More from my solo Camino trip this past summer. If you’ve just started walking with us, here is Survive: Part One.
Though we’d been ascending and descending for the last handful of kilometers, there came a point ahead of us where the land just… dropped off. The ask, it seemed, was for us to step off the edge of the world.
In reality, it was a steep, straight downhill, maybe half a kilometer long. The only walking surface(s) were those sharp, unstable tennis-ball-size rocks we’d dealt with on the way up. Centuries of people walking the path had carved it into a kind of deep, U-shaped chute, with the earth on either side basically vertical, so there was no skirting around the precarious terrain.
Weirdly, a food truck was parked in a spot just before the descent began, where the Camino path crossed a modern paved road built into the mountain. The truck was evidently quite new to this area, otherwise we wouldn’t have been so fussed about having adequate supplies. Most of the few dozen people walking that day had stopped there, but instinct told me to keep going.
I heard the food truck had flyer with a taxi number that you could call and, by the time you’d made it down this precarious stretch (intact or otherwise?) to the next paved swoop, your ride would be waiting for you.
Noted. But for now, there was no choice but to traverse this. Survive this.
Rebecca offered to hang with me, knowing how freaked out I was on this terrain, but I told her to move on. In spite of how much I’d craved company during the first part of the day, I knew I couldn’t take a step, or even a breath, without full concentration now. If my attention was even a little bit on another person during this descent—never mind feeling like I was in the way of folks who wanted to go faster than I could—there was no way I’d stay upright.
As it was, with everyone else having stopped at the truck, I miraculously had the world to myself for this achingly slow journey.
So I started talking to myself.
And to the god I’d swear I’d seen at the top of the mountain not an hour before.
Then I remembered someone from the group I walked with last year, who’d been so disheartened by one particularly brutal uphill that she wasn’t sure wanted to keep going. The following day, something told her to start singing herself up every incline she encountered. She did, and it got her through the rest of the trip. Now, I started singing the songs she taught me.
Then I remembered hearing somewhere that making your out breath longer than your in breath has a regulating effect, signalling to the body that you are safe. I began pulling air through my nose and blowing long, exaggerated, whistling breaths out my mouth. Began devoting an entire breath to every step or two.
I spoke to my body. Not asking it to cooperate, to serve me, but rather to find its own balance, as I knew it could. I engaged my core, but not to the point of tension. I had begun to trust that each part of me knew how to work in concert without my head issuing commands (more on this radical discovery in a future post!).
And so then gratitude bubbled up…
…organically, abundantly. I thanked my blessed knees who were holding up so well. I thanked my calves. My fingers. Lungs. Cells. Skeleton. I thanked the tears that had started welling and falling, that I had to stop and blink away before safely moving on again. Every part I could name and every part I couldn’t got its own individual blessing. Out loud.
When I ran out of parts of my own body I moved to the bodies that had created me, even though I didn’t know them and never would. I thanked the ones that loved me. The ones that hurt me. I thanked God or Whoever (GOW) for talking to me, sometimes in words, sometimes in mountains. I thanked that mountain, that land, those rocks and plants and trees and yes even the bears and the wolves (wherever they were), all bearing witness to this, making it possible. I thanked the very path hosting me in that moment, allowing me to live, to pass this way. All the land I’d traversed so far, and all that would come.
I thanked my teachers, human and extra-human. I thanked the family who would be waiting at the end of all of this. My family at home. The family I was making here. The folks who were helping me whether they knew they were or not. I thanked the wide open air around me for being so plentiful and, in this moment, protecting my solitude so well. I thanked my fear.
And when I was out of gratitude there was the breath again. One cycle for each step. Surviving.
And then… there was the road.
In reality it had probably taken about 35 minutes, but it felt like several hours. Several lifetimes. With every step I took, those rocks—those ancient, mischievous, very alive beings—were leeching away decades of old wounds that had been keeping me blind to so much.
This day wasn’t over by any means—plus there were another ten to go—but I came out of this chute a slightly different person than the one who had entered it.
But again, growth hadn’t been the objective. Not even a little. I’d just wanted to survive, and I had. I learned what it is to celebrate making it through something alive and intact. I’d survived the diciest part of the mountain not on extra provisions or skill or taking the ‘safe’ path (which I later found out wouldn’t have been all that easier, nor would it have spared me this particular downhill).
There wasn’t anything to earn, atone for, or prove. The over preparing had, no surprise, proven useless. I’d survived on gratitude and breath.
The teeny tiny hillock of each day
I realize as I write this that this is showing up in my days. Like, I get into bed each night with a bit more satisfaction than I used to, dancing a micro-jig at having survived the day. Not in the sense of having just barely hauled myself through a gauntlet of hardship, arriving bedraggled and spent. For some people, every day is a mountain. Mine aren’t that hard, and that’s part of what I celebrate. Good god, the miracle of this stable, privileged life I have. The miracle of this healthy body, this [mostly] intact mind, and these beings, seen and unseen, colluding with me in every moment.
On this day - any regular day - I created, connected, saw, smelled. I felt, even if the feels were grief or stress or confusion or failure. I spent time. I wasted time. I freaking lived. And if all goes as expected, I’ll get another stretch of road to walk tomorrow.
(And yes, there’s still a lot of Camino to go. I hope you’ll keep walking with me!)
Photo credit: the wonderful Rebecca
But this is not the part of the path in the story above. The “chute” was even steeper, and it probably would have been dicey to turn around for a photo.
