When I applied for my credencial in St. Jean Pied-de-Port, I had to check whether the purpose for my Camino was religioso, espiritual, cultural or deportivo (sporting). I checked espiritual, though I might have checked any of the first three. But sporting? Fitness? That seemed bizarre to me. And so I embarked on a five hundred mile walk, thinking the walking itself was beside the point.
I have always lived in my head. Having a body was a necessary evil. More than once during a long stretch, I thought, “I am doing this, why? I don’t walk.”
As a graduate student in theater I took the required course in stage movement. Wearing leotards, we lay supine, responding to instructions to raise one knee, lower it, raise the other, lower it, breathe. Side coaching, sotto voce: “Attend to your proprioception. Explore your bilateral symmetry.”
Proprioception: At the time, I had to look it up. It is our inner awareness of our body in space, its position, its movement. It’s mysterious. Blindfolded, how do we know how we’re standing, how we’re moving? And, of course, it is the basis of our response to theater and dance and sports. We respond to the presence of the human body moving in space because we are bodies in space. The body in motion is the outward and visible sign of the movement of the soul toward the object of its desiring.
It was a basic course. We didn’t get to stand up and walk until the last week.
I’ve been exploring my bilateral symmetry quite a bit since I hurt my right foot, a little less than half-way through the Camino. The hurt never went away, but it was never the same as the day before.
Can I walk? Should I walk? Is the pain greater, or is it less? Is it gone? Is it back? What is it I’m feeling in my left foot? In my left thigh? In my right calf?
Is that pain? Is that pleasure? Are those different? Does it matter? It is sensation, it is aliveness. It is my body, and I am living in it, and I am living in the physical world. I am in my body. I am my body. I am alive!
So the thing is, strange, that final category, deportivo, whatever that means, living in my body, inhabiting space, being in this world, may be not that different from espiritual. On my next Camino, in 2017, maybe I will check ‘deportivo.’
My Camino with Toni 
Via con Dios, deportista!
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My favorite poem is by Antonio Machado. It has no title, just a number. I love it because it is about impermanence and may seem melancholy, but it is also about going on and making our way, even if our way will not last. In that way I find the lines uplifting. Because, if I can now quote Stevie Nicks, the sea changes colors, but the sea does not change.
XXIX
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.
Caminante = a person who walks, and the word walker sounds oddly unpoetic in English. But here it is as best I can translate:
Walker, your footprints make the road,
nothing else.
Walker, there is no road,
you make the road by walking.
By walking you make the road,
and when you turn back and look
you see the path
you will never walk again.
Walker, there is no road,
just the wake in the sea.
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Wow. I’m almost certain this is the poem that my Galician friend once quoted for me. I had heard my Dad singing a song in Spanish that I’d never heard before & I could make out some of what it meant but not all of it, so I asked him to let me know what at least 1 of the main verses meant in English. When I told my friend about it, I think she either said it reminded her of the poem you just quoted above or that that song was based on that poem.
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Denise, I was able to search & find what my Galician friend had said because she said it in email. (She speaks Galician, Spanish, & English.) You said “walker sounds oddly unpoetic in English,” and I think I might have a remedy for that. When she translated the poem, she gave the translation of the 1st instance of ‘caminante’ as ‘walker’ and the translation of the 2nd as ‘wanderer’ (which is more poetic). She said that the song my Dad had been singing reminded her of “a famous poem of Antonio Machado: “Walker there is no road.”” (Not sure if she was giving it a title herself.) About the song, she said “the song is about a person whose life is a continuous pilgrimage because he chases a dream, but that makes him (or his lover) sad because he cannot stay in a place for too long. It also says that sometimes he arrives to a place singing like a river, and then he goes away crying without anyone noticing it.” About the poem, she said “It’s like you have to walk a way no one has built, and it will disappear once you’ve walked it,” which I took to mean something about finding one’s way on a path that’s personal. (Btw, it reminds me of a saying I heard years ago, that I like: Learn, by going, where to go.)
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What a journey, your blogs have been wonderful. We will chat soon. R
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Proprioception. Thank you for the new word. Learning this word (and being aware of the concept) actually helped me w/something important over these past couple of days. It had a real-world, positive effect w/ Physical Therapy (P.T.) for a shoulder injury that I’ve been dealing with since about late June. I discovered that when I attended to the bilateralness of a certain difficult arms-exercise (which I had seemed to reach a plateau with), I made more progress with it than otherwise seemed possible! I told the P.T. doctor about it today and mentioned the term (I also told her I’d learned it from someone who learned it from studying theater) and she actually knew the word! She said it’s a term in Physical Therapy, too. (Btw, at the moment when I read that your right foot was in a bucket of ice, my right arm and right shoulder happened to be in ice, too.)
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500 miles of feeling your body staying in the moment is a lonnnggg meditation!
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