Just Sit Still

There's a strange kind of joy in stopping. Not the relief of finally reaching a bed at the end of a stage, but the smaller, stranger joy of pausing mid-afternoon, boots still dusty, with kilometers left to go.

That's what I found at El Jardín del Alma, just before Astorga. Someone had dragged an old, weathered armchair — the kind that's lost whatever house it used to belong to — out into the middle of a hay field and left it there, half-sunk in the grass, facing nothing in particular. No wall, no table, no reason. Just a chair, a field, and sky. I sank into it anyway, arms draped over the back, and let myself be exactly as tired as I was.

Donativo stops like this one have a different rhythm than the rest of the Camino. You give what you can, and in return you're handed permission to stay a while. Around me, other pilgrims were doing the same: someone sharing an orange with a stranger, someone else just staring at the clouds moving over the field, nobody asking where anyone had walked from that day or what waited for them back home. For a few minutes, none of that mattered. We were all just people who had walked far enough to need to sit down.

I think that's part of what the Camino teaches you, if you let it: progress isn't only measured in kilometers. Some of the most important ground gets covered while you're not moving at all — while you're sitting in a broken armchair in a field, watching the light change, letting your legs remember how to be still.

I didn't rush to get up. Astorga could wait a little longer. The chair, the field, the quiet company of strangers — that was the whole point of the day.