Words, footsteps, and other material things

"Alaska," a song by American singer Maggie Rogers, seems simple in its construction but reveals itself to be more complex than you’d think. I felt myself reflecting on several lines of it yesterday as I walked the 14 or so miles from Palas de Rei to Castaneda on our third stage of the Camino de Santiago. Specifically, I had these lines in mind:  

I was walking through icy streams
That took my breath away
Moving slowly through westward water
Over glacial plains

And I walked off you
And I walked off an old me
Oh me oh my I thought it was a dream
So it seemed

Rogers, it seems, might be a good candidate for going on pilgrimage herself. After all, she testifies to the cleansing nature of walking and its ability to slough off any emotional baggage you might feel yourself weighed down by. The song carries a certain tension between the physical and non-physical, an awareness that our external actions can prompt change in our interior self:

Cut my hair so I could rock back and forth

Without thinking of you

Learned to talk and say

Whatever I wanted to

In the song, she’s asking us to think about the link between our physical selves, our memories, and the way our bodies are wrapped up in our identities—which are all things the act of pilgrimage asks us to consider as well. As I was walking along yesterday morning--well before the never-ending rain began--I began to understand what "walk[ing] off an old me" might look like. The verdant rolling hills, accompanying cast of farm animals, and small cafes began rushing by as I tuned out my surroundings and fellow pilgrims, focusing on the rhythm of putting one foot in front of another again and again. It felt restorative: while there are quite a few things in my life I'm not capable of controlling, I was capable of telling my feet to keep moving. They obeyed this command well, all things considered, with only an understandable amount of soreness to match the mileage.    

The thing about walking--and specifically, doing the amount of walking we're doing--is that it is at once a spiritual and non-spiritual thing. We spend our daily lives at home walking around, but here, it's different: we have a goal in mind, and that goal is making it to the steps of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. We want to feel some sort of internal catharsis upon reaching the shrine of St. James, whether we're religious or not, and the build-up of that catharsis is inarguably a part of the walking we've been doing the past few days. Can I walk off an old me? According to the thousands of pilgrims who have come before, the answer, I think, is yes.