The Thin Road

Last evening, I silently walked on a candle-lit labyrinth. There were more than 50 of us. The air was still and felt a bit close, an early note of the summer nights to come.  A harpist played from the center of the labyrinth, accompanied by a chorus of peepers from the surrounding woods. Our footsteps on the fine gravel surface of the path were the only other sounds.  Silence has a way of reminding, of allowing.  So too does shared movement.
 
From Chapter 7 of the upcoming book Into the Thin, A Pilgrimage Walk Across Northern Spain:

...No longer do I see pilgrims, I see pilgrimage; a movement toward something, a movement away, a movement of Grace.   I realize in this moment I am not apart from them, or they from me.  I am in no way living in opposition to them.  I am them.  And in the larger context of life beyond the Camino, all the competing needs and desires, all the conflicting interests, all the wounds inflicted and received, all the differences of body and thought and language and most certainly of religion, are revealed as only mistaken notions of things.  Elegies of separation become expressions of compassionate oneness along this thin, magical road to Santiago.  Realization loves to dance here, to be glimpsed even if only in the briefest of flashes.
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Here’s to thin, magical roads.  And here’s to the one of us.