Greta — On the Way, Spain

She was a farmer for 25 years, but she sold the farm a few years ago, and now she is looking for a man. 

Not just any man. Not just, some guy. She is looking for a particular man that runs a particular small business in a certain town on the Camino de Santiago. His name is David, and for the one hour she spoke with him, she said, it was like meeting the first person that ever really understood her. 

"It was like this," she said in her loping German accent, pointing to her eyes, then her forehead, and then outward, as if connecting to the eyes of this other person. This person who saw her so well. It was the universal sign for, "we clicked."

But that was two years ago.

"So where is he?" I asked. "Do you know what town?" 

Greta, a lithe woman of not quite 50 years, had struck her pace next to mine during a bridge crossing a ways back. She looked straight ahead when she answered, and she lowered her voice ever so slightly.

"Yes, I know the town." But she didn't say which. She kept her eyes on the road.

"So...what will you do when you get there?"

She wasn't sure. Two years ago, while she walked her first Camino, she'd gotten a feeling about him right away, but was eager to keep going. So she visited with him, got a stamp in her Pilgrim Passport, and moved on down the trail. 

"Ever since, it's like this name in my mind...David David...and this feeling in my chest, this, who is this man?"

She fluttered her fingers over her ribcage, and took a deep breath in. 

"I am not in love, I think. I just need to see." 

She didn't strike me as a flighty woman, prone to romantic larks. Her backpack was as spare as any I'd seen. The long, lean muscles under tanned skin belonged to a woman that worked hard, in the sun. A farmer, she said, doesn't have time for long walks. 

"Because always there's the cows," she said. 

And yet, here she was, on the Camino, for the second time. Looking for the man who put a red heart stamp in her booklet, after a conversation she can't forget. 

"I did not come to the Way looking for a man, or God, but now there is this man. And God, maybe here he is too, and maybe I forgot about him for a long, long time."

Language barrier or not, I could see her eagerness was guarded. Her mission wasn't one she chose for herself, it seemed, nor was she particularly comfortable with it. It just, happened to her. 

"I had long, long hair before," she said, touching the close-cropped brown locks she had now. "But I cut it. If I find him, I don't want it to be about the eye, what it sees. It should be more." 

I think sometimes we get to witness important moments in people's lives. Times where change and awareness and fate and chaos come together for little bit of meaningful something. Whatever Greta finds, or doesn't find, in her little town on the Camino, this was a little bit of meaningful something. This decision she made to find an answer for the tingling in her ribcage.