Camino Parte 2

[please excuse typos and weird formatting - back to posting from my phone!]

While we didn’t plan it this way, it feels fitting to be ending my fellowship travels back on the Camino de Santiago, where this all began.

The past few months have left me feeling a bit unmoored. No set schedule or routine - the weekdays indistinguishable from weekends. Luckily we were in most places long enough to unpack and get to know the area a bit.

The Camino is the opposite in some ways - a highly structured rootlessness. A new bed every night but the same routine - get up eat breakfast walk eat second breakfast walk eat lunch walk arrive in town shower dinner chat sleep. Rinse and repeat.

While the routine might be the same this time around, the landscape isn’t. Our first time on the Camino was at summer’s end - the fields of grasses golden, crops harvested, leaves slowly changing and falling as we headed west.

Now we’re here as spring creeps back. A giant tree burst with flowers in a town square. On the bus to Leon, we sped past my old friend gorse, its yellow flowers smearing the sides of the highway.

We walked out of Leon today. Since it’s a Sunday, things were quiet so we got to notice the birds, including seven large peacocks in a municipal park (!).

We left Leon and walked through fields, some shooting up new leaves of kale, others freshly plowed, still others a strange, dead grey green - spring hadn’t come to them yet. Microscopic purple flowers spilled along the ditches. There was rain, but it was sparse and gentle. Birds chirped everywhere.

It gets stranger every day to be so far from home, where it seems like billionaires and autocrats want to block out the sun and turn our lives into some sort of perpetual grey winter.

Walking through spring is a reminder that new things can grow and flourish, that beauty comes after a harsh winter, that farmers tend the soil and bring back new life.

Spring is a corny and cliched symbol of hope - and that we all must be the gardeners and the farmers who will do the work to make beautiful and necessary things bloom. Buen Camino.