One of my great pleasures is reading, on Facebook, accounts by pilgrims and aspiring pilgrims of their journeys toward the venerated cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. The most common route for these long walks begins in France, crosses the Pyrenees, and proceeds northwest through the Basque country and Galicia. There are many variations on the route. A few years ago, Erudite Partner and I joined with a friend to walk the Primitivo route, one of the oldest and most rural.
Some people are even more ambitious. People begin walking from all over Europe, making their own routes. These days, I'm enjoying looking at an account from one Liam J. Bayly of his trek south from Glasgow along the west cost of England. He's a reflective narrator. (I have no idea how he intends to cross the Channel.) He expresses cogently something that I have felt walking the bayside perimeter of the San Francisco peninsula:
Looking from this vantage point across Middlesbrough at the vast industrial sprawl, I could feel it. The sadness. The very deep and powerful sadness and woundedness. Think me crazy?!? That's fine. You can. But it doesn't change a thing. This is not a rant nor a soap box. This is a description of a moment. I wept. The tears were not tears of joy. They were tears of immense sadness. The industrial period of the human race was necessary for our evolution. But it has come at a cost. A severe cost in some cases. It has left its mark. And I ached and I wept.
I appreciate that, even as he weeps, he also accepts that our hideously destructive, frequently cruel, brilliantly creative, capitalist civilization has led to better lives for masses of humans who wouldn't be alive without the standard of living it makes possible -- and also for a long running catastrophe..
This seems as a very truthful state of mind for our times. Pilgrimage is about noticing.
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