Day 37 Ultreia

Day 37

“Take to the highway, won’t you lend me your name?

Your way and my way seem to be one and the same.

Mamma don’t understand it, she wants to know where I’ve been.

I’d have to be some kind of natural born fool to want to pass that way again, But I could feel it on a country road. Sail on home to Jesus, won’t you good girls and boys. I’m all in pieces, you can have your own choice.

But I can hear a heavenly band full of angels and they’re coming to set me free. I don’t know nothing ’bout the why or when but I can tell that it’s bound to be, because I could feel it, child, yeah, on a country road.

I guess my feet know where they want me to go walking on a country road. Walk on down, walk on down, walk on down a country road…”
Country Road by James Taylor

This song is featured in the movie “The Way” with Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez about the Camino de Santiago. I can honestly say I’m not sure I had ever hear it before seeing the movie. But it’s become a favorite of mine. It’s even my alarm ring tone on my phone to wake me up in the morning.

But I found it fascinating that it was used for this movie about a walk across Spain. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way but country roads were something that country and western singers sang about and growing up in Oklahoma that was confined to my provincial life of rural Oklahoma. But fortunately I have been able to travel. I see way beyond my borders both figuratively and literally now. And in this I have learned that country roads are in all countries. It’s like St Augustine said, “the world is a book and those who don’t travel read only one page.”

There’s something about this walk…this Pilgrimage that moves you…certainly moves you toward Santiago, Finisterra, Muxia but also beyond. The common phrase on the camino is to pass a fellow pilgrim and say Buen Camino literally “good way”. But another saying is Ultreia! It means keep going, reaching beyond, heading onwards.