Intuition

(Day 26 – Santiago > Pontevedra – 25 July 2025 – 65 km, 1045 m)

The distances are shorter, the mornings colder, my legs now well accustomed to the increased total altitude of each climb. So I start with a late and long breakfast after walking around the near abandoned twisted streets of yet another city in Spain that does not get going until 10 a.m. Rocio’s vegan hole-in-the-wall shop is warmly decorated in tones of cream and white. There are four small cacti in one nook, two books on eating consciously, a minimalist cat poster. The menu fits on a single piece of paper about the size of a large photograph. Coffee is not on the menu.

I chat calmly with the middle-age Colombian couple living in Santiago, the young Italian woman leaving tonight after having following the Caminho northward from Portugal. Everyone leaves, but, as I woke up deciding I was in no rush (more on this in a future post), I follow my savory breakfast with an order of tea and a slice of cake. Rocío inquires as to whether I am following the Camino.

Am I? Somewhat, I explain. There have been stretches where I have overlapped with the Chemin/Camino, there have been hotels, hostels, and a few meals shared with pilgrims, and I too have engaged in repetitive movement day after day following something or going somewhere. I am still moving, I add. I will move every day until it is time to stop (earlier than the originally planned end in Lisbon). I do not tell her that arriving in Santiago on the eve of the Festival of St. James the Apostle was touching though I am not Catholic. I do not tell her that I do not have, and do not care to have, the little paper that pilgrims get stamped (for food and lodging discounts, to obtain a pilgrimage completion certificate, and as a souvenir). I do not say that the energy at the AirBnB where I stayed last night drained me and saddened me. Somehow, Rocío seems to pick all this up in the comfortable silence that has settled in the shop.

Suddenly, a talkative couple in a grating rush (despite the holiday) barrels in, orders something, eats quickly, leaves. Rocío burns palo santo and, almost imperceptibly, actively slows her breath before talking to me again.

Am I? Somewhat, I explain. I am on a path. And nearly every time I sit to write about it, I cry, and sometimes when I talk about it too. She waits for me to collect my thoughts.

I tell her about Filippo and the answers to the questions I never asked. I am listening, I finally tell her. Not just to the days the bike tells me to leave earlier or later, my belly tells me to order a cake or to skip a meal, my skin tells me to remove my coat or to apply sunscreen or to seek shade to bring my temperature down, and the shooting pain in my knee reminds me to pedal through because it will pass (it really did pass). Those messages came into sharper focus (and, truth be told, they were never too blurry anyway) within the first days of my wandering.

I am listening, I repeat, more to myself than to her. I am listening to the subtlest of signs. Everything is more heightened. Intuiting where ideas and plans fit and when and where, assimilating words and messages. I am listening to the people talking to me along the way, to their many, many stories and joys and pains. I am listening to the overlapping sentiments, the convergence and divergence. I am following the constant course corrections, embracing the absolute surety of a decision to go one way at one moment (in this journey, in this life) being just as surely and radically supplanted by intuitive adjustment days or weeks later. I am listening without judging and listening without the need for validation. I am listening not by throwing caution to the wind, singing paeans to spontaneity, acting irresponsibly, but by listening wholly and through all my physical and metaphysical senses. It is cacophonous, quiet, and symphonic all at once, much like the birds I’ve been aurally spying on along the way, at times illuminating and at times overwhelming.

I am unsure how much of this realization I actually say to Rocío and how much simply swirls around in my head. She nods as she rings me up. She seems to have heard. I seem to be listening.

I leave, clip into my pedals, and look down at my little digital map. After weeks of westward journeying, I definitively turn south and snake unhurriedly up and down the lesser traveled hills, the sweet pine and aromatic eucalyptus forests ushering in the last stage of my journey.