At the airport gate, I chatted with an older woman who had just walked the Camino in Spain. I’m not really sure where the Camino is. I’m too jetlagged from my Ireland trip to google it. But I think it’s a pilgrimage following in the footsteps of some beloved saint.
The 70ish woman carried only a small backpack. Her feet were tired she said but her boots were sturdy. She lifted a boot to show me.
“Nice,” I said although they were just plain old hiking shoes, not attractive at all. I guess hiking boots are not supposed to be attractive. “They look functional.”
“Some people do hike the Camino in sneakers, but I think you need these.”
“I am going to do that – a spiritual journey,” I nodded.
“Any walk can be a spiritual walk,” she said. “Like you told me you’re from New York. You could walk the Hudson River?”
“Really?” I said. “What’s spiritual about the Hudson?”
“I don’t know. Maybe do Vermont then,” she said.
I am attracted to the idea of long walks like the Camino, wherever that is, or the Appalachian Trail. Yes, the AT’s cool. You start in the spring in the south and end in the fall in New England. But do you sleep in a cozy bed? I don’t think so. I love a bed and breakfast where someone – not me – makes me coffee.
Maybe I should consider the wise woman’s advice and see the Hudson as a spiritual path. I could blog about it. I might call the new blog, Hiking the Hudson, A Spiritual Journey. Oh, I like the sound of that. The Hudson is beautiful in the fall. Maybe I’ll do the hike this fall when my darlings go back to school.
Wait. The Hudson is too ordinary. I want to do an extraordinary hike — Mount Kilimanjaro or K2 — a climb that will make me famous. Or at least make me feel alive. I might encounter rattlesnakes, freeze to death, stare down a wild boar. But will I sleep in a soft place? I don’t think so. Maybe I should stick with the Hudson and then I can head home every night to my cozy bed on the Upper West Side.
Maybe every walk can be a spiritual walk, just like the elder pilgrim said. Every journey can spark lofty thoughts, philosophical ponderings and celebrations of God.
I believe God is found in nature and in chance encounters on the daily journey. Maybe God even resides in the ordinary river that I pass every day.
Maybe I don’t have to make a pilgrimage to some distant land and blog about it to find my spiritual path.
I wrote this post at the Ecumenical Library lunchtime writing group at the Interchurch Center led by Tracey Del Duca. The next God Box writing group meets on Aug. 10 and 24.
100 Days of Poems and Pics 
This is a wonderful post about “walking” ~ it has a great sense of ‘whimsy’ about it too 🙂 I think your friend is right in that ‘every walk can be a spiritual walk’ if we do it with an awareness that suspends ‘thinking’ ~ Namaste.
I’m envisioning a walk where you invite people to walk portions of it with you – people you know near those places – and the conversations you have while walking are what comprises the book.
Lovely coincidence. I went on a long walk but I took terrible shoes. Now, my feet are reminding me “salvage something from that walk; make it matter, give it meaning or else these blisters are in vain!”