on meaning [notes from the camino]

work in process//12.

We weren’t even 24 hours into our pilgrimage on Spain’s Camino de Santiago last week when my husband, Steve, threw out his pilgrim’s passport. The paper booklet, sanctioned by the Catholic Church and handed out for free, serves as documentation of your journey. The rules are simple: You must get two stamps per day on each day of your route for your pilgrimage to be certified as official. You’re supposed to leave nothing but footprints on the Camino, but if you want your walk to count, you need a paper trail. 

Remembering to get our stamps, or serros, each day became an entertaining game to distract us from the long miles. In one church a blind man stamped our booklets with wobbly hands; in a pop-up tent that looked just like an ultramarathon aid station, a man carefully pressed the outline of a shell into hot wax. 

But Steve wasn’t playing. After a cafe con leche at a roadside albergue, he tossed his booklet into a trash can. Raised Catholic but now an avowed atheist and the family contrarian, he didn’t need a pamphlet as proof of his walk. He hadn’t even gotten a single stamp.

“Wait!” I sputtered. “You’re not going to get your certificate!” 

He shook his head and grinned. “Nope!” he said, holding up his empty hands as evidence. “I feel free!”

I had to admire him. After all, wasn’t this what our walk—and any true pilgrimage, for that matter—was all about? The freedom to travel on two feet across the land with only a backpack on our backs? To leave schedules and emails behind, ambition and ego, the need for speed and even significance. 

I had a lot of time to think about meaning during the five days and nearly 80 miles we spent walking the Camino. Why had we come and what were we learning? Were we having transcendent experiences, as so many pilgrims claim, and if so, what were they, or when would they begin?

Social media prizes meaning. For content to carry weight, it must convey lessons and learning, digestible messages and takeaways that followers can use to achieve their own self-transformation, in short order. The algorithm rewards immediacy over equanimity. But rushing to assign meaning risks reducing profound experiences to pat one-liners, shrinking the enormity of the experience to fit the narrative.

Of course, we writers have always sought to make sense out of mayhem. It’s part of our job description to take events and observations and distill them into story. As I walked, I felt my mind grasping for understanding. The green, softly rounded hillsides looked a lot like the Blue Ridge Mountains in the spring; the rock walls and tumbling creeks reminded me of the Brandywine Valley. The eucalyptus forest smelled sweet, like California. My father was all around me, everywhere I looked. I had the strangest sensation of walking backward in time, through all the places I’d ever been and known and loved, and forward into the unknown future—my own and my daughters’. 

Some days we walked all four of us together, arm in arm; other times, we spread out along the well-marked trail. We could move together as a family, in the same direction, but ultimately each of us would follow our own way, walk own Camino. The realization struck me as deep and true, if a little sad.

Was this what it was supposed to teach me? 

By our third day of pilgrimage, my mind felt so void of feelings and thoughts, negative or positive, it seemed the very definition of emptiness. Was this a good thing? Certainly, it was unusual. For this reason alone, I suppose it was meaningful.

Still, I didn’t want to rush to judgment. Pilgrims have been walking the Camino for 1300 years. Who knew why we’d come and what it was for? It reminded me of the classic Zen koan that asks, “What is this?” For months while writing Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World, I found myself asking the same perplexed question. What is this? What is this? I couldn’t explain my book to myself, I didn’t have a 30-second elevator pitch. Maybe it’s jetlag, but even now, two weeks before Brief Flashings comes out, if I think too hard, its true meaning eludes me.

I take this as a good sign. It’s not my job to determine its meaning. The book belongs to itself, and soon, to those who read it. Like the Camino, its meaning isn’t finite or fixed, but the opposite: an experience that may take months, years, or a lifetime to reveal itself. 

The answers, if there are any, are yours to discover. 

When we finally reached Santiago de Compostela, it was nothing like what I’d imagined. The ancient part of town was a maze of tiny narrow stone streets. It was Palm Sunday. Our bodies had gotten stronger—we’d adapted, as humans always do, to the rigors required of us. Maybe this was the takeaway? We’re stronger than we think. We went to the Pilgrims’ Office to get our Compostelas, or certificates. The woman in charge waved us into a computer, where we entered our information and produced our booklets as proof. She motioned to Steve for his.

He shook his head. “I don’t have one,” he explained in Spanish. 

“It’s OK,” she replied, with a winking smile, gesturing for him to enter his name anyway.

“No,” he said again, kindly but firmly. 

He could have gotten his Compostela, but he’d already figured it out: A slip of paper written in Latin wouldn’t bestow meaning or value upon our pilgrimage. The walking itself did that. 

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with thanks + buen camino,

katie