We are not quiet, mind you. Although Jari takes off ahead and returns to us in various fits and starts, as is her nature, the Musketeers and I are loud and boisterous, full of laughter and jokes and inappropriate humor. There are many, many times we stop in search of a place for one of us to go to the bathroom only to realize that when the landscape is flat and featureless, you are more or less shit out of luck. One of the Musketeers (who, for purposes of dignity and mystery, will remain nameless) spends a good 30 minutes in search of a small hillock or knoll to hide behind so she is seen by neither Linde and I nor the tractor in the distance. It's crude but hilarious and I can't underscore how great it feels to be able to laugh at these things with these people.
Despite the raunchiness and volume on the outside, I'm quiet inside. There continue to be moments along the Way when I forget about everything that conspired to get me to that place, to Spain at that time, when everything feels natural and correct in the deepest sense. There are moments when I forget everything else - that a couple of weeks prior I was still at work, sleeping on a cot in Athens, that it was still summer, that I have a phone and a Jeep and a whole life 5,000 miles away. There are moments when walking carries the same ritualistic emotion as the mass - at once sacred and deeply natural (saying 'yes' to that feeling of correctness in the mass is a large part of how I ended up Catholic). There are moments when I feel fully inhabited with the present, with myself held in balance between my heart and my joy.
In the Meseta these moments stretch out and become minutes or hours, and in those times I feel so close to God it's physically overwhelming. My eyes well up, I want to either scream in delight or curl up into a ball until it passes, and I can't decide if that feeling is immense consolation or immense fear. Whatever it is, it comes with immense gratitude and sorrow that I've ignored God through much of my life.
I am inherently uncomfortable talking about mysticism, but I believe this is a prayer being answered. I can find, even now, scores of journal entries from my 20s that ache for and demand a singular purpose, a direction, a trajectory toward something or some goal that is larger than me. I've tried, and failed, to force that purpose in different ways; I've prayed to find it for years. Let's be honest, I've prayed for a giant neon sign from God that says "Be a _______, and you will be joyful and your life will have meaning." So far it hasn't happened.
But there, with this overwhelming physical presence of God, I have an answer.
Bad news, kids - that answer was, and remains, nonverbal. The closest I can get is something along the lines of "THIS!" and "YES!" For a person who is, by nature, steeped in words... this is deeply unsettling.
There are plenty of 'things' that also happened that day - following the Camino through the ruins of a medieval church and gateway that now house a hostel, where I was desperate for a toilet and rejected because their pipes were broken, where Jari suddenly appeared with a guitar in hand laughing and playing it well, the surprising church/museum on the outskirts of town where Linde asked me about iconography and I had no answers, the strange worm-like layout of Castrojeriz that felt both alien and lonely and encouraged us back to the gorgeous hostel to cook dinner and cram into the tiny upstairs kitchen, the drama between another set of pilgrims that still strikes me as funny ("I told her, I like the sound of silence!"), the fact that Linde cooked for us by herself and asked for nothing in return.
Once again, I remember taking time to look at the dark landscape stretching down and away from our hostel window to the south, and the night sky full of stars above, before consoling myself to sleep, and the end of another day.
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