This post is by my husband, Kyle, who just walked the Camino de Santiago this spring. Many of you have been following along with his journey, from his delay last fall due to injury and his uncertain departure this past March. He returned from the Camino safe and sound in early May, and I’m excited for him to finally share his experience here on the blog of walking this famous pilgrimage and returning home changed.
I needed an adventure.
I needed to do something that I didn’t completely believe I could actually do but so very badly desired. And, that’s what I got, though I didn’t know quite what I was seeking at the time.
I recently walked the French Route of the Camino de Santiago from St. Pied de Port. A lot of pilgrims make this walk. It’s hard, but not so physically demanding that an 83-year-old can’t do it on his own. (I had the honor of walking with such an impressive soul.) One of the biggest dangers is walking too quickly before your body is accustomed to it, which takes a week or two. As I left home, I didn’t know if I would return home before making it all the way to Santiago (or to the coast in a town called Finisterre, where I really wanted complete my journey).
I had originally planned to make this journey last fall, but hiking in the mountains (ironically, to prepare for the Camino) left me with horrible knee pain and an achilles injury. But before I continue this story, it’s important to tell you a little more about my body’s past. I’ve never been a very strong guy, but I could goof off like it was my job. I loved being reckless on a fixed-gear bicycle I built myself, I liked climbing on things, and I was known to play frisbee all night in college. One could say that I had the wiggles.
And then, the summer after my first year of college, it happened. I injured my back working at a summer camp, leaving me with a bulging disk and constant pain down my right leg and an eventual surgery just to be able to stand up without getting knocked out by the pain. Years have passed between that fateful summer, and while I recovered well enough, the truth is during that summer I lost an important part of myself. No matter how hard I tried, it always felt out of reach.
Because of this, you can probably understand the trepidation I felt as I left home to walk the Camino this past March. With years of chronic pain and frustration as well as the injury that kept me from walking the Camino last fall, a lot was riding on my hopes of completing the journey and returning home healthy and whole.
Leaving St. Jean.
Not surprisingly, I was a bit nervous as I walked for the first week or two of my journey this spring, working through little bouts of pain all through my legs: feet, ankles, knees (still leftover from backpacking the previous summer), and hips. Soon after my achilles started to hurt, I found myself in the middle of Spain thinking that I might not be able to finish what I came to do after all.
Several days into the achilles pain, I surrendered to my body and stopped 5 km short of where I wanted to go that day and stayed in a town that consisted of a single building: a pilgrim hostel with two generous hospitaleros. And, in an act of synchronicity, one of the people there happened to be a massage therapist and did for my achilles exactly what it needed. The next morning I left with a full belly, a good night’s rest, a lot less pain, and instructions to buy a compression sock at the next pharmacy I passed. Once I got the compression sock and put it on, the pain was miraculously gone and my body (now unencumbered) finally fell into what felt like my natural rhythm.
From there, I took off, feeling fantastic. After spending years fighting pain and injury and feeling like I was getting nowhere, I finally felt whole again. There was even a moment while crossing a small mountain range that I remember so vividly in which it felt so right to be exactly where I was that walking could no longer contain my joy. With pack on and only halfway done with a 20 mile day, I couldn’t help but run and jump along the trail. I once again had the wiggles. And they were holy wiggles, indeed.
This was likely just before or after jumping for joy.
It took me a couple weeks after returning home to realize it, but it was that moment in the mountains that I finally had the chance to integrate the part of me that I lost with my back injury with the man I now am today, and this healing integration continued as I carried on down the path.
From then on, I was able to walk further and further each day, walking as much as 56 km one day with a new friend (we were both a little crazy that day) and finally reaching Santiago after a 50 km day an entire week and a half earlier than I had originally thought possible for myself. After a celebratory day of rest, I kept walking and ended my journey in Finisterre—the place that I always wanted to end my journey.
At the end in Finisterre.
One week later, I would return home.
However, just before I left Finnisterre, a Dutch man I met who fell in love with the Camino and moved to Finisterre to open a pizzeria (which was absolutely delicious), told me that while my body was about to return home, my ghost would stay behind and keep walking for awhile longer. As it turns out, he was right. Most people will say that going home after a journey like this one is hard, and I believed them. But I didn’t really know what I was in for. It was like trying to walk through quicksand.
The morning after returning home, I woke up in a deep funk, not knowing what to do with myself, so I went for a walk. This helped, but only a little. The feeling of quicksand became more and more obvious, and I’m grateful for that, because it helped me truly understand what my journey meant to me.
When going on a journey like this, most of us will meet the Divine in ways we previously haven’t, and that was certainly true of my experience. But I also met a part of myself I thought I had completely lost, and it took me a while (and a lot of struggling through emotional quicksand) to realize that this once-lost part of myself that I met along a trail on top of a mountain in Spain came home with me.
And, while it took about a month after my body returned, my ghost has finally come home, too. As to what that means, the season of discovery now begins.
GO FURTHER…
Have you found a lost part of yourself on a significant journey? What was it like to return home and integrate your experience into everyday life?
