Map Making

My last days on the road to Santiago were spent wandering down eucalyptus lined country lanes that wind from hamlet to hamlet. The Galician climate, renowned for its indefatigable display of precipitatory variation, served me the kind of bleak weather in which one often feels a chthonic sense of intimacy with the world. Somehow I became separated from all the pilgrims I had been walking with, often spending entire days alone with the mist, the rain, and the cold. But in the evenings when I found new people, and it was from them I heard in the last of my interviews tales of grief, loss, self-doubt, joy, and purpose. It seemed that it was in the face of the end of their journeys people were able to make sense of it. There was something about the land, the weather, the point in the journey that called for introspection. Where had we come from? Where were we going? Few had answers, or at least definitive ones, but everyone, it seemed, had something. Everyone had a map.

The memory is visceral; fogged windows, warm hearths, scent of wet soil, cold fingering its way between jacket and scarf. Images of warm fires, hearty food, wine, and friends, all cloaked in the blue-grey half light of early winter with the gentle hiss and trickle of Galician drizzle come to mind, even though that wasn’t necessarily the reality. In the tiny bars and restaurants of towns like Ferreiros, Airexe, or Melide, towns that one has no reason to visit otherwise, pilgrims talked to me of their journeys physical and emotional. As I had been throughout the walk I was struck by the lack of traditionally defined religious sentiment. But then for most, Christianity, Buddhism, or indeed any form of institutionalised religion was irrelevant. Rather, what presented as meaningful was the recognised power of sharing stories, the will to push on, the need to examine life. Again and again the title of a book by Jack Kornfield came to mind; A Path With Heart. And that, I believe, is what the Camino was for most I interviewed – an attempt, or more accurately a part of the project of, finding a meaningful path in life, love, and labour.

In October, early in my walk, I commented here about the experiential aspect of the pilgrimage – that one felt as if one were a ‘maintainer’, that in the process of following the path the pilgrim leaves one – but I realise now that for many pilgrims, at a very deep personal level, the process is also cartographic. For most pilgrims on the roads to Santiago that I interviewed the pilgrimage was a part of the process of sketching the terrain for themselves, as well as finding the ways to negotiate it according to their ability. In 1978 Jonathan Z. Smith wrote that religiosity was a manifestation of the human urge for order. He understood religious thought as part of the process of mapping the social and physical universe. Maps are intended as guides only, they do not indicate The Way, but rather are tools for navigation. Thus in the wet and darkening laneways of Galicia, some thirty or so kilometres from Santiago, I began to think about cartography.

The pilgrimage to Santiago is made (by most) without a map. Directions present themselves as they are needed. Occasionally one goes down a wrong path, but it’s not long before the error is realised and corrected. For many this was a beautiful metaphor of how life ought to be lived, even if not always possible. But the real point was that it was what they felt they ought to be doing, and the power of the metaphor was not that they walked without a map, but that they walked the path with heart. They wanted to be there. And so as the spires of the cathedral in Santiago came in to view, many pilgrims felt they now held a map, not of how their life ought to go or what it ought to contain, but of how it ought to be walked, how it ought to feel – heartfelt.