I Never Slept with Charlemagne

[Illustrations from bink's Camino sketchbook.]

I often experience a long lag time between when I finish with things and when things finish with me. Sometimes I don't even know something's unfinished until some final piece clicks into place, maybe a long time afterward. 

This summer, for instance, I finished up a trip I took eight years ago, mostly by realizing I'd never quite accepted that it was what it was.

I. No Bad Pilgrims

The summer of 2001, I walked across northern Spain, on the medieval pilgrimage trail the Camino de Santiago, with bink.

The previous year, Shirley MacLaine had published a book about walking the Camino too. She'd written about being accompanied by an angel and about connecting with her past life as Charlemagne's lover.

It annoyed me when European pilgrims I met thought I was an American of her sort. I was full of Latin, not feathers, and serious intentions to straighten out the path of my twisted life. 
I'd recently quit my job of twelve+ years, and I didn't know what I wanted to do next. My married lover wanted to leave his wife and move in with me when I got back, and some interior red light was signaling THIS IS A DISASTER, but I wasn't sure. 

I told people I was walking because I wanted to be a better person. I wasn't looking for sex with dead emperors.

I wasn't looking for flayed feet either, but that's what I got. 
A couple days in, at the Roncevalles Pass, where, according to The Song of Roland, Charlemagne was killed in battle, I put my first band-aid on my little toe. 

A couple weeks later, the pilgrimage had become about walking. Nobody, including me, talked much about spirituality. 
Everybody, including me, talked a lot about feet.

And a couple weeks after that, toward the end of the walk, I knew I hadn't miraculously become a better person. 
I was exactly the same person, with all my concerns and confusions, but now with ripped up feet.

I stood in the dirt path under the hot sun in rural Spain and wept. 

"I'm a bad pilgrim," I told bink.

"It's not possible to be a bad pilgrim," she said. "Pilgrims walk. You're walking. You're a pilgrim."

II. Home Again

After five weeks and five hundred miles, I went home. 
My twisty life was right where I'd left it.

 People asked me what I'd learned. I told them mostly I'd learned that blisters really, really hurt a lot. Also cheap red wine with Coca-Cola is surprisingly good.

I worked up a couple insights too:
"You can have whatever you want, but you have to carry it"; 
and "Maybe happiness is the baseline of existence", a thought I'd had when I was blissfully happy one evening, even though my feet excruciating painful. 

I also offered bink's wonderful phrase, "It's not possible to be a bad pilgrim." 

In truth, however, I was a little deflated that I couldn't report dramatic spiritual transformation.
Still, I suspected there was something profound in realizing I wasn't going to turn into a better person. A Catholic monk even told me I was a better person for knowing that...

III. I Missed Nothing Special

A few weeks ago, I was sitting on my porch in the sun reading Meetings with Remarkable Women: Buddhist Teachers in America. One of the teachers, Joko Beck, talks about the Zen concept of "nothing special." 
Our minds get attached to everything, she says, even to enlightenment, which is freedom from clinging to attachments.

As one practices being aware, however, over time the mind naturally loses interest in holding on so tight to attachment and opens, now and again, onto enlightenment.
But this is "nothing special." 
It is ordinary. It comes and goes. Don't cling onto it. Just go on sitting.

Nothing special.
Just go on sitting.

When I read that--though I've read this sort of thing many times before--all of a sudden it flashed on me that I always thought I'd missed something on Camino. 

All of a sudden, I saw that in fact I had hoped--secretly, even from myself--that some divine being would descend on me or Charlemagne would appear in a dream and tell me what to do about my life (as if he'd know).

I laughed.
It was delightful to realize I had overlooked the very ordinary, nothing special times that had opened over and over and over again because I wanted the openings to come with neon signs, pointing: Enlightenment Here. 
As if I'd hit the jackpot.
But of course that's exactly what enlightenment is: 
 no self. no sign. no prize. 
Just go on walking.

The Camino had been full of openings onto no thing. 
One night on Camino, for instance, another pilgrim told me that she'd unintentionally walked more than 40 km one scorching day. She'd miscalculated where the next albergue was and got stuck far between two. She didn't want to sleep outside, so she'd just kept walking. 
She got so tired, she told me, "I forgot who I was."

We laughed together about the shared experience of walking along with heavy packs and empty minds. 

Nothing special.

Maybe I finally realized I didn't miss anything--or, I had missed no thing--because so many dramatic things have happened since. 

I came home to break up with the married man, without angelic guidance. 
My cockatiel bird flew away one hot summer night, and planes flew into buildings. 
My mother killed herself, and profound dreams piled up. 
I started working on geography books. Angels and emperors came and went. Neon signs pointed to Star Trek. 

Terrible things. 

Wonderful things.

And you know what? 
None of them have been more or less "special" than walking. I didn't miss anything. That was the thing.

Slept with Charlemagne? Didn't sleep with Charlemagne? Either way, as they say, you gotta do the laundry.