Chapter 26: A Zen Candle

The place where the only way to know what is within is to allow another to enter and describe it.

The night I stop in Atapuerca, I meet a Brazilian woman. She is in the restaurant’s waiting area, and we get to talking and then end up sitting together. As is inevitable, we fall into sharing our stories.

There is a stranger-on-a-train quality to forging relationships on the Camino. You share things about your life that you would never share with someone you had only known for fifteen minutes anywhere else.

So, my new friend learns about my year in France, my “unpack everything,” my “let it go, let it go, let it go,” my day in Toulouse, my moment on the stairwell, my prayer in Vernègues, my children, my wife – everything that I have shared with you here.

And I learn what brought her to the Camino, alone, a woman from another continent, halfway across the world, far from her husband and her two young children. There are many older women on the Camino and many younger women in their early twenties. They travel with friends in the laughter and safety of small groups, but it is rarer to m…