Call of the Camino

For thousands of years, a pilgrimage to a holy site has been used as a way to change one's life and start over again free of the sins and burdens of the past. Feeling the need to mark his 60th year in a meaningful way, Robert Mullen set out to walk the Camino, the pilgrims' way from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port at the foot of the Pyrenees, to the shrine of Saint James at Santiago de Compostela. As a writer, he wanted to explore the myths and legends associated with this pilgrimage and perhaps have his own mystical or transformative experience on this 560-mile trek that ended in Finisterre, the westernmost point of Spain.The book is a fascinating combination of travelogue, history, legend and memoir. Richly-drawn portraits of the author's fellow pilgrims engage the reader and move the narrative along. Mullen recounts braving the hardships of mountainous tracks, harsh weather and sore feet with his fellow pilgrims. You can understand the bonds they forged with each other, as they sh
ared their life stories, food, medicine, unisex dormitories, and acquired wisdom.The book is as much about connecting deeply with yourself and other human beings as it is about the web of history and human longing to connect with the divine. It is all so interwoven that you don't so much read this book as experience it. It's rather like a modern Canterbury Tales in which, in the author's words, "we ourselves are the chief collaborators, the authors as well as the editors.... and we are above all engaged, and caught up in, that apparently most singular of human activities, the making and the revising of the stories which define our world and which constitute our lives."

View this post on my blog: http://www.yourgamebook.com/call-of-the-camino.html