Getting to the place where the Camino de Santiago begins is a crucial part of the journey, many say the crucialiest. Actually, they don’t say that as crucialiest is not a word. What can be said is that it is not that easy to find the beginning of the Camino because the Camino begins in a bunch of different places. This was hard for me to understand, as I assumed a pilgrimage road was a single established path from one place to another, you know, like a road. But apparently there are five or six different routes you can take and still have it be called the Camino.

Kind of reminds me of the Trinity.

We were walking the French route of the Camino, which is the most popular and the best tasting of all the routes, so we planed, trained and automobiled it from Chicago to our beginning in St Jean Pied de Port, France, just over the Spanish border. The town is absolutely beautiful, which is suspicious as hell. As an American, a Texan, a Chicagoan and an avid consumer of cinema I am always suspicious of overly picturesque places. Right when it gets all quiet, nice and idyllic is when the Ninjas jump on you from the rafters you that were too distracted by all that quiet niceness to have noticed.

I have come to accept that I am a very odd person, odd enough to know my oddness is a problem and not just a cute facet of my personality. My teeth grate when I meet those who proudly proclaim how different everyone thinks they are. We don’t. You’re just loud. That’s not different, it’s annoying and we are all just being nice. Odd is when you have an panic attack triggered by performance anxiety while buying hiking sticks in a French Village. And I did.

During the entire journey from Chicago to St Jean I was stewing hard. My stew was made from worrying about getting to St Jean, worrying about Stacy walking 500 miles, worrying that she could tell I was worrying and it was all heated up to a steaming, bubbling goo by the fact I had no idea what I was doing on the Camino de Santiago.

I am not a Christian, Spain is not one of my favorite cultures (I have six favorite cultures throughout time and Space), and I even suck as a Buddhist and now I was going to have to walk 500 miles with with Christian Spaniards who are all wonderful at being Christians.

Now, it is okay to suck as a Buddhist. All Buddhists suck at it in the beginning, we’re supposed to, and the the Buddha tells us this. So, fine. But I was sucking extra hard as I was floundering in my attempts to join a Sangha, a community of Buddhists. It was one of the four things I swear to uphold every time I meditate, and I just couldn’t do it. There were reasons, good ones, deep and sticky with trauma, and I was starting to get at them, but on the day my boots hit the soil of France, I was a churning pile of confusion wearing a cheap plastic Hasbro mask of “Everything’s Fine Man,” and that little rubber band holding it on was about to snap.

My sangha problem comes from the fact that I am not a joiner. When a bunch of people start to do the same thing, in general I hang back with the smokers to watch what’s going to go wrong, and then we put on a show to make fun of it all. That’s been my life for the past 40 years. Making fun of the group. The group I’m not a part of. The only group I’ve ever felt okay with is a cast of actors under a strong director. Everyone else, you’re just audience I’m trying to please until I can have sex or get alone. And now, I was going to have my nose rubbed in a fecund pile of a group of half a million of The Best Most Wonderful Christians Ever In All the Best Most Beautiful Cathedrals Ever Doing Wonderful Christian Things Together in Wonderful Ways!!!

Feh.

Meh.

And Feh to the power of Meh.

Now, I am going to leave a blank paragraph space, which is to represent all the things I have said against religion over my career as an Improv actor performing for drunken college students. This is a technique taken from Hokusai, where I use empty space as a repository for negative thoughts.

Ah. Emptiness is so much better than cliched anti-religious humor, isn’t it? Now, all those things not up there, and there are a whole lot of things not up there, had the backbone of my sincere belief that religion has been harmful to society in many ways. That backbone has been torn out with a Finishing move of Faith by the woman walking at my side. I know and understand that a blanket condemnation of faith is just as wrongheaded as fanatical religious orthodoxy. That literally replacing blind faith with blind doubt gets one nowhere. But I am still walking in the groove those thoughts and feelings have left in me. And I am not sure how many times I will be able to passively enjoy a church covered in gold stolen with the use of slave labor from the Americas….

