About a Place

From Lake and Woods to Shore

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I’ve never lived in one place for so long. From the very first it welcomed me home and held me close like a mother would. It begged me to heal. Floating on the sweet air was a promise of refuge and a fair possibility that maybe things would be okay after all.

It was during springtime some years ago when I first arrived, and back then I was in a nearly constant protective crouch because the world had ended. Nothing much remained. There was a pulse and respiration, an appetite, a will to live. That’s about it. Anything resembling a personality was mostly a facade, an inner plea for normality turned outward, and my thinking was more than a little bit off. As I turned 55, circumstances dictated that life needed to start over, and at the outset I’d committed to two ideals: simplicity and deep quiet. There were some things I needed to sort out — in fact, everything.

Coincidence delivered me to the place, which was a good thing because discernment was not a strong point for me at the time. The town of Morris in Litchfield County, Connecticut, population 2200, looked like someplace from a postcard — a pastoral landscape of woods and lakeshore that I would come to know intimately through quintessential seasons of lime-green early springs, lush and verdant summers, vibrant, crisp autumns, and heartbreaking, lonely, frozen winter dusks. But more than anything, the walking was wonderful, and walking had become everything.

“It is solved by walking.” — St. Augustine

At first it was merely exercise, a way to push off a few pounds that had accumulated during the previous few years of apathy. There is a seemingly limitless variety of routes along country roads and trails that surround the lake, and I walked them daily unless only the most severe weather suggested otherwise. But soon the walks had become something much deeper — each one a sacrament, a contemplative act, a prayer of movement, a conditioning of the inner life. How this came to be remains a mystery, but it became apparent that (to borrow from the Celts) I was walking through thinner and thinner places. It felt as though I was being delivered to something, something like the end of me, and to the beginning of something new.

Then came the step. There was life before it and life thereafter, for the step changed nearly everything. I came to it with a couple of things already in place.

First, the world’s end. A year and a half before taking the walk that contained the step, life had convulsed. Two important men lay dead, a stepchild was afflicted with a life-changing illness just before my only son’s death by suicide, and my longstanding marriage had dissolved. All of these events transpired in one calendar year. At the time, I referred to it as emotional crucifixion. I still stand with that.

Also with me as I took that walk was an awareness of a road in Spain, a long and ancient one where it was said miracles could happen, where sorrow and calamity could be dropped like a couple of stones onto holy ground. I would never have found the way to such a place of my own accord, and so the step arrived because it needed to.

My foot left the ground, just another step as I walked along briskly on a hot summer day. In the time it took for my foot to return to the ground, Spain’s Camino de Santiago, everything about it and the absolute all of it, permeated the absolute all of me as a fully lived reality. Time stood down to an eternal now, and here became something beyond place. I thought I’d lost my mind.

***

Three and a half years had passed beyond that step when I found myself bound for Paris and eventually on to Saint Jean Pied de Port deep in the French Pyrenees mountains where they lean against the Spanish border. The walking sacrament continued from there across the Iberian peninsula, ending on the moors of the Atlantic coast. On those moors, I wandered for days on end, slipping in and out of the layers, the shifting thinness full of visions and wordless thoughts and revelations, all of it carried on the sounds of the wind and crashing waves. And when I returned home, I was different. I had finally met the stranger who I’d been all along.

In the years that followed, I published two books through an independent press and wrote several essays, a few of which found their way into online magazines. It seemed the unlikely path forming beneath my feet included becoming a writer, something I’d always felt drawn to. I also became proficient at giving public talks and interviews, an interesting development considering my long-standing aversion to being at the center of attention. In general, discomfort was something I was coming to tolerate with greater ease.

Through all of this, it began to dawn on me that I was steadily becoming a very different person on an infinite pilgrimage, even if temporally circumscribed in a finite world. More than anything, though, came an even deeper understanding of the larger reality: that this applies to us all, for all are one.

From the book Into The Thin, a chronicle of my first pilgrimage along the Camino:

Before resuming its proximity to the highway, the Camino zigzags a bit, and contained in my view for a time, I see between one and two kilometers of the path’s blond dirt ahead as it courses through the deep green slopes. All along its track are pilgrims, perhaps 30 or so in small clusters or alone, spread out and moving westward. For just a bare moment, for just the briefest fraction-of-a-footstep-on-a-Morris-road of a moment, I see it all differently. No longer do I see pilgrims, I see pilgrimage; a movement toward something, a movement away, a movement of Grace. I realize in this moment I am not apart from them, or they from me. I am in no way living in opposition to them. I am them. And in the larger context of life beyond the Camino, all the competing needs and desires, all the conflicting interests, all the wounds inflicted and received, all the differences of body and thought and language and most certainly of religion, are revealed as only mistaken notions of things. Elegies of separation become expressions of compassionate oneness along this thin, magical road to Santiago. Realization loves to dance here, to be glimpsed even if only in the briefest of flashes.

This revelation is the one that has endured above all others. Its implications have been all-encompassing, as far reaching as forever. And to think how this rose out of a single, quite perfect step in a place called home.

***

Time has passed. It’s been 14 years since I first arrived. Life has evolved. And if I’ve learned anything through these many decades on the earth, it is that nothing in this temporal world remains as it appears to be. Home is no exception. What began as refuge against an onslaught eventually leaned toward an idea of simple sanctuary and these days has become more a preference. Meanings of things unfold. The rhythms of life have come to suggest that a season of change is upon me once again as an inner shift from the lake and woods, and a turn toward the shoreline. Something awaits there. I just know it. But how to lean away from this place, this point on the earth where so much has come to be? Never have I felt the notion of a true home as I have while living here.

The great spirit of pilgrimage has always called its wayfarers out from the comfort of the places they’ve known and prayed they be fearless and trusting, that they leave home and offer themselves to the unknown ground. Life is circular, isn’t it? And pilgrimage is life. I keep returning to these departures —they always turn me home, and it’s a home I’ve never really left.

After all of this walking through the woods, by the lake, and on holy ground an ocean away, I’ve learned to listen with care, and now this is what I hear: Quiet places by the sea await. Quiet places to walk on beaches and listen to wind and waves and bear witness to the drama of skies, to the holy truth of it all. Other places, perhaps even a final place. Life is circular.

Peace,

Stephen