Heather Conn Blogs

Leaving at 6:30 a.m. from Santa Catalina, walking alone in quiet, I saw the sun lift into a sky of muted pink. The peaceful simplicity of this natural start to a day embraced me as I walked, surrounded by rolling, thick rows of heather. These radiant mounds of purple and white, next to yellow bushes of broom, were as tall as me. I had never seen heather grow so high; their presence brought wonder to my journey.

It was June 21, my twenty-fifth day on the Camino — only nine more days until my destination of Santiago.

While walking in a lively wind under overcast skies, I allowed the gusts to nudge me along, through the glorious array of mountains and brash colour. Swallowed into nature, I let myself wallow in the luxury of solitude and boundless beauty. A phrase came to me: “This is the gift.”

All day, I walked on footpaths, seeing few people amidst scrub and conifers, feeling energized by the cold, clouds and wind. I passed dozens of wind farms on distant hilltops, an audience of skinny figures both still and moving. 

Later, the steep descent down to Acebo, full of a lot of loose shale and stones, demanded my concentration and slower movement. My ankles and the bottoms of my feet were aching. I took an ibuprofen. For a considerable time, I heard the constant squeal of a cyclist’s brakes as he went down the same route.

At least three times, with no one else around, I stopped to rest my feet, express gratitude, and drop more fully into the landscape. At these times of stillness, I felt as if the fields of dried grass heads, waving in the wind, were linked to me in one energetic flow. It seemed as if they were the sole motion that mattered.

The next day, I wrote in my journal: “One awareness that came to me yesterday was that it’s all there in life and nature — it’s just up to me to stop, find the stillness, and connect to the peace that is everpresent. This is not an earth-shattering awareness and it’s not as if I didn’t know that before, but I feel as if I got it at a visceral level. It came to me in such simple clarity. It is always there. It is up to me to decide to tap into it or not. I create any state of ‘not peace.’”

Rather than through walking, my usual gateway to this felt sense of oneness has been through the stillness of seated meditation. With eyes closed, focused on my breath, I don’t have the distraction of my moving body. At such times, my mind seems more willing to slow down, even if it’s only briefly. Author and Zen Buddhist Natalie Goldberg says of this form of meditation: “The great ground of being opens up and holds us. Sitting still joins us to that true marriage.”

At times, I wondered if my mostly constant movement on the Camino worked against me in finding this sense of stillness. I thought that a meditation retreat, with prolonged periods of sitting in one place, would probably allow me greater and more frequent access to Presence or Source than a destination-based pilgrimage. But perhaps that’s just another illusion of the mind, yet another form of creating separateness, rather than connectedness.

While on the Camino, I noticed that I resisted doing sitting meditation. Even now, I don’t meditate regularly. Decades ago, while in India for many months, I often meditated twice daily for an hour at a time. Since I was there for seven months, I more easily let go of my sense of time. While on the Camino, I was keeping to a schedule and convinced myself that I didn’t have time to meditate, except for brief periods.

A willingness to let go of something, whether it’s a deadline, an identity, possessions, money, goals, status or needing approval, creates an entry point to Presence and Source. That’s one reason why I think so many people are drawn to the Camino: they recognize, either consciously or unconsciously, that it offers a way to let go of their daily accepted identity markers, to leave their regular life behind. Through walking its path, we can let go into the Unknown, finding stillness in motion, joining nature as one, unified force.

In childhood, my entry points to the Great Connection were art, creativity, writing, and spending time on the Lake Ontario waterfront, although I certainly didn’t view them that way then. In adulthood, I’ve added yoga, meditation (I’ve tried the open-eye method of Shambhala Training and the more traditional closed-eye ways), walking meditation, and SoulCollage®.

We can all find our own paths inward, whether it’s while cleaning a toilet or sitting with someone who’s dying. For a British climber I was involved with in India, ascending rock faces, ice walls, and the world’s tallest peaks were his spiritual entry point. Combining intense focus and connection with rock, ice or snow, within vast, panoramic spaces, brought him in intimate touch with a force greater than himself.

If we are willing to move beyond our own limited self and step into all-embracing Self, we can honour a moment no matter where we are. We don’t need to walk the Camino to experience this; it begins with simple awareness, appreciation, some form of stillness, and one, conscious breath.

