This book is about magic. The magic of an ancient pilgrimage in Spain, called Camino de Santiago.
In spring of 2019 I walked 500 miles from Saint Jean Pied de Port in southern France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain and then all the way to Finistere. It was while those 30 days that a process of my personal transformation was ignited. This flame burns still. I guess it is an alchemical flame that could never be extinguished.
There on that ancient road in northern Spain I have experienced encounters for which I am still not sure what they were. Angels, ghosts, spirits, demons, ...?
Most probably all of that. This ancient path has been made sacred by the millions of pilgrims who are in faith walking it for more than a thousand years. Here on the Camino, you have positive people walking it every day, 365 days, 52 week per year for more than a 10 centuries. Here you have a constant flow of energy for more than a thousand years. Because of this, the barrier between heaven and earth practically vanishes. This membrane becomes permeable and both worlds start to interfere. Sooner or later everybody on the Camino become aware of this - even the agnostics. Camino de Santiago is a living proof that in this secular world the sacred places still exist.
This book is a journal of my Camino. It tells the story about the people I met, it tells a story about my thoughts and my realisations and especially it tells about the spiritual events that have profoundly transformed my comprehension of the world.
I met people from all parts of the world. People from Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Hungary, France, United States, South Korea, United Kingdom, Netherlands and Croatia. The largest group were naturally the locals from Spain. And I even meet two Slovenians.
I liked how equal people on the Camino are. It is not important who you are or what you do. Pilgrims only ask you for the name, so that they know how to call you, and where you are from, so that they know in which language they can talk to you. Nothing else matters. On Camino you are just a simple pilgrim. And this is so liberating.
Camino is about encounters. Some being short, some becoming a life long friendships. It is about a girl who's tattoos were telling the story of her hard life, it is about a young woman that has prayed being afraid of losing her boyfriend, it is about an old lady asking me to embrace the saint in Santiago de Compostela also for her, it is about a man who lost and later luckily found his passport, it is about a love troubled middle aged woman that has burned in Finistere not just her clothes but also all the personal bridges, but it is also about a couple that walked to Santiago de Compostela from Hamburg, Germany and got engaged in front of the cathedral, and last but not least it is about the burden that I have caried and managed to let it go. It is about little villages and big towns, it is about roman bridges, it is about hostels and caffes, it is about trees, mountains and sky. Camino is love, faith and magic.
Camino is far from being just a walk. It is a unique multidimensional experience of a pilgrim traveling through three different phases: the physical, the menta and the spiritual one. The first two being a hard test of one's endurance and determination and the last one being a reword that pays out the first two for more than a 1000 times.
Camino is really a unique experience. And for me Camino was definitely much, much more that I have ever expected.
