The Awakening

If you ask one hundred people who go on a Pilgrimage why they have decided to undertake such adventure you will get one hundred different answers.

Pamplona, 2007

Most of the time the idea to go on a Pilgrimage is like a flower, it blooms in one’s heart and most of the time one cannot say when and where the seed was planted: it just happened to have been flourished. For some the seed has been planted long ago, but it needed time to bloom. For others the desire is impulsive and they are able to leave everything behind and follow the instinct. 

It is true that people go on a Pilgrimage in search of an answer. And many times the question at the answer is so deep, so intimate that words cannot explain what the heart knows already.

But conscious or unconscious that the process can be, one knows that in order to find those answers he has to be alone. One has to take the time and to go away from the crowds and the noise. One needs to do what a peasant does: he ploughs the field to let the soil breathe, he weeds it and finally he harvests his fruits.

In a Pilgrimage the heart and the mind open up. It takes days, but it always happens. At the beginning the mind is still busy but after some days it surrenders to the silence. That is the point in which one finds the balance between the heart and the mind. And there is where heart and mind start a dialogue long due.

Following Saint Francis's Footprints, 2009

One of the most common comment people makes when you say: “I will walk alone for days” is “Oh my God, all alone? That must be so hard not to have anybody to talk to, so solitary”. Yes, of course it is hard and solitary but… that is exactly what every pilgrim wants and needs. Still on a pilgrimage you are never alone. In that privileged status of a deep contact with yourself your ears start to open up to a forgotten voice: the voice of your soul. Its voice resonates to you like an old song, it brings along old dreams, and old pleasures, and you turn into the child you were when you first discovered the world.

In every pilgrimage there is always the “turning point”: the awakening. It can happen on a early morning when you see the sunrise, or one late evening in front of a breathtaking sunset, or when a storm of birds sing at your passage, or when you meet someone that helps you or asks for your help, or when you finally see the sight of your destination after hours spent under the cold rain or the hot sun. The awakening hits you like a lightning, and you feel it with your entire whole. And most of the time your reaction to it will be just a simple smile. -“How simple was that!” those are the words that your mind will come up with in that moment. From that point on everything starts having a different flavor, and you start looking at things and feeling them for what they really are.

Sunset in Mahajanga, Madagascar 2008

I was in Spain on The Camino de Santiago, it was the day after Christmas. I have been walking for days, meeting very few people, sleeping in Albergues almost always alone, at that point my mind had already shut down, I had already started looking at things with different eyes, and hearing and smelling the life around me. I thought I had already hit the turning point, I thought I had already reached the mountain and start seeing the horizon in the other side when two days before I found myself talking to the birds… But not… I hadn’t, my awaking moment had yet to come.

- It was a beautiful morning I had been walking for hours, passing sleepy fields and not meeting anybody. Three hours earlier I had left behind the last small village and ahead I still had three more hours of walking before to call the day. Suddenly I saw a man sitting at the side of the Camino, he looked old, and he looked very tired. I stopped and asked him if he was OK? But he was German and I don’t speak German. Talking with signs I understands he doesn’t have water or food and that he is walking opposite direction. Wowww!!!!! He will have to walk three more hours before to find a resting point. I asked if he needed help, and without thinking I offered him all what I had: half bottle of water and some figs, when I walk I don’t carry much food or water with me, I tend not to need it and I don’t want to carry extra weight, now I was left without water. He accepted and then he signed me to go. He smiled and I smiled back wishing each other “Buen Camino!”. When I started walking again tears came down from my eyes, a sweet cry from the deep of my soul.

“…For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me…”

How simple is that!