 

Walking solo past sprawling fields of wheat and corn, heading towards Astorga, I braced myself against the wind. Even with my windbreaker hood on, my jacket zipped up as high as it could go above my neck, gusts battered my face.

 

This was day 24, my third week on the Camino, when I was supposed to fall more deeply into myself, according to one seasoned pilgrim. “Week three is when you get in touch with your pain,” this retired European man had told me.

 

It never happened. “Still have had no profound insights or revelations, no new deep stuff from my past appear,” I wrote in my journal. But I was feeling increasingly content and peaceful.

 

And I needed a break. The arches of my feet ached. My blisters and the bottoms of my feet were sore. Since 7 a.m., I had covered almost 26 kilometres, surprised to have seen few people in my previous hours on this red dirt path.

 

In flat, open space and dry scrub, passing no town or village for almost seven kilometres, I felt delighted to see a building, a few trees, and some people ahead. Feeling dehydrated and wanting more water, I now truly understood the impact of the word “oasis.”

Approaching the front of a long, crude brick building, which looked like a warehouse, I saw scattered backpacks and a few pilgrims seated under makeshift sheets of corrugated tin. A large mural of painted coloured circles, intersected around a star, was on the wall to the right. To the left stood a tiny, free-standing derelict wood stove with a kettle on top and a small fire pit in a circle of bricks on the dusty ground.

 

Beyond that, in the middle of the same wall, stood two tall rusty doors, which bore graffiti and large painted red hearts. In front of all of this hung the ultimate symbol of laid-back living: a hammock. (A long-time hammock lover and user, that sight alone warmed my heart.)

The dominant feature on the wall was a large blue tarp, which hung vertically across the entire left front of the building. Pilgrims from around the globe, current and past, had scrawled their name, the date, and/or a thoughtful saying in black marker, wherever they could find room on the fabric. “Love from Gibraltar.” The star of David. A white dove with a white heart above it. “Dios esta en los detalles” (God is in the details.) It was a tableau of temporary presence, a mingling of hearts. I loved it.

 

A woman named Elisa, whose smile and genuine warmth exuded love and kindness, gestured at me to help myself from a wooden cart decorated with a row of hearts. I joined a handful of pilgrims who were selecting from many cartons of juice; thermoses of coffee; a plate of cookies; crackers, peanut butter; oranges; and a jug of water. Everything on this Camino-style welcome wagon was available by donation.

As a handful of us stood around the cart, a beat-up old truck appeared from the west, pulling up next to the building. A handsome, tanned Spanish male, with his shirt off, jumped out, gave us a celebrity-bright grin, and said in English: “Welcome to paradise.”

 

His name wasn’t Adam, but David, the man who had created this slapdash stop for pilgrims in 2009. He called it Casa de los Dioses or “House of the Gods.” I asked him why he felt compelled to create such a place and gave it that name.

 

“I wanted to create somewhere where all gods, for all people, could come together,” he told me in broken English, “and where people could feel loved.”

 

He explained that all religions wanted the same thing, love and peace. This humble pilgrim stopover was his attempt to create a loving sanctuary on the Camino. He and Elisa described, with passion in their voices, how they hoped to raise $30,000 to buy the surrounding land, owned by a friend of David’s, to establish Casa de los Dioses permanently.

 

Elisa, who had come from Italy to serve as a Casa host for two weeks like a hospitalera at an albergue (hostel), offered me a kind smile and hug. She exuded simple warmth and kindness. No smarmy niceness here.

 

This place is a church of the heart, I thought. To me, David’s sincere welcome and vision of oneness brought more love to my Camino experience than any church or cathedral I had entered so far along the way.

 

For the first time on The Way, I felt inspired to add my name and a sentiment to a collective pilgrim document. Grabbing a black marker, I wrote “One Heart, One Soul, One Spirit” with my name, the date, and Roberts Creek, BC on the bottom left-hand corner of the blue tarp. It felt good to be part of this cross-cultural, multilingual record.

This Casa—a feel-good haven with hippie ideals and a community-minded soul—reminded me of Roberts Creek, my home. In my journal, I called it “bohemian funk.” For a weary pilgrim seeking basic comfort, it was the sustenance I truly needed: validation that someone else, on a route defined around the world by Christianity, valued oneness beyond the separation of religion, culture, race or language.

On a red, heart-shaped table, I eagerly stamped my credential (pilgrim passport) with the heart-shaped Casa “logo,” like a groupie getting a temporary tattoo. Continuing westward into the wind, I felt grateful to have visited this mini-oasis of love.

