Finding Something Lost

Renewal at Weekapaug Beach

It doesn’t just blink out. It fades, dissolves in tiny increments, and the next thing I know, I’m leaning back on the old ways. It’s not the first time. But life does have a way of setting the crooked path straight.

***

It began as an understanding spontaneously delivered one fresh, sunny spring morning on just another day of walking along the French Route of Spain’s Camino de Santiago in 2016. I was out in the middle of nowhere — soon to cross from the region of La Rioja into Castilla y Leon, a waypoint just over 200 kilometers from the beginning of the route in the Pyrenees Mountains, with about 600 kilometers more to walk before reaching the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela near the Atlantic coast. It may have been the single most significant mystical experience I encountered during all of my time there, and represents the kind of thing that can happen when distraction is removed from life and replaced with utter simplicity and a strong tendency to notice.

From my book, Into The Thin:

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 ... 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.

The intention I bring to sunrise at Weekapaug Beach in Rhode Island is to renew this understanding more deeply than I ever have before. My living of it has waxed and waned mightily in the time since that first pilgrimage 9 years ago. I’d have thought such an experience would never leave me — not for one moment, not ever. But the world as we know it conspires to convince us all that we are separate and discreet from each other, our origins, and our environment. The consistency of this is astonishing. But truth is truth, and as the eastern horizon begins to glow, I arrive at Weekapaug Beach and follow the muffled sounds of the surf as I move along the sandy path through the dune grasses.

***

At the upper edge of the beach nestled against the grasses, I find a large driftwood tree trunk to sit upon that is angled perfectly toward where the sun will soon rise over the water. Along the shoreline before and behind me, there are several surf casters silhouetted before the easy ocean swells rolling in off the open Atlantic. At the brightest point of predawn light on the horizon there is a cloud form resembling a corkscrew, like how a genie’s vapor wafts up from its lamp. The tide is close to high, the air lightly chilled with just enough of a breeze to refresh. As I await the crown of the sun, I’m given to remember the moment in Spain when everything came to one thing.

With just a few minutes to go before dawn, a woman appears from behind me, passes by, and finds a spot about a hundred feet farther along the beach, also just in front of the grass line. I notice the way she is standing — with solemnity and intention. I recognize her as a fellow pilgrim. It is easy to discern.

The sun breeches the water in an easy rise, blanching the clouds’ scarlet tones as they fade into pink and orange. The reflected light scurries across the water, and the surf casters continue to cast. It seems that the beauty of each of these sunrises displaces the memory of those which have come before.

Once the sun is full and round above the water, the woman turns to leave, heading back in my general direction. She looks to be in her early 50s, athletic, and possessed of a kind and lovely face. Approaching, she stops about six feet in front of me, careful not to block my view of the sun, and says, “It is just so beautiful.”

Within a couple of minutes, I come to know she lives nearby with her husband, works at one of the casinos, and regretfully, had not availed herself of a sunrise all summer long. She comes to know that I’ve traveled from the northwest hills of Connecticut, and that I write a Substack column about the pilgrimages I make to dawn along the coast.

She then begins to speak extemporaneously about how exposure to light (especially first and last light), and the quality of sleep and our food affects our very being, and how all of these things are interdependent, in fact, homogenous. She asks about these things in my own experience. As part of my response, I tell her of my belief that there can be no separation between us and our world or each other, that among she and me and the surf casters and the rising sun, there is only one of us here. And as she regards me intently and quietly agrees, I come to understand what has just happened. Within the space of this chance meeting with someone I will never see again, a vulnerability has risen along with the sun that has allowed this day’s intention to renew itself more deeply than I could have hoped. My wish is that something equally wonderful has happened for her.

I sense she is about to leave. Hands on my heart, I tell her how happy and thankful I am that she stopped to chat. As an afterthought, we tell each other our names.

How does something like this even happen? How can the mysteries of time and space conspire so perfectly, and deliver two humans into such proximity and conversation? For my part, I can only report that after the intention for this sunrise first came into mind, I simply looked over the map and found a beach where I’d not yet been. Seems all things must rise out of one thing after all.

Life does indeed have its ways of setting the crooked path straight, and it’s a path that forms beneath each step.

Peace,

Stephen