Hello Friends,
I’m writing to you from a tiny village called O Arrabal in Spain. We hiked here from Porto, Portugal (not all in one day—we have taken 5 days to get here). I love the Galician coast and am happy to be back. The last time we were here, we were staying along another hiking trail, the Camiño dos Faros (the way or road of lighthouses in Galician).
Since we finished the Camino Francés last month, we have found ourselves along one camino or another, though when people ask if I am a pilgrim, I say, “sort of,” since I’m not on any kind of pilgrimage right now. I’m not trying to reach a certain place, nor am I looking for anything. I’m just hiking, and that makes me happy.
Last night in Caminha, Portugal, my husband and I ducked into a little bar to have a glass of wine. I was attracted to the place because of the book-lined wall. I told the owner I loved the books, and he told me that he had asked people to send him books from all over the world, and he received more than he ever imagined, so many books he can’t even display them all. He was a banker in Porto but after hiking the camino more than 20 times, he decided to quit his job and open an albergue and a bar along the Coastal Portuguese Camino (which we are currently hiking) so he could live on the camino. I asked him why, and he said something I have heard more times than I can count: The camino provides.
Of course what he meant is that the camino provides serendipity: it gives you what you didn’t know you needed. As I have mentioned in an earlier post, I think it’s more likely that we are on the lookout when we are traveling by foot, when we have slowed down enough to notice the gifts of the world. But also people walking the camino, for the most part, are nice to each other because there’s a feeling that we’re all in this thing together.
A few weeks ago on my walk up O Cebreiro, I noticed a woman limping along, and she had this sagging Ace bandage wrapped around her knee, which was obviously doing nothing. I had brought two neoprene knee braces and only needed one, so I pulled the other one out of my pack and offered it to her. She was surprised and grateful, and I’m guessing she is now telling people about how the camino provided for her right when she needed it. But was it really the camino that provided?