The roads back then were not asphalt. James miraculously floated there, in a stone coffin. The legend first heard in 7th century AD. when the church took over the Compostelan shrine from the sea goddess Brigid. Cowry shells were adopted by the cult of the new saint.
**
I set out on my walk with a rabbit’s paw. The branches so low they nib at my knees. The world in shroud. The world running amok.
**
Being in a human body calls for rapture. Movement calls for community. The smallness of our eyes perceiving night’s sky. The limits of land mass embraced by a fecund body of lapping waves, Posidonia, moving habitat. Our skin touching air. Our organs only knowable when failing or through another substance coursing the system.
**
I ate figs while walking. I ate the great star at night, sweat running sideways into my mouth, and finally seawater, in big gulps at journey’s end, I drank.
**
Brigid, keeper of the hearth, birch and purifier of liver, is celebrated during lambing season. She is considered the tender of fire, caretaker of home and shows great hospitality towards anyone who passes her threshold. For many days, walking under the open sky, I heard saxophones and smelled the juniper, watched the visible horizon joining land, my feet, calves, heartbeat. The endless summation of roads converging, of decisions and chance.
**
Cee, Galicia
I dreamt of a buried civilization sunk to the embankments of a present world. Ungovernable. Boats in front of ruined houses, an ancient Port Grimaud.
This unknown civilization had ambitions, brocade and golden water. Cages still. Napoleon burnt what came his way archives, chapels, crosses. No indication of when they flourished. I saw myself a very different woman. Chased by a robed man to the wall of a bastion. The journey the only boundary. This titan forest. Inhabitants of disgrace, of disobedient. The stars pieces of liver. The stars pieces of the love matter. When in darkness wait. The body can recover over night in a room with no windows, seagulls on the roof.
**
Pilgrims don’t talk, they beg: make me better. But I am not a pilgrim and so I remember one thing and forget one thing. I am the soil from which they came. I am going to the saints this summer, I sing. I am going to the saints this summer, their footsteps and marble busts. Herbal plant, my saint. Take up a saint this summer. A saint is imperfection, I sing.
Negreira, Galicia
The day begins with a woman convincing us to take the wrong way. Take the wrong way, she says, laughs us off the road. The walk to the end of the world has a lot of cows, strange folk singing folk songs, drunk men pissing into fields. Foul toothed animal. Clear the air in front of you. Napoleon’s men marched here. The saints crossed with their sticks, their glum feet. Even Christ lives in Bon Xesus speaks Gallego to the sheep. Keep your doors open. If white butterflies surround a person by night good news is to be expected. The maize is stored in stone houses on boulders. Our long pursuit of safety is a constant murmur, a countless seeing. What is on my mind? Where will these days belong? You say, God, don’t let me be born in a village in Galicia.
**
Take a bowl infuse it with your calendar; your dream, the forgotten; sex with the one you did not understand; with the broken stone from a field of lava; a broken stone from your body; a comma separating your name. The mountains rise behind the skyscrapers, behind which the plains, the prohibitions, myself a young girl; infuse it with your weather; your longing organ; why am I thinking of you on this cracked road; infuse the rites; your loudest dog; it is not misfortune that brings you here; passing a procession; a white figure; Veronica veiled, her hands gloved; the goddess of the earth spills her cards; this bus is always late; like Lispector’s strawberries; do you really know the meaning of poverty; of the stems of her words; she reads in broken Portuguese and it rises.
**
Solvatur ambulando, Diogenes proclaimed. “It is resolved by walking.”
**
At night I look at my legs, which formed calves from stratosphere. Cobwebs dance from the ceiling. My body weighs less than the small sculpture on the desk, less than the carrion of the lion’s hunt. My face shows no hints of ethnic origin or age. I could be mistaken for a child or a hallucination.
Santa Marina, Galicia
The Earth is. A troglodyte in the densest parts of the forest. The old man asks, where is your mother? Little boy plays, mother slaps flies from her legs. Little boy finds a bucket and fills it with stones. The fear of your eyes loose. I think of women in wartime walking. In the shadow of a gun. Thoughts come as visitors. Mountains are miracles. Fifty eagles crossing into Spain. Into a room that does not lock and there are no bathrooms. These are not the borders. When I don’t finish the tortilla, the owner pokes me in the ribs. Heaven is not golden. The horizon is.
**
My great great-grandfather was a pastor in western Germany who undertook long pilgrimages to the Middle East, mid 19th century. His letters back home to his wife and two daughters are reflective of the influences of realism. Buildings, sleeping and eating patterns, travel conditions and his health are described with acute detail. The form breaks open only once, ecstatic and incoherent when he arrives in Jerusalem.
To steal into a side street, stealing views–trapped in them. Why walk why make the journey? The desire for a threshold, a movement away from myself, or to remember: we, the crow; we, the dirt. Scared, or strong? To tell a story, it is said, is an act of love.
**
Ara Solis, the rise. A coral flower into the pillar, gone. Black tears for the dead.
Red tongues for the days. We hate asphalt, or our feet do and our feet are our mind and our mind has grown bare-ankled, asking what does the light do
while it travels?
**
What if you refuse to speak any of the given? If the pre-sentiments, the tightrope walk does not hold its promise? They would call you Wahnsinn. They would send you up the mountain to touch the cross. Instead I am bound for the girl from Lourdes, later for a grotto, incandescent home to Mary Magdalene, much later the strong walls of Hildegard von Bingen’s monastery. Walking through the lush fields of Galicia. I did not want to think of it as pilgrimage, but as moving through a broken circle.
Yanara Friedland is a German-American writer, translator and teacher. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Denver and a long walk along multiple border regions in Europe. She is collaborating on walking and writing initiatives along the Front Range and teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder. She makes home in a small cabin in the foothills of Boulder. Some of her writings can be found in the following places: Les Editions Maelstrom, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, The Collagist, Quarterly West, along the Camino Santiago, the benches of Finisterre, within the wells of Lourdes, by the invisible trench lines of Berlin’s former east-west division and buried deep within the soil of the German Harz forest.