Sonder on the Camino
Sonder on the Camino
by Nicole de Beaufort | Detroit, MI
Sonder is a newer word, meaning the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. This word echoed as I walked the Camino Portugués. Our group started in Viana do Castelo, Portugal, and for 10 days we walked along the beautiful northwestern Portuguese coast into Galicia, Spain, and inland toward Santiago de Compostela.
The Camino Portugués coastal route is a feast for the senses. Waves crash against ancient rocks along the coast. Sometimes, the sulfuric stench of rotting seaweed assaults the nostrils, but these moments are few. You can taste salt from the sea in the air. The perfume of eucalyptus pervades. Wind rustles tree branches, causing them to brush against each other, as if to make a shushing sound. Hydrangeas are omnipresent in white, blues of every shade, magenta, pink, and purple.
Every day on the Camino is different. The landscape changes, but the pilgrim abides. Camino walking is inherently solitary and insistently communal. That’s why the word sonder kept invading my headspace.
Everyone on the Camino is on their own journey, experiencing elation, contemplation, fatigue, suffering, and hope. We hunger and thirst when no café or resting place seems close by. We do this together but with our own stories. Our vivid and complex lives don’t intersect as much as meld into a stream of common humanity. Like a river, the Camino is a vessel that changes infinitely by and with its walkers.
Walking a Camino demands we leave behind our everyday lives to focus on this one thing. It’s impossible to multitask. At day’s end, sleep comes quickly and deeply. I would awake refreshed, as if my cells had healed the prior day’s aches.
When my companions and I reached the cathedral square in Santiago, I removed my shoes and socks. My feet felt the sun-warmed stones that have greeted pilgrims for centuries. It’s emotional to reach the end. Around me, hundreds of others met this moment with joy, laughter, relief, and bittersweet tears. Another feeling of sonder, a celebration within ourselves and with each other, together as humans. We accomplished something meaningful in the history of our lives.
