They walked a country road together in high apex of August heat as sun sank in sight in western sky; its fire greatest in advance of coming eve and night’s cooling respite hinting of autumn airs to come. The sky weighted heavy in humidity from a rain that would not break and dampness refusing to depart. The tension of the sky added to the heat and flame of bare-sky sun, and in their walk, they took rest beneath a pear tree in open space where once a homestead stood, its family, story, toil and joys leveled and forgotten—returned to sea of prairie—save for the great pear tree that remained: living proof the place was once a home for man.
Resting in the shade of the great tree, its low branches giving respite to summer’s burden, he asked to her, “Have you ever heard of the Road to Santiago? It’s an old pilgrimage route beginning in France and ending in Galicia, Spain that follows a trail used my millions across millennia to reach the Cathedral de Santiago del Compostela. It is marked and lined with symbols of shells painted with red cross and covers hundreds of miles before you reach the church and ending destination.
I read of it first in a book by Paulo Coelho, and when I tried to get away from it there, it returned to me in Pillars of the Earth, and again, months after, in Dante’s Vita Nuevo. I believe Dante walked it, and it was from this journey his own idea of a pilgrimage—through the depths, heights, and infinite light of transcendence beyond this life—that The Divine Comedy was conceived. Coelho wrote a book about it: The Pilgrimage, and it reappears again and again in reference.
It is said to be the way of storytellers and light; its way, in the middle-ages, lined by French jongleurs, telling stories at waypoints where pilgrims stopped and gathered in their nights. That its appeared to me so many times in stories—across ages, nationalities, and minds—leads me to believe there may be a greater truth in what that means.
I have a dream to walk it, not in expectation for anything more than the experience: an intentional time to lose myself apart from time and world demands, to slow and see different than I am able when shaped by immanent acts. I have a dream to walk it in the night through open lands to the vertical stripe of Galaxy showing in band in the Heavens, lighting and guiding the way; to lose myself in a different language, culture, and in becoming no one for a while, perhaps finding my truer self in the after of experience.”
“Why are you asking me?” she asked.
“I thought it might catch your mind: the travel, the stories, history of writers and dreamers discovering self and other revelations in disappearing from a world that depresses dreams; to choose a different path, not original, but farther and more difficult than most would ever willingly seek, and from the journey, finding something greater—even if only a subtle shift in sight that changes everything around—in the journey.
Would you ever take a trip like that?” he asked.
“I never know until I do. I don’t overthink it,” she answered. “If an experience I want to live…I go.”
“It’s something I want to live,” he spoke.
“Then you should. What is it you want to experience in the journey?”
“To disappear. To break from the day-to-day and rediscover a greater depth to waking up and living, walking, putting one step in front of the other until we reach our end…and return different than I was before.”
“Different how?”
“However God wishes me to be, or nearer to His intent.”
“And if you don’t find it?”
“There is always something to being humbled, choosing and following a course to end in gratitude for the gift to live and experience it at all. It’s all a gift. Expectations rob the simple joy that comes in being and experience, when we pre-shape an ideal and outcome and proceed blindly to all we are exposed and hold wonder if we simply change our sight to see.
I want to learn to live and see that way again and, if I’m blessed, to write and share from refined sight.”
He paused. Sun fell low in line with eyes in sky, its evening rays lighting on the limestone road laid straight before their path, its light casting stone in yellowed golden hue.
He spoke to her, staring to the ends of the golden road that disappeared beneath the curving of the earth beyond the flat and open plain before them. “I thought you might find something interesting in it too, and wondered if it was an experience you would ever want to live.”
Her answer, like the ends of the gold-lit road, lain beyond vantage of their view.