Fellow Pilgrims —
We did it. We came. We walked. We… walked. Then we walked some more. A whole country and a pilgrimage. And woven into that walking was much to contend with, much to reflect on.
Some words I’d cluster together were I asked what’s in mind: Strength, silence, pain, euphoria, weariness, wariness, melancholy, mentorship, friendship, gratitude, joy (!), disillusionment, solitude, vastness, peace, alarm.
Into the walking, too, we wove conversations across cultures, languages, belief systems, personalities, backgrounds, ages. We wove in eucalyptus trees, stale white bread, wild horses, urban hell sprawl, industrial farming, and an arresting coastline that rolled on forever down pilgrim road.
Questions begot answers begot bigger questions. And so it goes. We are truly a bizarre species navigating an even more bizarro time in history.
Where to really begin?
PR-CDN01 Specs
- 808 km walked
- 1.1M+ steps!
- 1,700 photographs taken / 296 published
- 15k+ words written / 2,097 published
- 31 binauraul audio recordings
- 0 affecting blisters
- Walk Data
Thanks & Prints
Many thanks for following along and being part of this project. And my sincere gratitude to those who wrote in with notes / letters / questions / comments. Throwing these virtual arms around ya.
I’ve been asked a number of times about prints. And so I might do a limited run. Think: “museum-quality”, perhaps 2-3 images in editions of ~30 each. $100 range, unframed.
The systems / relationships around printing and distribution will of course need to have a standard of quality I’m happy to put my name on. And so if there’s interest, send me a note so I can get an overall pulse on “demand”. Beyond that, I’ll be spending the summer considering if there’s a “shape” to a much bigger project around the Camino de Santiago / pilgrimage.
Final Words
That so much can be extracted from a day on pilgrimage – a wholeness – from the mere falling forward a few ten thousand steps within medieval “constraints” is, to put it plainly, impossible to understate. It reminds us, under a glaring spotlight, what about contemporary life may leave us so uneasy, so devoid of meaning.
In the quiet space of pilgrimage, we make clean contact with reality, with our humanity, and experience directly how the higher parts of our nature simply emerge when shallow desires go unfulfilled. When fleeting whims go unfollowed. And when instead, we immerse ourselves in the “right” conditions. It's these conditions and the environments / incentive structures that enable them that I'm most interested to examine more deeply.
We can’t necessarily live in these extremes (like pilgrimage), but we can learn the most from them. There's an archetype to extract. One needs not to walk across Spain to "tap in" (though I recommend it!). Out your front door is just fine.
More soon,
M
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