For more information about Casa de los Dioses, see their Facebook page.

“I will cease to live as a self and will take as my self [sic] my fellow creatures.”

—   Shantideva, an 8^th-century Indian Buddhist scholar and yogi

On a windy, cold day, walking through forest past the town of San Martin del Camino, I watched two pilgrims ahead of me scoop up things from the path and put them in a white plastic bag. The twenty-something couple, travelling with an older man, bent down at least a dozen times and continued to fill the bag.

When I approached them, they said, in English: “We’re going to have them for dinner.” Snails. Escargots. The pilgrims were French. A typical delicacy for them, right?

I felt sorry for the poor little snails. This was day 24 of my pilgrimage. By then, I had shared The Way with many snails, ones with black-and-brown striped shells that looked at least twice the size of our snails at home. I thought of them with fondness as my fellow travelers, along with the slugs, ants, beetles, lizards, and bigger creatures—dogs, cats, horses, sheep, and cows—that shared brief portions of my journey.

For me, these tiny sentient beings were as much a part of the trail as human pilgrims. In my busy life back home, they often went unnoticed or ignored. On the path, they had become visual focal points for me. After all, my eyes were constantly looking down, surveying the terrain for the most level surface, trying to avoid any potential footfalls. Amidst stones and other stationary features, insects added a spark of movement that invited more attention.

I began to see them as a symbol of life’s interconnectedness. At times, while hiking alone on the  Camino, my mind and body, with no conscious effort, entered a sense of profound oneness with my surroundings. Physically, I felt as if I was no longer separate from what I could see and feel. Everything—my moving legs, shadows and bugs on the ground, birdsong in the air, waving tufts of wheat—were linked energetically as one fluid form of life. Insects weren’t just little dots beneath me: they were part of my own soul and being.

This sensation was so palpable I wondered why I didn’t feel it all the time.  I wrote in my journal: “I truly felt as if I had reached a state of grace while hiking alone today. . . It felt as if all life was sacred, including the flies, splats of cowshit—everything.”

Beyond  visual sensations, the Camino offers frequent reminders of bird and animal presence: the clang of cow bells, cuckoo calls, seemingly nonstop birdsong, and rooster crowing, even in the evening. Along the route, storks build thick, high nests of large branches on the flat eaves of many stone churches. The migratory paths of many birds follow The Way.

We are never alone if we are willing to let all of nature into our hearts. Perhaps that is why I revel in solitude when in the outdoors.

In hills with radiant rows of heather, thick and tall, on the highest part of the Camino (1,505 metres), while walking from Santa Catalina to Acebo, I noticed individual beetles, shiny and iridescent, along the path. Then I came across a cluster of them, later writing in my journal: “They’re startling in their mundane beauty.”

While contemplating these wee beings, I was surprised that the words from a hymn, which I sang in church as a child, came back to me:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful:
The Lord God made them all.

Had the Christian roots of the El Camino reached me? I had not thought in terms of “Lord” or “God” in many years. I believe in Soul and Spirit and divine essence, a unifying link of Oneness, rather than an externalized God or Saviour. Yet the phrase “all creatures great and small” stayed with me as I walked, almost as a mantra.

On day 27, while walking from Acebo to Cacabelos, I saw what looked like a large chickadee, with dark orange on its throat, alight on a low branch of a shrub. I remained only about a metre away and it did not fly away. Two days later, a yellow finch with some orange in its tail feathers hopped along the dusty path just in front of me.

These direct encounters with nature occurred while I was solitary and had seen no other pilgrims for at least an hour. They reminded me that any notion of separateness, viewing someone or something as The Other, or better or less than, is ultimately an illusion. All living beings share a heart that beats. That is enough to unite us all, big or small.

Then why did I inwardly condemn the pilgrims who repeatedly got drunk or treated the Camino like any regular two-week vacation? I resented the brashness of some bicyclists who hurtled downhill, loud and sometimes with little warning, expecting those on foot to make way for them. My mind eagerly put them in a category separate from me.

With humans, I feel the need to maintain the illusion of my own identity, making others somehow wrong so that I can feel righteous or more evolved. With insects and animals, no such filter is necessary; with them, it is easier to connect from pure spirit.

NEXT WEEK: La Casa de los Dioses