Earth and Sky: First Camino Meditation

Traveling at Home

Even in a country you know by heart
it's hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
Can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident. To get back before dark
is the art of going.

--Wendell Berry

To learn a new land through the feet. To have sun hit the skin at a different angle. To watch stars emerge from different, unanticipated parts of the sky. People ask me why I'm going to Spain and this is the best answer I can give. So, this Camino de Santiago, this Way of Saint James: Is it about the journey? the destination? Is it about adventure? self-discovery? discipline? sanctuary? Yes to all of these, and no. The art of going: maybe that's all I'm after.

I've been thinking about pilgrimage for a long time; once I get an idea in my head, I'm not one to let it go easily. The Camino de Santiago is rich with metaphor. Saint James was a martyr, his body said to have been miraculously transported to and interred in northwestern Spain, where he preached. Centuries later the hermit Pelayo was led by a star to Santiago's tomb. And to this day we walk to the Field of Stars, Compostela, seeking...something.

James and his brother John were known together as the boanerges, the sons of thunder. Fiery spirits, troublemakers, the thunder-boys make appearances throughout mythology: Castor and Pollux for the Greeks; Magni and Modi, Thor's sons in Norse mythology; similar deities show up in Cherokee myths; according to Peruvian belief, every set of twins is born of thunder and lightning.

I find myself thinking of the thunderbirds who show up in many Native American mythologies, and then of peregrine falcons (thus named during the middle ages when they were captured not as fledglings straight from the nest, but in flight on their migratory "pilgrimage"). There is something awesome and almost incredible about migrating birds of prey; all bird migrations hold some special power, but especially those of raptors...

For most birds, migration is a leap of blind faith, an instinctive urge over which they have no real control. The curlew does not "know," in a conscious sense, that coconut palms and placid atolls await it in Tonga or Fiji--it can sense only an urgency to fly in a certain direction for a certain length of time, following a path graven in its genes and marked by the stars. --Scott Weidensaul, Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds

And so we're back at stars, el campo de stelle. I wonder if we humans don't share some of those migratory instincts. Give all the sociopolitical, psychospiritual explanations you want; perhaps the basic longing is for the going. Evolution: "to make intent of accident." We go where we're drawn. We keep what works.