Reflecting on the journey

01.12.2024. Camino souvenirs in our hallway

Advent is about a journey; or, rather, it's about several nested journeys. There is the journey Mary is making through pregnancy, and the one she is making from pious and beloved daughter to reviled disgrace, and from thence to Mother of God. There is the journey from one ancient, rich and deeply enculturated view of God to another, just recently conceived. There is the soul's journey home. And these journeys find their expression a young man and his heavily pregnant fiancee, making the hard journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

I make a journey from Advent Sunday to Christmas, seeing myself reflected in those hopeful and befuddled travellers: their journey making sense to me to the extent that my life is somehow seen in it; my life making sense to me to the extent that it reflects their journey.

Journey is a primal metaphor for me, and it has been lived out in several prilgimages. On our last camino, at Finisterre (the end of the earth and also journey's end) we bought souvenirs - these little guys dressed in the traditional garb of peregrinos: rough robe, stout shoes, broad hat, and carrying a staff and water gourd. And, of course, wearing the scallop, the badge of a pilgrim in many traditions. We framed them. Reflective glass. Today that seems kind of apt.

And also, today, I start onmy own new journey. I intend, every day to make a photograph I am pleased with, and to publish those pictures on here. I am starting on Advent Sunday but intend to follow this road for a whole year, and see where it takes me. I won't post daily, but probably weekly, because I expect many photos won't make much sense on their own, but only in the context of the whole. Neither will I comment as fully as I have today. This is a kind of intro to the whole process and for the rest of the year, I hope the pictures will speak for themselves.

How will it end and what might it all mean? Who knows? The Spanish Poet Antonio Machado kind of sums it up:

“Caminante, son tus huellas

el camino y nada más;

Caminante, no hay camino,

se hace camino al andar.

Al andar se hace el camino,

y al volver la vista atrásse

ve la senda que nunca

se ha de volver a pisar.

Caminante, no hay camino

sino estelas en la mar.”

Traveler, your footprints

are the only road, nothing else.

Traveler, there is no road;

you make your own path as you walk.

As you walk, you make your own road,

and when you look back

you see the path

you will never travel again.

Traveler, there is no road;

only a ship’s wake on the sea.