded through the frames of the film and seeped into my soul. I will linger on the road unravelling and unravel myself as I keep walking the pilgrim way.
Letters to 