Postcard from a Wanderer No. 3
The end, the beginning and the messy in-between
My mind is wandering off to new places. Disoriented I’m tottering along, looking left and right: I have no idea where I am these days. Except that I’m back and that things factually are the same yet everything feels different as if someone woke up at night and moved all my furniture an inch to the side.
Not so unrecently someone (I) has moved all my furniture, of course, all the way back to an area I lived exactly one year ago. So that feeling is somewhat accurate. I’m back - five minutes away - to where I started. A reboot, a restart, a strange deja vu of some sort: who am I know? what was in-between? what is different?
The last day on the Camino looking over the soft hills of Güemes, the sunlight flooding the green meadows, piercing pearls of morning dew: resembling the flood insight of me, salty tears on my cheeks. The words of Ernesto the Hospitalero of my last Albergue still ringing in my ear: “This is really just the start. The Camino runs through you. You’re always on it.”
It’s hard to describe this feeling of living in a metaphor, visceral and tangible. For three weeks life literally had been a path I was walking on. A stream of people all moving forward, towards a goal/the end, the importance of timing, new experiences waiting if you turned a corner, if you paused, went faster, slower, in circles and serpentines. People often describe life like this. But now I have lived it.