I lost my world and my purpose in the COVID-19 pandemic. I lingered in limbo in a new place, not knowing the language or the culture. All I knew was that something was fundamentally broken. I found some pleasures and madness in a life untethered from the world, but my psyche demanded something more substantial. An exploration of my existence. Determination of the worth of its continuation.
I started walking with the hope that having nothing but time to myself, alone in nature, would spurn me to write about my mother. We'd had 34 years together. Surely it should've been simple to write one new tale of our life together every day. A life of 22,383 days, with 12,709 of them shared, should have enough to fill a book. My mother had always wanted to write a memoir. The task fell upon me to write about our extraordinary life. Her extraordinary character.
Although I'm not religious, something about the suggestion of walking the Camino de Santiago moved me. When we were living on the streets in Mountain View/Santa Clara/Sunnyvale California, we often stayed on a street named El Camino Real. Our life had involved a lot of traveling. Santiago de Chile, my mother's birthplace, had always been a place we meant to return for a visit. In a locked down world, where international travel was limited if not outright banned, walking through the span of Spain and meditating on my purpose seemed sensible.