Walking the Camino by Tony Kevin

Author:Tony Kevin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Kevin, Tony, 1943-, Travel - Spain, Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages - Spain - Santiago de Compostela, Spain - Description and travel
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2011-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

chapter nine

Across Castile to Salamanca

My walking now settled into a generally predictable and pleasurable routine. Baños was about halfway from Granada to Santiago in terms of distance; Santiago was 570 kilometres ahead. There were no more dramas, but rather the quiet satisfactions of meditation on the move, letting the mind and spirit relax completely. I was just under halfway though the ten weeks I had planned to stay in Spain. With thirty-six days in Spain to go till my booked flight home, I was confident that, barring accidents or serious illness, I could now complete the journey. I was now regularly walking up to thirty kilometres a day without strain, and I only needed to maintain a daily average of sixteen kilometres to get to Santiago in time. As my weight came down, as the weather started to get cooler moving north, and as my walking technique improved, it all became easier.

I was not thinking about getting to Santiago, but rather enjoying each day as it came. The blisters had been finally left behind in Extremadura, the soles and heels of my feet had hardened, my legs and thighs had trimmed down to an athlete’s physique, and the flabby folds of surplus skin left around my thighs from my lost fat were disappearing as skin elasticity returned. My buttocks had tightened, and even my belly — the middle-aged man’s last stubborn reserve of fat — had started to shrink. My cotton trousers felt pleasurably loose. I was sleeping well, no longer waking myself up with my own snoring, and not needing asthma relievers any more. I was happy with this new body.

The benign endorphins of long-distance walking had at last kicked in, relaxing the mind, and walking had at last become less a matter of harsh will power, the exercise of ‘mind over matter’, than of just letting it happen. I was now truly riding on ‘Shanks’ pony’, a phrase whose meaning I now pleasurably understood. For my legs were now striding forward automatically and effortlessly, while I enjoyed an unparalleled relaxation and liberation from daily cares.

The huge, rolling landscapes of the Castilian meseta unfolded like a slowly moving Circorama film around me as my mind ranged freely over my life. There was unlimited time to muse; to try to remember old snatches of poetry or music learned at school; to reflect on old loves, friendships, estrangements, enmities — all the knots and tangles of a complicated personal history. I found myself thinking more unselfishly and compassionately than ever before about important relationships and events that had happened in my life, whether spiritual, interpersonal, or political. It was a steadily developing process of mental relaxation and discovery of truth about myself. Talking afterwards to Father Frank Brennan, another Jesuit friend, about this, he agreed, saying that he had found his Santiago pilgrimage to be ‘taking your life for a walk’. And that is indeed what it had become now, in these happiest days of the pilgrimage.

Let me say a little more about the physical character of this walking.

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