Camino de Santiago - Balance … Who Are You?
Camino de Santiago
Balance … Who Are You?
(My Camino…)
My friend Milan, a professor, painter, and composer, once told me a beautiful story about raising children in an African tribe. I don’t know if the story is authentic, but it is certainly meaningful, and I want to share it with you.
“In an African tribe, when a girl was ready for marriage, her mother would send her into the forest to spend the night alone. The girl had only one task. She had to imagine her child and create a song for it.
When she returned to the village, and later when she got married and became a mother, she would sing that song to her child. Whenever the child—or later the grown person—did something wrong, the entire tribe would place him in the center and sing that same song to him. Likewise, whenever he did something good, the same center of the village, the same tribe, and the same song.”
I heard this story after returning from the Camino. Perhaps I would not have understood its essence so deeply had it not been for the strange things that happened there—things that pushed both me and my fellow pilgrims to do good and not-so-good.
Everything is about balance. Just like how many kilometers you walk in a day, what you choose to say, or how much you eat or drink. In our group, there was a circle of young women who, freed from constraints, either stepped out of balance or leapt into it—eating, drinking, and laughing wildly.
On the other hand, after walking 25 kilometers, I would leave my backpack in the albergue, slip into my sandals, and keep walking through the new town for another ten kilometers or so—hungry for the images and energy of every new place. I too was laughing wildly. I too was restoring balance within myself. Both ways were right. We were simply listening to different songs.
I could write about balance as humanity itself, as yin and yang. When I write about the Camino, I see balance in that thin edge between two worlds along which peregrinos walk. On one side lies the spiritual path—self-discovery, growth. On the other side, the world of sore feet, exhaustion, hunger, and a routine that makes you want to scream louder than the waves of the ocean beside you. One side holds tradition, faith, the church, the rules. The other side—Instagram, tourism, the twenty-first century. Sometimes you find yourself on one side, sometimes on the other.
Such a similar boundary, where two worlds intertwine, I felt at the Ostrog Monastery in Montenegro. St. Vasilije of Ostrog calls you and lets his divine ray shine upon you. And there, just like on the Camino, there are tourists, believers, pretenders, the lost… Yet he doesn’t judge, he doesn’t turn anyone away. The question – for everyone – is simply: do YOU know who you are?
I remember going to Ostrog twice, on the day of the great feast called the Transfiguration. Both times, just like before the Camino, I dreamt a dream that carried special meaning for me. Both times I “happened” to go on that very day. And both times, I received a sign showing me where I needed to go next. Once, even, in the lower monastery, a monk placed a bunch of grapes in my hands as a gift. I needed that. I needed comfort for my grief, and St. Vasilije found a way.
Balance also lies in the longing of our inner child to play and enjoy life on one side, and the adult within us who strictly follows rules on the other. Where there is no balance, the child runs away, and suddenly the adult is 4 instead of 44 years old. That can be fun and creative. But what if the child is angry? Afraid? What if it is invisible and unacknowledged, starving for love? Then boys and girls, as if escaped from the tale of Peter Pan, walk lost, searching for their place. What if they don’t hear their own song, but—manipulated by glittering lies—jump to someone else’s rhythm?
I don’t know. I don’t have the answers to those questions. One must dig to find them. Deep, through the cliffs of the Soul. Until the Compass aligns and until the song, sung long ago, becomes the guide once more.
Everything is in balance. In harmony. Like the Universe.
next step link Trial or Temptation?
Buen Camino.
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