Going Deeper on the Chemin le Puy

Challenges arise

The many caminos de Santiago, wherever one picks one up and follows it for however distance, isn’t just a hike, though it is certainly that. Two weeks in, I’ve hiked 315 kilometers (195 miles), and I’ve surprised myself with how easy it has been. I’m in good shape, and getting in better.

(Well, that’s the positive take. Certainly, my feet and legs and lungs have held up well. I’m strong. But other things are a challenge - more on that later.)

Physical challenges aside, the camino is, after all, a pilgrimage. Modern pilgrims don’t have to deal with bandits, disease (much), hunger or the totalitarian state that was the Catholic Church. Nowadays, each person does it for different reasons, from exercise to spiritual exploration - and everything in between.

Still, the camino challenges each of us in diverse, often-unexpected ways, which nobody particularly likes…at least not when the challenge first appears. But we come to love them, because this is what makes the camino more than a hike.

In this way, the camino is just like life. You put yourself out there, pursue what you think your goal is, face the challenges as they come, and answer them as best you can.

Then you learn what you need to learn, not what you necessarily wanted to learn.

For many, the challenge is physical. That’s my primary reason for doing it, and the camino does not disappoint in that respect. Secondarily, I am doing it to see a part of France I have never seen, and that has been very far from disappointing; this is easily the most consistently beautiful camino of my six, and that was already a high bar. I think that the countryside I’ve walked through over the last 14 days is some of the most beautiful countryside I’ve ever seen, anywhere; and when I’m not in lush valleys and windswept ridgetops, I pass through the most incredible little villages - only a couple of which could even be called a town, as most are villages that seem almost entirely untouched by the modern world, apart from a car and the joys of electricity and running water.

Take beautiful Conques, which we looked forward to as being an actual town…with a population of 237…

The one I’m in today, Cajarc, is perhaps the biggest yet, since Le Puy - with more than 1,000 inhabitants!

No industrial areas, no suburbs, no highways…just country, rich and green and everything made of stone, wildflowers like I have never seen, animals everywhere (check out the frogs in the video at the bottom)…

The Chemin le Puy, the Chemin du Saint-Jacques, the Via Podeiensis, whichever name you choose, is the most perfect of the six caminos I’ve walked. Again, a high bar indeed.

It is also social, but nothing like the Camino Frances in Spain, which 60 percent of pilgrims still take. That’s a mobile party, in the best possible ways, but the Le Puy is different. Social, but in a low-key way. I’ve met many lovely people on this one, and tried my hand at French, and been greeted warmly by people who recognize me from days before, and though they speak not a word of English, and vice versa, we connect.

Our stories are all particular to each of us, but as life and travel and the camino in particular all confirm, we are none of us all that different. We deal with the same fears and faults and loves and losses, and we all deal with our various fates as best we can.

This was apparent at a pair of communal dinners I participated in the past week, in a gîte which had been recommended by another gîte operator, who I described in last week’s post. (I deliberately keep names and places a bit vague; I don’t know the degree to which people are public with their stories, and I won’t presume to be be a journalist here.

But this oasis in the middle of rich pastureland was opened not just for pilgrims, but also for longer visits by people who, as the Monsieur, Olivier, likes to say, were suffering from “burnout.” (Always funny to hear an American expression employed abroad, as so many are; I told him that when I first heard the word, it was a highschool expression designed to described other kids who had done too many drugs. It has gone mainstream.

That’s apparently how he himself ended up here, on a camino that “totally changed” his life, and he went with it. Leaving home, career, wife and who-knows-what-else to buy this old farmhouse and refashion it into a retreat for anyone who needed it.

So the communal dinners - standard in gîtes in France in ways they aren’t so much in Spain - were as much about talking, and sharing, as eating. There were laughs, and a not-inconsiderable amount of tears, as some pilgrims walk for very deep and personal reasons, and the pain they - we - often find in the process was apparent. Most of it was in French, of course, but it wasn’t hard to undestand the pain, and the release that those in pain were feeling in sharing their stories.

