Losing and finding my Way

I'm sitting in the garden behind the apse of Reims cathedral, feeling sad. The yellow citrus smells of mimosa and forsythia climb above those of damp chalk paths and the pinkly-dangling, summer pudding smells of flowering current. A Japanese student with a scared sprouting of beard is sketching the street scene - quite a good sketch - and a young couple are slowly wheeling home their baby and their market baskets. While I was forgetting to look, horse chestnut leaves have broken free of their buds. For one day only we have a respite from rain and wind. A light high haze is between us and the sun, smearing but not stealing the brightness.

In Laon nine days ago we finally turned south. When we leave Reims at the end of next week we shall, at last, be following one of the recognised paths to Santiago de Compostela, the one leading from Belgium via Vézelay. We shall stay with it as far as Vézelay, or possibly Nevers, and then cut down through the Massif Central to Le Puy en Velay.

Even three weeks ago those two events filled me with excitement, especially the prospect of meeting up with other pilgrims in the act of walking. Along with some kind of terror at having our hard-won rythmns disturbed.

So why my sadness? In the hiatus we have fallen into I feel that we shall have to start the challenge all over again. While David is off in London, recounting stories to friends and burning for a return to what he sees as our 'real' life of packing, walking and unpacking, I find I have lost the knack. Lost my way, almost. No sooner installed in my hotel for the week than I have the urge to buy flowers and settle down. I remember Normandy as a golden era of quiet remoteness and gentle valleys. This enforced break, valuable for my health, is dangerous to my head. I know now more of the difficulties before us, and the fact that we haven't yet encountered a mountain is sobering.

Yesterday I looked at the great Pilgrimage to Santiago website that had been a source of so much information before we set out. It led me to other people's diaries (here and here) and I felt small. Their accounts are full of joy and optimism despite great pain and illness. These are people who bite on a piece of wood and carry on marching on their bleeding stumps. They're walking in winter like us but make only passing reference to being unable to find food and the lack of hot showers. Yet I'd been assumeing it was all going to get better as we got further south.

Compared to those people, we're just playing at the pilgrimage thing. We're the kind who would pay others to go in our place. My fears were confirmed by the welcoming man in Reims cathedral who was confused that we're staying in a hotel not in the international hostal across the square.

But the memory of others we have spoken with bubbles up. A woman shopping in Cabourg who saw our shells and tapped us on the shoulder to say a quick good luck - she'd been there herself. The blue-eyed glow of the woman in the woods above the Seine as she remembered the approach to Santiago; or the be-leathered motorcyclist sitting outside with his beer and his cigarettes in Ry who also, surprisingly, admitted his trip there once, a long time ago. Each of them had that same glow, the Christmas-morning secret they couldn't put into words but wanted to share. It intrigues me, this difference that comes upon people once they've arrive in foot in Compostela.

And I can't let my courage fail because of José and Josette who will be setting out from Gournay-en-Bray in about a week. When we met them they were half-way between exhilaration and daunted, between fully-planned and innocence. They seemed to draw strength from the fact that we were laughing and looked healthy. So for their sakes we have to tuck in our chins and carry on.

And the lovely Dominique et Marie Brigitte Ernoult. Dominique caught up with us leaving Senlis and invited us in for coffee and cake or lunch, if we would accept it. The fact that they are slowly making their way to Compostela with a group of friends in one- and two- week blocks takes nothing from their joy at doing the walk or from the peace and space to think that they find there.

As I collected my 'stamp' in my Pilgrim Record in Laon cathedral, I wondered at a cerain hollowness over clocking up yet another Gothic edifice. The medieval pilgrims' insistence on traipsing to all these places must have amounted to more than a "been there, done that" automation? Then it struck me with the force of a revelation: of course, they were threre to pray, weren't they?

Well. Occasions for quiet thought are a start.

15 March 2008