The energetic presence of people doing Camino de Santiago in Porto

There is a quiet energetic presence among many of the people you witness doing the Camino de Santiago. With their big heavy backpacks and consumed shoes. Their appearing sense of lonely companionship and determination to follow the path all the way to its end. The striving for achieving an objective, and the lightness of doing so while raising everyone else around them up and to the end with them. That is a somewhat philosophized and romanticized view of a seemingly simpler journey, which may be a valuable and inspiring lighthouse into one’s own daily existence: to walk toward something tangible with determination and attentive awareness of one’s own and of the surrounding people and environment. As David Whyte writes in a passage of Pilgrim:

“The way forward, the way between things,

the way already walked before you,

the path disappearing and reappearing even

as the ground gave way beneath you,

the grief apparent only in the moment

of forgetting, then the river, the mountain,

the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting

you over the rain filled pass when your legs

had given up, and after,

it would be dusk and the half-lit villages

in evening light; other people’s homes

glimpsed through lighted windows

and inside, other people’s lives; your own home

you had left crowding your memory

as you looked to see a child playing

or a mother moving from one side of

a room to another, your eyes wet

with the keen cold wind of Navarre.

But your loss brought you here to walk

under one name and one name only,

and to find the guise under which all loss can live;

remember, you were given that name every day

along the way, remember, you were greeted as such,

and treated as such and you needed no other name,

other people seemed to know you even before

you gave up being a shadow on the road

and came into the light, even before you sat down,

broke bread and drank wine,

wiped the wind-tears from your eyes:

pilgrim they called you,

pilgrim they called you again and again. Pilgrim.”

— from David Whyte’s collection, Pilgrim

Spacious