Stop it. Breathe. Everyone has a right to happiness…

So, its the first day of our pilgrimage and Stacy and I are in the thick of Camino Nation in the town where at least 200,000 pilgrims will begin their journey in 2023. We get in the line for our official passbooks, and everyone is talking and chatting in a dozen languages. The line is scary long, long enough to make us wonder if the trail was going to me more crowded than we thought. It is. Everyone was talking about it, the huge turnout this year, this month, this week. Do you have a room? You do? You’re lucky. Fifteen people are going to have to spend the night in the fire station. Really? Oh my yes, the town has give them a place to sleep, isn’t that nice? Oh, it sure is! Where are you from? Where are you going? What stops have you scheduled? How far are you going each day? What kind of socks do you wear? Do you have ibuprofen? Isn’t the town lovely? Where are you eating? You don’t know? Oh you should try [ five different restaurants in Basque accented French are rattled off like a machine gun of syllables ]. Oh, we will! Do you have your hat? A good waterproof coat? Do you have your walking sticks?

Walking sticks. All my anxieties and doubts, all my negative kilesas, all my childhood bullshit trauma…were about to be poured into the form of two aluminum and plastic-tipped walking sticks.

First of all, my perception of walking sticks is that they are for old people. Mall walkers. The soon-to-die. I am corrected in this misconception with the information that everyone on the Camino uses them, all the guides say so. Oh good, the group wants me to do something. Something I never did on the thousands of miles I hiked and walked as a youth in Texas. No triggers there at all. Oh look, there’s a store that specializes in Camino equipment, everyone says they are the best. Really? Oh good, something else the group wants me to do. And the store is charming, and well maintained, and run by a person who has been doing nothing but this one thing for decades, and so I have to give her money. I have to. If I don’t, her business will fail. And she will see my face every time she thinks about her ruined life. And they have so much to tell me about the sticks, so much they want me me to know, so many decisions I have to make about them. And Stacy helps as well, telling me other tidbits of info to help in the decision. And then a passerby from Canada stops to argue with the salesperson, disagreeing with her on a certain point about a certain brand of stick. Suddenly, I am trying to make the salesperson happy, my wife happy, the stranger happy all the same time while doing something I didn’t want to do in the first, second and third place. Everyone is telling me what to do, how to do it, where to do it and how I should feel about it. All of them are looking at my face, wanting and needing a reaction from me, a pleasing reaction, they all need affirmation for their opinions and views, and I can’t give it to them as it is tied to my opinion about these ridiculous walking sticks for this ridiculous pilgrimage that I didn’t want in the first place an no sane person would want if they had a true grasp of their spirituality and..and …and…

My face froze, and I stammered like a teenager. I saw their faces become disturbed by my disturbance and they all backed off.

15,000 hours of improv and I lose it with a stick salesman.

I lost it because my mask was loosening by the second, and I could feel it falling. Regardless of my opinion, regardless of my views of religion, regardless of my feelings about Spain, I was about to go on a 500 mile walk with my wife. I wasn’t going to be able to hide a damn thing from her. She already knew me too well, and I was going to be surrounded by people who I can’t dazzle with my jokes and funny voices. And it’s not that I was hiding anything from her in the first place, it’s that I was hiding everything from everybody. But Stacy wasn’t everybody, she…mattered,…?

I had worked hard to make sure nothing I do really mattered. I had felt the pain of others too much as a child, and so I lived of life of short relationships or long shallow ones, abandoning friendships and family as fast as I could. Family was synonymous with pointless struggle, feckless acts of kindness and forced smiles. This was the mental poison that made me distrust the group, the happy people, the beautiful people, the successful ones.

I didn’t know all this while stammering in front of a hiking stick salesman, but I was starting to. It was important to me to ‘fit the script’, to do what the situation requires. You tell me what’s needs to be done, and I do it. That I why I love the theater so much, Here’s the script, there’s the stage, there’s the audience. Everyone understand what is supposed to happen and the roles, in every sense, that we are to play. But often in real life, people have one script in public and one script in their heads. Or things aren’t clear, like the signage in the Pamplona bus station, which made me furious. I was crystal calm while supporting 15 years of my raging manic depressive mother, but a bad placard will make me shout at inanimate objects.

Now, I did know some of that while stammering in front of a hiking stick salesman….but I didn’t understand it.

Eventually I made it to the counter and paid for a pair of walking sticks, and we left, all of us embarrassed for me. Stacy was being very understanding, but doubtlessly worried I was going to be a problem for the whole hike. I was too. I didn’t want to be. And if I wasn’t, I was going to have to let go of some of that shit, that shit that I had unpacked in that hiking pole store that was now all over the floor of my mind. Look at it all, memories, trauma, personal failures, excuses, reasons, opinions….how was I going to fit all that crap into my pack?