“this is the camino; miracles happen all the time.”

“This is the Camino. Miracles happen all the time.”*

I smiled to myself when I watched and heard him say this. I smiled because I know his statement to be true. And when someone in our audience asked for a show of hands of who among us has walked the Camino, with my heart pounding I raised my hand.

Before first light on September 19, 2024, I, along with my long time friend, Mariah, set out from St Jean Pied-de-Port, France to walk westward. Eight-hundred kilometers and 40 days later we walked in to Santiago de Compostella, Spain.

I have not yet written here about my journey because I have been lost as to where to even begin to write about it. All these weeks later I feel like I still haven’t had time and space enough to process the experience of my pilgrimage. The one thing that I’m sure of is that the processes of processing will take the remainder of my life.

Yet I am keen to jot down something here, especially after being reminded once again of the angels of my journey.

Psychologist Dacher Keltner, in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life tells us that there are eight key ways that we humans experience awe. “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.”

I, being an avid outdoorswoman, would have guessed that the number one way people feel awe is by experiencing Nature, especially vast landscapes like the Grand Canyon, or a massive weather event. Yet while Nature is, indeed, one of the eight key ways we experience awe, it ranks number three on the list.

Out-ranking Nature, and number two on the list, is “collective effervescence” — those moving experiences that a gathering of people share together: A group of fans watching a sports event; people participating in a local parade; a band or choir creating music together. As Keltner describes it, collective effervescence is when “we feel like we are buzzing and crackling with some life force that merges people into a collective self, a tribe, an oceanic ‘we.’ Across the twenty-six cultures [researched], people told stories of collective effervescence at weddings, christenings, quinceañeras, bar and bat mitzvahs, graduations, sports celebrations, funerals, family reunions, and political rallies.”

Crowning the list of ways we experience awe is “moral beauty”: The witnessing of “other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming. Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty…. Exceptional physical beauty, from faces to landscapes, has long been a fascination of the arts and sciences, and moves us to feelings of infatuation, affection, and, on occasion, desire. Exceptional virtue, character, and ability—moral beauty—operate according to a different aesthetic, one marked by a purity and goodness of intention and action, and moves us to awe. [Included in] moral beauty is the courage that others show when encountering suffering.”

I attest.
For the Camino is nothing if not an 800k artery of collective effervescence and moral beauty.
A 500-mile conduit of awe.

For me, collective effervescence of the Camino is the moving — physically and emotionally — of the mass of pilgrims all walking in the same direction. Each is there for their own reason, yet all share the vision and desire of progressing westward with countless others along the sacred path. We experience together the sunshine and rain, the wind and mud, the nighttime dormitory snorers and farters, the gratitude of finding an open cafe after hours of early a.m. walking; that first sip of a hot coffee or a cold cerveza. The tears. The laughter.

What makes the Camino extraordinary from other long distance trails is not only its centuries-old history, but that its pilgrims are from all over the world. And by that I mean everywhere. Every day I heard all around me a marvelous array of languages. Ahead of me might be pilgrims speaking Swedish, and ahead of them those speaking French, and ahead of them pilgrims speaking Dutch and Hungarian. Behind me might be pilgrims speaking Korean and behind them, Portuguese followed by Taiwanese and German and Finnish and Hebrew. The shared language of all was English, often broken and heavily accented. But the one Spanish phrase that everyone uttered well and uttered countless times daily to one another was “Buen Camino” — “Good Way,” a blessing and desire for each other to travel well.

And then there was the moral beauty.

Each day I struggled not to wince too much from the relentless pain in my knee — a crippling condition that began on day one and endured the rest of my journey (and which even now, I am working to heal). Yet every day I was lifted out of my suffering by the kindness of strangers and acquaintances: A pilgrim offering me at seat at his table; a barista comping me a cup of coffee; a shop owner expressing concern about my footwear as I headed out in sandals into the mud; an innkeeper who, seeing my limp and exhaustion, insisted on carrying my pack to my room; innumerable kind words of encouragement and questions of concern, “are you OK?” from pilgrims hiking past. These kind souls were my angels — my daily messengers of moral beauty.

One angel in particular I will never forget:

One grueling long hot day on the Maseta, I was limping badly, when a pilgrim I had never seen before rushed up to me with concern on his face. In broken English he asked where I was in pain. I pointed to my knee. He then gestured for me to stop and take several deep breaths. As I did this, he knelt down and whispered in a foreign tongue a blessing, as he slowly moved his hand round and round over my knee.
Several long moments passed.
Then he rose up, put his hands together in prayer, bowed, and, looking directly into my eyes, wished me, “Buen Camino.”
He walked on.
I never saw him again.

I walked the remainder of that day — at least three more miles — without pain.

“This is the Camino. Miracles happen all the time.”

They do, indeed.

*”This is the Camino. Miracles happen all the time” is a line from the soon-to-be-released film “The Way, My Way,” about the Camino. The film is directed by Bill Bennett, an Australian writer and filmmaker who first walked the Camino in 2013 and whose memoir of it shares the title of and inspired the film. I was lucky to score two tickets to the sold-out premier of the film & Q&A with Bennett in Santa Fe this week. The film is a joy — as is the book!

p.s.: I wrote my previous post just days before leaving for the Camino. In response to that post, many of you wrote to me with such lovely, heartfelt comments. It was my great intention to reply to each of your messages, however time conspired against me. Please know that your comments were read, reflected upon, and deeply appreciated. Thank you. ✨

---

---