The Way of the Stars: Journeys on the Camino de Santiago
Sibley, a journalist and professor, chronicles his first medieval-style pilgrimage along the Spanish Camino, a 750-kilometer route leading to a World Heritage site, the city of Santiago. Bookending that journey is his return years later to retrace it with his grown son. Undertaking the first trek as neither a devout believer nor an expert (though experienced) long-distance trekker, Sibley found his journey filled with emotional, spiritual, social, physical, and intellectual discoveries. He provides imagistic access of each process, offering readers not so much an armchair travelogue as a meditation on the role such a dedicated journey can play in the life of the traveler. His quick crafting of such scenes as coping with a blood blister, sharing dinner with a woman planning her next pilgrimage (to the Ganges, which is holy to Hindus), and enjoying the simplicity of the quarters set aside for those traveling the Way of the Stars through Spain’s countryside bring the trip alive, offering the reader, as well as the writer, insight on an ancient meditative challenge as it can still be practiced today. --Francisca Goldsmith--This text refers to theDigitaledition.