Walking...

When I smoked I used to take my Camaro around the corner, a quarter block, to buy cigarettes. I think about this as I return from a 10 K walk down Toronto's Queen Street East. How did I get from there to here?

On my first New Year's Eve, in Toronto, watching the year odometer turn over to the auspicious new millennium, my then partner decided to take me on a walk to a downtown cathedral. An ex-nun, she still had a reverence and fascination for churches. I don't recall much about the visit as I really didn't share her enthusiasm for all things Catholic, but what I did receive there was going to come back and haunt me almost a year later.

Fast forward to Christmas, 2000, and I went home to the awkward, frigid embrace of the winter prairies to visit my family. My mother decided she wanted to buy me a book for Christmas and true-to-style she wanted me to pick it out for myself. Milling through the New Age section of the local bookstore, I found it. Shirley Maclaine's The Camino.

The Camino de Santiago, translated, means The Way of St. James. St. James, of course, was one of Christ's apostles who, legend has it, was buried in what became known as Santiago de Compostela, Spain, consequently becoming the end to a pilgrimage of many hundreds 0f kilometres. MacLaine spent 30 days on her mind-bending pilgrimage, both internal and external, for the 780 kilometres from St. Jean Pied de Port, just over the French border, to Santiago.

Through MacLaine's book, I found myself completely engrossed in the magic of this ancient road that follows the strands of starlight belonging to the Milky Way.

My Christmas was spent obsessed with this book, the trail and this inexplicable desire to do the insane. I wanted to walk it myself.

I returned to my Toronto apartment, in body, but my mind was still lost in a foreign continent, curious about my own very foreign desire to walk for over 700 kilometres.

I was reading something MacLaine said about the history of the scallop shell as the symbol of this path, when I found myself flooded with niggley, vague memories of the cathedral I visited, almost a year previous.

I realized, with no shortage of goosebumps, that that cathedral had been named for St. James and I remembered the gift I received there that night. I had a hunch it was in a "junk box" at the back of my closet and I raced over to it, dumping it upside down on the floor, frantic, for reasons unknown to myself, to find that gift. A flash of gold caught my eye and I grabbed it. The gift...a gold scallop shell. The mark of the Camino pilgrim.

I sat there, holding it in my hand, for an interminable amount of time, not understanding the whole length and breadth of this experience, but knowing I was receiving a very strong Nudge.

Over the next five years, I found myself "accidentally" flipping to TV channels who just happened to be playing travel shows about Spain and the Camino or in depth documentaries on subjects like the Knight's Templar -- ancient protectors of ancient pilgrims on an ancient road. Or I would run into posters of My Camino author Sue Kenney's speaking engagements in places like the St. Lawrence Market or in obscure spots like on a telephone pole halfway between Toronto and Bracebridge. Friends would look at them, then at my astonished visage and laugh, knowing my own amazement at all the messages I kept getting. Me. A now 40-something, not particularly physically fit person, who would much rather be than do, was being pushed to walk hundreds of kilometres.

So, I quit smoking and started to walk. For a couple of years it was nothing more than a couple of kilometres and always a distant dream.

As often happens, though, I found myself distracted with life's dramas and lost in self-pitied miseries over life not going how I wanted it to and the Camino took a back seat. One day, my beautiful partner, disillusioned with my decision to marinate myself in negativity, said, "When I met you you were going to do the Camino. What happened to that?"

At the time I didn't really appreciate the reminder, but sat stewing in it, suddenly feeling very tired at the prospect of walking 750 K. It seemed much easier to just fly to some of the world's other sacred places, like Machu Pichu or India. Not wanting to simply dismiss all of the Camino synchronicity I had experienced, though, I felt I had best ask the Universe about it. "Okay...if you still want me to do the Camino, will you give me a sign?"

Forgetting all about it and just hoping the urge would pass, I went grocery shopping. I walked past the beverage aisle and I looked up to see a can of hot chocolate...the brand name? Cocoa Camino.

I stood there laughing at it and myself, wondering what fellow shoppers must be thinking of me. The Camino beckons.

So, for the woman who used to drive her Camaro around the block for cigarettes, life has now become all about walking. Every free block of time becomes a push to walk and walk some more. I'm now up to 10K walks and must push on until I am at least capable of 25 K a day.

I watch the weight drop off me and my calves define themselves. I lay in bed and play with flexing my leg muscles, as alien to me as the country I will be heading to. Foreign , yet not foreign. They say that people don't just do the Camino on a whim. Instead they are called home to do it. I leave Sept. 3rd. I am both terrified and excited.

As I finish writing the paper draft of this blog entry on the streetcar, I hear the driver yell out, "Roncesvalles!" and I smile. Roncesvalles is a Toronto street and also the starting town of my first pilgrimage. One foot in front of the other...

Ultreya!