Again, I will here refrain from spilling the details, it’s not my right; but I hoped to contribute my little bit, and did so in the best way I know how: I played my camino song, “The Gift Must Move,” which I completed on my first camino. I love this song, and it reasonated deeply with some of those at the table. One man told me the next day that he listened to it several times after dinner on Spotify, and it, and another song, “Proud,” spoke to him.

Talk about proud: There are few things I life that I love as deeply as someone telling me that one of my songs has meant something to them - even if it “means” something for them that is different to what I intended. The songs have lives of their own, and it is amazing to experience them through the hearts of others.

This is my greatest motivation these days, the only reason I even bother to play music now. To connect. To share what I’ve learned. It is everything to me.

But the camino is not a performance, and the real journey is interior - as always. I always walk alone, and I guard my solitude jealously. But at the same time, I have spent much too much of the last two weeks still listening to the outside world: YouTube videos about the stock market, or China, or Ukraine, or health videos - and of course, the endless spew of Trump nonsense.

But I arrived at Olivier’s gîte with the understanding that all of this is meant to be forgotten here, just for awhile. And so I deleted my YouTube app (with its 110 GIGS of downloaded videos), and finally, I walked in silence.

What came up were old arguments and frustrations, mostly with myself, and a lot of little bits of songs - and not just my own. There were the songs of birds - so many birds - and of frogs. (There’s a video of the latter at the end of this post…I encourage you to give it two minutes.)

But mostly, what came were my own songs, or those little bits that appear, from wherever songs come from, and which I know, if I stick with them long enough - and give them enough aural room - will, or could, turn into real songs. Good songs. Even some great songs. Not sure these will, but watching the process, as a meditation, is really something else. Humbling, even, though it may not sound like it!

I have also gotten to the point that I can see, after two weeks and 315 kilometers, that I don’t have enough time (two more weeks) to complete the remaining 400 kilometers to Saint Jean. I knew this would be the case, and as one lovely French lady said to me this morning, the final arrival point doesn’t matter. It’s the camino itself that matters.

Of course, I know this. But it’s easy to forget. I am a goal-oriented man, which works if you want to achieve things, and I have. But the joy is always in the process. I even translated our old saving for her into French (with Google Translate, of course):

“Il vaux mieux voyager avec espoir que d’arriver.” (Yeah: “It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.”)

But perhaps it is even better, sometimes, to travel without any hope at all.

Today I am just hoping that my lower left jaw feels better. I have had molar pain for a week, and last time this happened, a tube of Sensodyne did the trick. This time, it doesn’t seem to be working, and this morning there was a signficant ache there, radiating, as it was there all my fitful night. I just took two Aleves, which seem to be helping, but a few more days and I may need a dentist. Not in my plan.

But plans, amIrite? LOL.

This comes on top of a week of some pretty irritating allergies that the Zyrtec is helping, but not exactly curing. I am congested. I swear I’m not the one dropping tissues on the camino trail, but one or two may have escaped. And whether the ache on the left side of my head is the jaw, or the allergies, I can’t quite say. Tomorrow is Sunday, so I can’t afford to have a problem in a small town. When Monday comes, if things aren’t better, I will take the next step. For now, I am choosing my usual optimism/denial, and hoping for the best.

On top of that, I am trying to plan how to cram the remaining 18 stages of this camino into the 13 days I have left. Not gonna happen, especially since seven of them are 28 km (18 miles) or more each, which is more than I (and my body) like to do on the regular. So I have to let go of this goal, and enjoy the process. As Olivier, the kind, thoughtful proprietor of the gîte said, “You could just walk. See what happens.”

Sometimes, the solution is right there. Just walk. That’s what I came here for.

And I will certainly see what happens.

Fingers crossed.

Onward, ultreia!

And now…the frog pond!