A human experience - part 2

When I have set off to undertake what I committed myself to in the application for the project, I intended strongly to do it on my own. I knew I would meet other pilgrims, talk with them, socialise. But the pilgrimage was to be my own done by myself. A hiker I spoke with in Refuge Wallon-Marcadau agreed with me. For him, the beauty was in the solitude. He purposefully was choosing the mountains he was hiking in bearing in mind how many people go there. He wanted to be on his own with the nature and the challenges. I doubt there are any official statistics on the matter, however, in all probability, there might be as many people making a pilgrimage alone as there are those who do the same with company. At least, I have meet numerous representatives of both groups during the realisation of the project. Some of them told me that they wanted to come with someone they knew, either for the comfort or for the need of companionship. Yet others, as a guy from Colorado, would conclude after more than a month of a pilgrimage, that people were the best part of a journey. Some pilgrimages are made alone, others cannot be made by yourself only.

Beauty is something that both those who travelled without companions and those who were walking in a group agreed about. Beauty is an indispensable part of a pilgrimage. Whether it is a physical beauty of a landscape that extends for kilometres ahead or an inner beauty of the changes that are under way. For a woman from Australia it was the beauty of the old architecture that for the Europeans is something they do not even pause to think about. Yet, for her it was what her pilgrimage was about. For a Bulgarian it was the beauty of being able to visit places you would have never come to otherwise. For a Lithuanian it was the beauty of el Bierzo and Galicia. For a citizen of the United States it was the beauty of visiting Spain. Beauty in all shades and forms.

Physical effort and a challenge might be seen as the antitheses of beauty. Even so, many responses about the meaning of a pilgrimage I heard could have been summarised under those labels. Zeno Howiacki, who walked both to Częstochowa, a religious capital of Poland, and to Santiago de Compostela, would be one person who supported this understanding of a pilgrimage. In his book about the latter of the journeys he defiantly asserts that for him a pilgrimage was how he challenged himself and his addition. The first pilgrimage to Częstochowa brought with it a challenge of stopping drinking, the second of recovering from the consequences of years of the abuse of alcohol. If it was not sufficient, when on the Camino de Santiago he was fighting the pain in his left leg. Not after he walked too much too fast. From the first day. On the other hand, a story of three guys that at some point were walking around 40 km a day, they were from Hungary, Italy and Poland, is not that dramatic but it too does revolve around the physical effort. When they came to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port they did not know each other. A desire to walk as fast as possible and to challenge themselves as much as imaginable brought them together. They explained that it was easier to “run” the pilgrimage with some company running it together with you. 

(to be continued)

 Photo: The Pyrenees