It was, under the circumstances, rash, unwise and desperate. To get out of the sump of a severe depression by walking 800km across Spain on the Camino de Santiago during an August heatwave. Not only that: I decided I would do it without friends, because I needed to win back my own strength, not lean on others. I would not take my mobile, and I would do it without tobacco, alcohol and medication.
Predictably, it didn’t work well. I found the journey almost insurmountably difficult. Within three days of starting the Camino, I bought a phone and called a friend who said she would come to meet me at the end. Before long, I was drinking beer, smoking rollies and back on pills. They helped. Strangers showed me deep tenderness. But it was the path itself that was the long-term medicine.
Pilgrimage is an ancient form of travelling for healing when “travelling” kept its etymological roots of travail: it is a suffering cure. It is a medicine to be endured, not enjoyed. Perhaps this seems counter intuitive, for illness craves comfort and ease while pilgrimage shoves you into pain and struggle. Yet knowing you have survived makes you feel strong. The relief that comes when the journey is over is more precious for the difficulties of the road.
The Camino, known as the Way, is signed by yellow scallop shells, painted in their thousands, on plaques, rocks or bins, carefully carved or scrawled in spraypaint. The symbol is drawn like rays of the rising sun. Or spread fingers. It looks like courage, the lift of happiness, the open hand of an open-hearted summer day. The pilgrimage heads west and follows the sun by day and the Milky Way by night. Santiago (Saint James) is known as de Compostela, from campus (a field) and stella (star). At night, I was walking in a field of stars.
You walk the Way, and the way you walk matters. It has an ethic. Be curious; be kind; be generous; trust that the Way will provide. Above all, keep walking. I took Beckett’s line from The Unnamable as my mantra: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
The harder I found the Camino, the more I had to mirror it in myself, forced to find rocks of determination to counter the stony paths. When the path made a gruelling ascent, I needed to find an equally steep tangent rising within me. In 36C heat, I had to match the burning sun with my own fire. My perseverance had to be as obdurate as the long trudge through the meseta. In August, it was filled with millions of sunflowers and no yellow like it, but I thought of Van Gogh, whose sunflowers are not laughing but crying, painswept with the mad yellow of the overbright light in the mind. I cried for his hurt.
When I met my friend at the end, I cried with gratitude and all I could say for an hour and a half (apart from: “Dos Estrellas más, por favor”) was: “Thank fuck it’s over.” My stumbling, exhausted, tearful month was done. I told her of the hardships, and also of the multifold kindnesses I had been shown on the road.
“We’re surrounded,” she said, “by unemployed angels.”
Back home, eventually, I felt daybright and eager. “How are you?” a friend asked me.
“Fine.”
I’ve never said it with such feeling. Fine. Fine as a field of stars in a midnight sky. Fine as a field of sunflowers in a summer dawn.
Jay Griffiths is the author of Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression