Even in my travels, I had somehow been proficient at avoiding dangerous situations—escaping a coup d’état in Bhutan, eluding the Communist authorities in the Soviet Union, living with the Masai in East Africa, protecting myself in the Peruvian Andes, and so on. My life had indeed been an evolutionary learning exercise.

  Those thoughts meshed together in my mind as I walked. Had I learned the techniques of escape and survival from the black-haired girl?

  As I walked, I somehow felt the energy of the path talking to me. The black-haired girl swam more clearly into my understanding. She was Moorish, and she had the gift of healing with her hands. She traversed the Camino on horseback, tending the sick. Then I saw her with a giant sultan of some type. The Giant Moor, they called him. She was called into his presence. I could feel the scene. I melded into it, until I was as one with it; I was the Moorish girl, and I was in a Moorish palace. I couldn’t make out the details. I related more to the feelings. The Moor had summoned me to heal him from a problem with impotence. He had many courtesans and couldn’t satisfy them. I was ordered to heal his problem. And I remembered how I had looked into his eyes. It felt as though my eyes were his, which were jet black but sparkling with emotion. I felt myself go into those eyes, remaining still for a long time. He relaxed. Then I lifted my hands to his shoulders. He didn’t blink. I used the gift of skin touch with my hands all over his body. His protectors looked on. I dipped my hands in oil stored in a keg made of animal skins. Our eyes never averted from each other. He was pliable and wanted to understand. He succumbed to the vibration of my touch and soon became aroused. His protectors left as I proceeded to consummate the healing. The Giant Moor sighed and was grateful and rested comfortably. I lay beside him.

  In a few hours he sat up. He said he wanted me to remain with him. I refused, pleading that my destiny was on the Camino in a healing capacity. He became infuriated, called for his protectors, and had me thrown into prison, where I found myself among Christian women. They were pale and starving and wailing and full of hatred for their Moslem captors. All this I saw while I was walking. I was in a kind of dream-walking meditation. The recall ended abruptly. I was stunned.

  Then I thought of the world today. I thought of Bosnia and Yugoslavia, and Christian versus Moslem hatred. I thought of Iraq and Saddam Hussein and the mullahs in Iran and the chasm that had been born out of ancient hatred between Moslems and Christians. I thought of the simmering Middle Eastern hatred between Arab and Jew and the birth of monotheism during the forty-year wanderings of the Jews with Moses in the desert. And, I wondered, once monotheism had come into being as a theological reality, had Mohammed heard the same Voice that Moses had heard? Why did everyone think that his God was the only God? And more interesting than all of that to me was the role that sexual prowess, competence, and aggression had played in the annals of human history. Somehow, sexual identity was tied to God. Why?

  A logging truck nearly clipped my backpack as I walked along a busy highway, living two realities simultaneously. The Camino was ancient and modern at the same time. The modern engineers seemed to know that the energy of the Camino provided the best place to construct a road. Saints and soldiers spanned the two extremes of those who experienced the “way.” Was the “middle way” possible in this world? Each of us seemed to have extreme views, in one way or another, and always the extremes were clashing. Was that how we “learned” about being respectful of all views?

  I still hadn’t eaten anything but prunes and Emergency C, which I dumped in my water bottle. Anna was existing on Coca-Cola and cigarettes. Both of us pushed on. I never told her what was swimming in my head.

  When we reached Pamplona, we found a refugio in the basement of a church.

  That night I had nightmares. I was falling from mountains, drowning in streams and rivers, sliding and pitching over rocks. I was hurt and alone, fearful that no one would find me and help. Was I dreaming the present or the past?

  When I woke up, I found Anna sitting on her bunk bed packing. I knew she was going to leave me.

  “Point your finger at me,” she said. “Pretend you are accusing me of something.”

  I pointed at her. “You see, you have three fingers pointed simultaneously at yourself?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “So when we judge another, we are really judging ourselves. There is no difference.”

  “You are leaving today, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she answered. “You need to be on your own from now on. That is the point of the Camino.”

  I was on the edge of crying. I remembered how I felt when I left home at sixteen years of age. I thought of how my daughter must have felt when she was put on a train for boarding school. Her attempt to keep control of her emotions so bravely had reduced me to tears as I waved good-bye to her.

  Now I was being put out on my own as well, in a strange country with a strange language. But maybe it wasn’t so strange. Perhaps I was here to find that truth. I had a sense that I would be false in the world, wearing a mask that blinded and disoriented me, unless I knew more deeply what had gone before.

  “The Camino will show you the past and the future until you realize who you are now,” said Anna. “You will have no other diversions as you walk alone ten hours every day. Be aware and diligent as you walk and contemplate. I will check in on you.”

  I couldn’t speak. I didn’t want to show the fear I had of my own inadequacies. What would I do if there was no one to help me? And what would I do if people recognized me and became too helpful?

  Anna fastened her backpack around her waist, hugged me, walked out of the church basement, and was gone.

  7

  I choked back tears and quickly gathered my things, put on my backpack, and walked up some stairs and onto the streets of Pamplona.

  I walked alone for a while, not sure whether I was going in the right direction. West, I thought. I should just walk west. People scurried through the city, busy with their jobs and lives. I was not one of them; I was outside of them; I was a pilgrim who had no knowledge of anything to do with the world around me. I felt isolated and paralyzed. It was worse than if I had been in the loneliness of the countryside, because here in the city I felt self-conscious.

  I was used to having an identity and a role to fulfill in a city. In the peace of the countryside, I could meld into nature, even if I had nowhere to go.

  I walked for a while, not even aware I was moving. What was my purpose right now, at this moment? Was it to find a yellow arrow? Then I spotted three women a few blocks ahead of me. They were wearing backpacks from which hung scallop shells. I knew they were pilgrims too. I got hold of myself and tried to catch up to them. They were speaking rapid-fire Spanish. I followed them for a while. They were crossing Pamplona looking for a yellow arrow too. Suddenly they stopped. They had found it. It led to a direction out of town. I knew I was on the right track for the time being. I felt better. The women walked on, and I headed for a phone booth. I looked at my reflection in a store window. I looked pitiful.

  After much confusion as to how to make an international phone call on the street, I succeeded in calling Kathleen in London.

  When she answered, I told her what I felt … a kind of sorrowful, humbling bravery. She said she was feeling the same way. “I’m taking Ken’s ring off now,” she said. “You do the Camino for me. I’m leaving this life soon, and you are finding a new one. I’ll be walking with you.” Her voice began to tremble, and she gently hung up.

  I hung the phone on its cradle and listened to the sounds of the traffic. Then I watched myself in the store windows as I trudged on to the next town, listening to the pealing of church bells.

  I passed the cathedral in the heart of the ancient Navarrería district. A traditional site of pilgrims’ worship along the Camino, and magnificent with its many chapels and the museum containing works of art from the cathedral and other churches of the region, including sculptures and manuscripts. Bloody battles had occurred on the ground where I walked, commemorated by many churches as reminders of Pamplona’s violent medieval past. The Church of Santo Domingo was decorated with scallop shells and a statue of Saint James looked over the high altar.

  I followed the yellow arrows across the outskirts of Pamplona, wondering out loud to my stick about the history of this blood-soaked terrain during the Middle Ages. I decided my stick was male and would know how to cross Spain by itself.

  Back again in the countryside, I continually looked down so I wouldn’t miss the yellow arrows. There were many discarded cigarettes along with plastic bags, papers, cartons, and condoms. How could people trash such sacred land? Would I discard my possessions later if my backpack became too heavy?

  A dump truck passed me. I remembered my trip to the “city of garbage” in Egypt. People lived in a place where refuse was dumped. My Western friends had been horrified. I had seen a resigned peace in the eyes of the inhabitants, who had nothing. I walked for a time thinking of the burden of possessions and the need to be identified by what one owned. I felt a freedom in that my survival and probable evolution depended on owning only what I needed. That was the question, though—how much did a person need? I remembered hearing a story, possibly apocryphal, about Mother Teresa’s insistence that a plush hotel accommodation be stripped bare at a cost of one hundred thousand dollars so that she could stay there in poverty. There was something wrong with that.

  I leaned against a tree on my stick, looking out at villages and hamlets in the distance, listening to crows cawing. Wheat fields nestled in misty valleys. I was beginning to trust the earth itself. I remembered that my father had told me that his mother had taught him how to fear, and once he had gone on a trip with his money belt strapped around his waist. I was doing the same thing, just in case I needed it.

  I prayed to Ken that he would enlist God’s help in curing Kathleen’s illness. I could almost feel him refuse because he wanted her with him. I remembered Kathleen telling me that he had said that proof of her love for him would be for her to come down to the bottom with him. I guess that even included going up to heaven.

  A huge caterpillar crossed my feet. I watched it on its own camino, wondering when it would become a butterfly.

  My left hip was numb. There was no pain. Was it a pinched nerve?

  I heard countryside church bells, and their sound made me think of my childhood in my father’s hometown of Front Royal, Virginia, nestled in the Shenandoah Valley. There were arguments in our family over whether the Methodists or the Baptists were the true link to God! Limited perspectives abounded everywhere.

  When I arrived in the Puente La Reina refugio, I met two Irish girls who were cooking noodles and sausage on a cooker they carried with them. They recognized me, said my books had inspired them, and proceeded to sing Irish songs and play the flute as though to dispel the Spanish surroundings. They talked incessantly, which disturbed me. I could feel myself pointing a finger with three directed at myself.

  They had lovely singing voices though, and I was reminded of the story Anna had told me about a young man along the Camino who had a beautiful singing voice but was too shy to speak, much less sing. At the end of his Camino, a big celebration had been planned at the church, but the priest had failed to come. The other pilgrims begged the boy to sing. He sang so beautifully they all wept. His fellow pilgrims knew he had accomplished a turning point because of his pilgrimage.

  I began to notice that the Irish girls and others in the refugio were relating to me as a privileged actress from Hollywood. I wanted to be treated like everyone else, but found it difficult to embarrass them with that request. Anna had said, “Remember you are simply not like the others who walk the Camino. You carry your own baggage of celebrity. Prepare for that.”

  I spent some time thinking about that celebrity baggage that accompanied me whenever people recognized who I was. True, they would confide their most personal feelings to me because somehow I engendered a trust that they felt they could depend upon. But I rarely felt they were being their true selves. They usually presented a version of themselves that they wished me to see, including what they thought of me. I longed to know more than their deepest secrets. I wanted to know the aspects they weren’t orchestrating. I had been a “celebrity” since I was twenty years old and had for the most part been exposed to people who related more to me than they did to themselves and each other. Regular people don’t like celebrities to see their faults. However, they are quite free about sharing their deepest fears and secrets. Maybe it’s because they know we have been through being exposed in public and can trust that we are sensitive to their issues of pain.

  I found myself shy to sing along with the Irish girls because I was a musical performer and I didn’t want to be anything other than regular. All human beings sing at one time or another, but I somehow didn’t feel free from performing.

  After our singing meal, I discovered how to zip open my sleeping bag from the bottom and fell asleep in it.

  When I awoke, I decided to discard a sweater and one pair of socks. My life had become the burden of what I was carrying.

  The celebrity burden reared its head as I began the next day.

  A photographer waited outside the refugio, camera in hand. The Irish girls immediately stepped protectively in front of me and told him to go away. The other pilgrims were bewildered.

  The Irish girls assumed the role of my protectors and walked ahead of me for the next few days. There were journalists in the mountains. The Irish shooed them away. But I could tell the word was out. The girls seemed to enjoy their new role as bodyguards. It relieved the tedium of walking. I was walking in two worlds. One of peace and meditation and the other of anticipation that the serenity would be compromised.

  I randomly opened my small copy of the New Testament as Anna had suggested. There it was:Acts 9, the story of Saul on the road to Damascus. He saw the light. Would I? What was I expecting to happen to me on this pilgrimage? No other pilgrim I spoke to could explain why he or she was walking. It was a subject that came up every night in the refugios. There had been an impulse, almost a compulsion, that had guided us to drop our lives, put everything in suspension, and come to Spain, and none of us knew why. Some had actually escaped to the Camino. One Danish man had walked in on his wife with another man, so he took his dog and came to Spain to figure out his life. Another woman was ill with arthritis and thought she might be cured by the exercise and the energy. But no one really understood his or her soul’s reason. There was something deeper than NOW, and everyone discussed it.

  I walked in wheat fields waist deep, then through apple groves with the wind whipping dappled sunlight on the leaves.

  A couple from Holland seemed weighed down from possessions, as though they were refugees from a war.

  I lost the Irish girls, missed a bridge, and got lost for a day. It didn’t bother me at all. My sense of smell increased, and because I was lost, there was no press.

  I had begun to feel blissful, moving gently forward in a meditative state of mind, when a dog jumped out of nowhere and made no secret that he wanted me out of the way. He blocked my path. I couldn’t go backward, and I couldn’t go sideways. The path was too narrow. I was suddenly faced with what had always frightened me. He barked at me unmercifully. I realized then that, unlike Anna, I wasn’t the type to stop and pray at a moment like this. I thought quickly. I raised my trusty stick and remembered what my Hopi friend had told me: “Visualize a red heart, fill it with love, and project it toward the dog without feeling hostility.” I formed a red heart in my mind, filling it with as much love as I could muster, and sent it out to the dog. I still had my stick raised, however, and I decided I would step off the path, even though there was underbrush and obstacles, and go around him. He growled, but I kept visualizing the heart and I kept walking. He looked at me curiously and watched me get back on the path. As soon as he saw I was on my way and had maneuvered around him, he lunged for me again, just for good measure. I ran from him with my backpack thumping up and down. He chased me for a while. I kept running until he gave up.

  I stopped, and when I looked back, he was out of sight. Breathing deeply and sore with another blister, I began to compare the similarities of dogs and the press. They each traveled in packs, and they each “pressed” you to understand the truth as you saw it.

  I had always been quite friendly with journalists, having lived with two very good ones for many years, admiring their curiosity and overriding need to learn about other people’s truth. The Fourth Estate kept civilization honest. Yet they could become brutally invasive, and out of a need to sell papers or get TV ratings, they often jumped the gun. But the public’s insatiable addiction to celebrity news contributed as much to tabloid insanity as anything else. The journalists I knew were usually fair and made a point of checking their sources. However, when it came to journalistic reportage on metaphysical or spiritual matters, they fell short of fairness, a prejudice based almost completely on their feeling threatened by the subject themselves. Most journalists are not interested in self-investigation; they labor under the illusion that their beliefs must not influence their objectivity. The sarcasm that they feel it necessary to display only says more about them than it does about the person they investigate. So my experience with the press had been mostly positive when they related to me as part of their “real” world—my acting, my political activism, my interest in traveling, or even my writing on stress reduction through meditation. But when it came to my interest in physical reembodiment or healing through past-life therapy, or my speculations on UFO activity and other matters that weren’t scientifically acknowledged as “real,” then negativity reigned. And when a movie critic reviewed a part I’d played in relation to what past life I might be portraying, it was yellow journalism that didn’t become his profession.