Letting Go At the Ends of the Earth

For over a thousand years, seekers from all walks of life have traveled the Camino de Santiago in search of inspiration and self-discovery. While the paths that make up the Camino de Santiago begin in a handful of different places, they all converge and reach a dramatic conclusion at a rocky cliff on the western coast of Spain, a place once thought to be literally the end of the Earth (hence the town’s name, Finisterre).

Tradition holds that upon completing this grueling 500-mile hike, pilgrims engage in two very symbolic rituals. The first is to burn a letter – a purifying offering that symbolizes a break with our past selves (as in, “Now that I’ve walked these 500 miles and done so much introspection and contemplation, I am no longer the same person I was when I wrote or received this letter”). The second ritual – leaving one’s shoes or boots at the edge of the cliff – is equal parts practical and symbolic: practical because, after 500 miles of wear, the shoes or boots are pretty worn out; but symbolic because those shoes or boots carried you on such a momentous journey, and now that you’ve completed it, you can surrender that footwear and move on.

My all-time favorite poet, David Whyte, wrote a very moving poem (called Finisterre) after his niece Marlene completed the Camino de Santiago and described to him her own experiences of surrender at the end of the path and the ends of the earth

The road in the end taking the path the sun had taken,
into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you
as you stood where ground turned to ocean: no way
to your future now but the way your shadow could take,
walking before you across water, going where shadows go,
no way to make sense of a world that wouldn’t let you pass
except to call an end to the way you had come,
to take out each frayed letter you had brought
and light their illumined corners; and to read
them as they drifted on the western light;
to empty your bags; to sort this and to leave that;
to promise what you needed to promise all along,
and to abandon the shoes that had brought you here
right at the water’s edge, not because you had given up
but because now, you would find a different way to tread,
and because, through it all, part of you would still walk on,
no matter how, over the waves.

To me, this poem can teach us so much about surrender and growth. The “dead end” that is the cliff overlooking the sea at Finisterre is exactly like the boxed-in feeling that confronts us when it’s time to change: we can’t keep traveling on the road we’ve been on, and we can’t even keep moving forward on foot, so we have to find new ways to explore the infinite possibilities of the sea that lies before us.

When Whyte talks about there being “no way to your future now but the way your shadow could take,” he seems to be referring in some ways to the moon shadow that many travelers have described experiencing in that spot at sunset, when the glow from the moon projects one’s shadow out across the ocean…but the other way of interpreting this line is that our “shadow self” (a term coined by Carl Jung to refer to the aspects of our personalities that we tend to keep hidden – sadness, rage, independence, emotional sensitivity, etc.) is essential for leading the way into the unknown.

My absolute favorite part of the poem is the last section, about abandoning the shoes at the water’s edge, “not because you had given up / but because now, you would find a different way to tread, / and because, through it all, part of you would still walk on, / no matter how, over the waves” – it speaks to the surrender of one’s coping mechanisms that is required in any real transformation. Like the boots worn on the Camino de Santiago, our coping mechanisms and daily habits can only take us so far in life and in business; after that, we need to honor them for bringing us this far, surrender them as something that no longer serves us, and move forward in new ways and with new tools.

Thank you, David Whyte, for shining such a heartbreakingly compassionate light on the pain and the possibilities of transformation.