It’s been a few months now since I hung up my hiking shoes for the last time, but I was reminded of my questions about what it means to be a pilgrim again this morning after reading a powerful commencement speech by Nipun Mehta.
My time in the village of Åre, Sweden, was supposed to be about skiing, but what I found myself exploring with as much energy as the piste was the Swedish cuisine of the Jämtland region – from savory reindeer meat to tangy cloudberries.
![A soul sister [mis]adventure: Notes on when travel isn’t perfect.](https://www.candaceroserardon.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_9531.jpg "A soul sister [mis]adventure: Notes on when travel isn’t perfect.")
The day had been a classic cocktail of frustration: delays, long waits and wrong turns. But for the thousandth time, I’d forgotten that travel won’t always be perfect – and that I myself won’t always be a perfect traveler.
Although a flight from Sevilla to Marrakech might’ve been easier, something told me it wouldn’t have allowed me to really feel and process the change in countries – not to mention the change in continents.
Some journeys feel more like a poem in their brevity, in the way they leave you with not so much a discernible storyline as a collection of images – fleeting impressions that stay visible in your mind long after you’ve left. My time on Mallorca was just that.
Talking sixteen hours a day was hard for an introvert, but despite the many “brain traffic jams” (as one Spaniard put it), there was a flow to it all that felt pretty darn close to magical.
I’ve been grateful to feel at home in Madrid, to not only have my own room again, but a desk to write at and an armchair to read in, all while sounds of the city and afternoon sunshine waft in through open windows.
It’s only my fourth day on the Camino de Santiago trail, but already I can feel it happening–that strange process whereby what I’m doing now becomes all I’ve ever done; as though I’ve always been walking through rural Spanish countryside.