Divine meaninglessness
“Wake up in one place, eat, walk 25 kilometers to another place, eat, go to sleep, wake up, do it again. It’s the most pointless thing we can possibly do. It’s also the most significant.”
I’m quoting the dear friend responsible for the start of my relationship with the Camino de Santiago. Actually let’s be real: he’s the dealer who activated my addiction, sparking what I hope will be a lifetime of pursuing this divine meaninglessness.
Home now from my second walk there in six months—a gift so precious that I’m still not fully convinced it happened—I’ve been deeply tired. Physically for sure, but also by the pressure I feel to pluck the bit of wisdom out of the last three weeks that will make for a Good Piece of Writing. I’ve been struggling to pull together something that both sums up my trip and offers a more universal lesson.
Similar to last time, my drive for this all to Mean Something threatens to divorce me from the experience itself—all aspects of it, including now.
Must! Extract! Wisdom!
I remember moments on this walk, step after hypnotic step, where I’d begin to craft a way of explaining the trip to this or that person, planning how I’d articulate it in a way that would make sense to them. Suddenly I was two kilometers down the road, having ignored the holy silence of the deep forest, or failing to register the ray of sun illuminating an ancient village against a backdrop of tungsten clouds.
After falling into this trap a few times I did my best to avoid presentation planning and just be there, sitting alone on top of a splintery gray picnic table, slicing chunks of oily manchego with a foldable knife, eating them with the still-soft roll I’d pilfered from the previous night’s dinner. Or sobbing for no reason at how calmly the leaves turn over when they expect rain; how the birdsong changes, just a little, in those moments.
I didn’t want it to mean anything more than that.
Yet as soon as I arrived back in my life (and at my computer), that programming—Must! Extract! Wisdom! And! Share it!—took hold, and it feels heavier than the backpack I wore across those hundreds of kilometers.
Yes, I’m a writer. Yes, I can weave together ideas in ways that are sometimes useful and even beautiful. And. I don’t want to be trapped by this. I don’t want every experience I have to have to become a soundbite, forcibly siphoning from it the gold it’s not yet ready to offer up.
What do you see?
In my morning writing to God or Whoever, asking for the grillionth time how I might best be a channel for beauty or peace or love or Whatever, this baffling question came in response: What do you see?
Right. Turns out all that beauty/love/peace/Whatever is coming, constantly, through my very own little eyeballs. Also through my nose, ears, nerve endings. This is Life, Wisdom, Divinity pouring itself through me: the adorably dense little human creature I am, with all my little senses. This is actually what I’m here for. What we’re here for. As cosmologist Brian Swimme says: “Our reverence for life’s preciousness and fragile beauty is our gift to the universe … to see it, to feel the moment, to speak it, to celebrate its truth.”
But we—I—also have the ability to make meaning out of what comes in through those li’l’ senses, and that makes me feel important. So I tend to lean more into the meaning-making than the experience, rendering all of this wayyyy more complicated than it needs to be.
It’s exhausting. I crave ever more meaninglessness.
So here I am, trying yet again to bring the meaninglessness of that beautiful walk into my days, my creation. That’s all art is: telling the world what you see, however you see it. I notice now that hints of that have shimmered through even in this struggle of a piece: the cheese and the elm leaves and the hilltop village. I’m excited to do more transcribing, and less interpreting.
I’m also fully aware of the irony of what I’m doing right now: extracting the lesson and telling you about it, likely far before it’s done revealing itself to me. I never said this was something I mastered, only something I am catching onto and want to explore more deeply.
This is how writing helps me.
What about you?
What do you see? Come share it with us in a Mini-Retreat. Soul Writing invites us to stop, sink under the waves of soundbite culture. Suspended there, relaxed and still, we discover what might be living under the noise, undisturbed and breathtaking.
