The Creative Camino
As became quite clear while I walked the Camino, journeys are not just physical experiences of moving through the world. The artist also embarks on a journey each time they sit down to work
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If you’re an older subscriber then welcome back. I appreciate anyone who stuck with the meta-journey of my diary of Camino entries, in some small way hoping that it felt like just much of a slog for you, dear reader, as it did for me, though I hope it was also just as enlightening an experience.
I’m going to wrap up the Camino chat in the next couple of weeks, but just wanted to try and summarise everything in a few essays - as much for myself as anyone else.
From then I’ll be broadening my horizons a bit more, though my (current) New Year’s Resolution is to resume a weekly format of essays and short stories about travel, the outdoors and all sorts of environmental stimulation.
Shortly after I came home from Spain I embarked on another Camino. Not a physical journey across a country this time, but a creative one. I wanted to share my experience, and did so by writing, editing and publishing a series of daily blogs and short stories in this newsletter (I’m sure you became aware of the bombardment on your inbox), posts on social media, and video blogs where I attempted to describe what it’s actually like to this historic pilgrimage – not just the external details of the environment like every other travel page and guide – but one that narrated the inner experience of such an epic journey.
I spent six weeks at it, the same length of time I spent actually walking. A diary entry of sorts for each day, with each one requiring several hours of work. I often stayed up late into the night compiling everything, editing stories and doing the donkey admin work of formatting and posting them. It actually ended up feeling like as much of a physical challenge as walking across Spain at a rate of 20-30km per day with no breaks.
And as with the Camino itself, the combination of physical and mental inputs resulted in an outcome that was more than the sum of its parts, the famous final third that you can’t envisage before you depart on your journey.
Mirror
A few days after I began all this, I became aware of an interesting phenomenon – I was starting to feel like doing the Camino again. By which I don’t mean that poring over photos and notes was taking me on an early trip down memory lane – this was a much deeper journey I was going on.
The excitement and anticipation of the first night in St. Jean, before setting on the Camino; the exhilaration of the first day and then the settling into the routine daily tasks, much like getting out of bed every morning, packing your bags, brushing your teeth, lacing out your boots and heading out the door of the albergue.
All of these experiences had counterparts at the corresponding points of the creative journey.
And like the Camino there were ups and downs: the slog of the middle third with no end in sight mirroring the equivalent point on the Camino through the Meseta, at this stage your actions being automatic, unquestioning, only on reflection realising that the only thing propelling you forward is a sense of duty that you never thought to question because it’s so deeply a part of you.
After a while I realised I didn’t even care about an audience or who might be reading – if I cared about the reader I probably wouldn’t have been subjecting them to such a relentless bombardment of posts, photos, videos and word counts.
I have to confess I took a small measure of satisfaction in the consideration that perhaps any loyal readers, some perhaps resigned to seeing the whole journey through out of loyalty to me in real life, or because of an unconscious personal promise made at the onset of the onslaught that failed to live up to early expectations, were being put through a slog, a form of spiritual penitence comparable to the one I’d gone on myself. Blessed are those who endure.
It dawned on me too, at some point, that like the Camino, there was absolutely nothing that was going to stop me from seeing this project through to the end. Throughout the Camino, though particularly in the early days, it was common for people to respond that they really didn’t know if they’d make it to Santiago. I probably went in a little over-confident in my physical conditioning, and received almost daily lessons in humility in the form of inflamed tendons and bruised muscles, though it never occurred to me that my enthusiasm for walking and experiencing the Camino might waver – and it never did.
Solo Trip
The creative project was a much more personal affair, however, than the trip across Spain, which did turn out, as the cliches go, to be “all about the people you meet”. There was only me doing it, for starters. Only me getting out of bed every morning. As the oft-referenced Irish poet John O’Donohue noted:
“Each artist is haunted by some inner voice that will not permit any contentment until what is demanded is created.”
but also the size of the task in that:
“For most roles in life there are structures of study and apprenticeship to acquire the skill to function in that profession. Though there are certain structures there for training in the arts, the artist is different.
The artist trains himself. There is no other way.”
Perhaps this devotion to order and duty was more like a traditional pilgrimage than the now-popular Camino I found, in which one had no choice but to lose themselves to the camaraderie and the connection that was found there.
The solitude meant that the only person getting me to the finish line was myself.
A Little Death
Every day a familiar routine. Write, edit, hit send and publish. Death, rebirth, and another death at the hands of the wider world. Day after day.
You write freely in order to summon up your thoughts and vision onto the page. It gives your voice a home yes, but doing so takes something out of you, as does sharing yourself with people on the road, or engaging in unconscious behaviour.
If writing is the equivalent of walking with others, then editing is its counterpart, it is where you walk alone, and where you impose conscious order onto the parts of your soul splattered freely on the page, in accordance to a set of rules – English, perhaps, but more the self-determined rules of your vision and what you’re trying to achieve.
Sharing then is another journey in itself. Although a complete cycle of the journey is completed in writing and editing a piece as perfectly as you can, when you release it into the world it becomes a living thing, no longer yours, but for the world to judge.
The silence is deafening when you hit publish, but you do it anyway, and you’re so immersed in the story and the lived experience of both the walking and the writing that often you’ve no idea what it might look like to the world.
But you’ve to hit send because the deadline is looming and you’ve committed to doing this every day and like the Camino you can’t settle in and stay anywhere, you must find your home in movement and motion. You must free your work and let it live or die, and no matter or how good or bad it is you must move on, stay present and continue your task, another little death of all that you’re not, every day.
This is the Camino, all over again.
Why are you doing the Camino?
“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say” – Flannery O’Connor
Why was I writing? Same as the Camino.
I guess I was just trying to make sense of the whole thing, both as I walked and on the creative journey. An artist does not simply describe the world as they see it to others; their work is an attempt to make sense of things for themselves first and foremost. And just as I set off walking to find out what would happen, so too I set out to write about to see what would happen if I did.
The creative journey is part of everything I do now, the call to adventure answered long ago and for better or worse, there is no closing Pandora’s box. This is simply my life now. To write is a necessary part of the integration process. And so while there have been some kind of outputs, and more finished products to come, it is also good to remember that it’s something to be done for its own sake. Like the Camino itself, the benefits (or outcomes, as the zen monk might prefer to interpret them as) mightn’t reveal themselves with any urgency.
To go on a journey is to embrace the unknown, to invite inspiration from intensive exposure to novelty. And to do so with purpose and see out that purpose is your own way of putting order on things. You write until you cannot say anymore, and then you attempt to make it make sense. Perfecting the cycle and seeing it through is an act of integrating your intuitive and rational minds. The result is alchemy, the creation of new levels to your spirit which were previously unknown.
Telling Stories
This couldn’t be a step-by-step guide or strictly factual account, though, with details of albergues, prices, menus and how to find various equipment along the Camino, and so on. Undertaking a journey is not a guide on how to do anything, it is a unique and subjective experience: it is a story. Stories may provide inspiration or act as cautionary tales, but they demonstrate no expertise in anything, and should not be followed as such. You don’t want to try this at home, though the message might be that you should try something.
All journeys are stories, and all stories are journeys. This is why the creative experience mirrors the physical journey so uncannily. The spiritual arc of answering the call to adventure, venturing into the unknown to overcome a challenge, and earning some wisdom before coming home is the same story that plays out in a physical sense when you go on an adventure.
Your work transforms you just as you transform your work. So it is on the Camino, as you follow an endless cycle of death and rebirth, of putting order on the world and succumbing to it, a never-ending repetition of the journey that can only be completed when you let go entirely, and let everything that you were die, so that you can become.
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