El Camino: A Pilgrims Path To Inner & Outer Peace
by Teresa B. Pasquale
What is pilgrimage? Wikipedia, our new god of definition, defines it as: a journey or search of moral or spiritual significance.
What is pilgrimage? Is it leaving the world behind or is it carrying it on your back? Is it both?
Once upon a time, a long time ago, in a land called Venice Beach, on my mutual birthday with one of my closest friends we took a pilgrimage to Los Angeles and found our way to tattoos. Mine, on my wrist, reads: Every Journey is a Pilgrimage.
Is it coincidence that almost 10 years later I might find myself headed for the Camino de Santiago, a trek I will walk alongside that same friend – a friend who I have spent the better part of a decade living physically apart from, but somehow spiritually connected to?
El Camino. The Sacred Road. What does that mean to me? What does that mean to you?
The Camino de Santiago is a trek that begins, most popularly, in France and finds its way through the mountains of Spain into a town called Santiago. This happens to be the hometown for many generations of my same friend who I walked the camino de venice beach almost 10 years ago with, and got inked with the message of the same name. Every Journey is a Pilgrimage.
For most Santiago is the end of the pilgrimage. For me it ends in Avila. Avila is 8 hours from santiago and 2 hours from Madrid. It just so happens on my pilgrimage i am heading from Santiago to Madrid and almost by chance I fell upon the geographical understanding that Avila is smack-dab between the two. Why do I care? Because, for me, pilgrimage ends in Avila.
Although I tell this story many times when I speak and so many who know me might know this already my naming, the birth of my identity begins and ends in Avila. For those of you who don’t know my story, let me explain.
Once upon a time, the story as I know it, began in an orphanage in Bogota, Colombia. There were nuns, of the grey order, that ran the orphanage and they … Read more…