what makes it into your backpack?

Admittedly, I’ve never been on a true backpacking trip. You know the kind where you carry everything you need to sustain your life for days at a time in the wilderness – shelter, food, water, clothes, everything – on your back. You don’t bring books, pains me to say. You don’t bring anything that isn’t crucial for sustaining life. Your pack can’t be too heavy. Neither have I embarked on a pilgrimage over days and hundreds of kilometers. I say kilometers because the coolest of these trails are in Europe. Well, except for the Pacific Coast Trail. A native of the Seattle area, that one is practically in my backyard and hundreds of people walk from Canada to Mexico or the other way around every year. To be honest, Cheryl Strange’s journey along the PCT as chronicled in Wild irritated me. But in recent years, I’ve heard of so many people embarking on the Camino de Santiago in Spain and most recently have read Pilgrimage to Eternity by Tim Egan about his 1900 kilometer along the Via Francigena journey from Cambridge, England to Rome, Italy. The walkers in Spain seem to be so numerous, it is starting to become cliché. But the Via Francigena is, to me, little known and far more intriguing. Its path happens to trace so much carnage of the world wars of the 20th century and is littered with small abbeys and massive monuments built and dedicated to saints over the centuries. And as New York Times columnist David Brooks has recently noted, we have replaced saints with influencers as role models, and regardless of your faith practice, this is not positive for a person or society. The Via Francigena is the road priests and friars used to walk to get to Rome, for centuries past. Egan embarked on his own journey along this particular road after his mother’s passing to make peace with his long-vacated Catholic faith of his family and youth to reconcile the vastly different states of his and his siblings’ experiences and current faiths. Not everyone walks these roads to make peace with God or their faith practice, but it does seem they walk to make peace with something, and it is always, if not at the beginning, for sure by the end, very personal.

In my work as an academic advisor at Northwest University in Kirkland, WA, I work with a lot of students as they transition from home to college and from being a child under their parents’ authority to being an emerging adult. While it’s not a classic pilgrimage, it’s a journey for all of them. For some, it’s a little rough and their backpacks are heavy – not with laptops and books, but with stressors and pain they don’t even know are weighing them down. Just this semester, and we’re six weeks in at this writing, I’ve done what I can to help a student who discovered she’s pregnant after arriving to school, helped her find a way to tell her parents, (they were not helpful in their response), helped her navigate four trips to the hospital by ambulance caused by bleeding due to extreme panic attacks from the stress of this situation on top of starting and trying to keep up with school, helped her make the decision to petition for a medical withdrawal and transition to online school.  Another student arrived without the resources for a tablet or computer, so my colleague and I found her one. Just as she was getting set up to do her work, two weeks into the semester, she went to the hospital, twice in four days, after passing out. She’s still working with her medical providers to learn what’s wrong with her heart to make her blood pressure drop such that she loses consciousness, and her limbs go numb. She is not making it to class. She also needs a medical withdrawal so she can re-coup her tuition. But, she’s estranged from her parents (has been for the past 18 months) and if she withdraws, she’ll be homeless. A social worker, I am not. These are just two students among many. Most of what I do is help plan schedules and make sure students are taking the right classes, so they graduate on time. Some of what I do is help them navigate this monumental transition and change in their life and understand the stress of it and how it reveals so much of the past stress they’ve experienced and are still carrying in their backpacks. This work has driven me to read books such as What Happened to you by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey, The Deepest Well by Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris, and The Angel and The Assassins by Donna Jackson Nakazawa to understand the lasting impact of trauma and adverse childhood experiences and the ways a person can heal from them. Because these students are not carrying life giving supplies in their backpacks. They are carrying very heavy burdens of systemic racism, trauma and shame that are making it very difficult or almost impossible to keep walking.

I have also been learning so much about my story, my journey, and what I’m carrying in my backpack as I learn. Most recently, I read Atlas of the Heart by Dr. Brene Brown. It maps the lived experience of 87 very common emotions and helps distinguish what is actually true and being communicated when a person is experiencing something such as envy rather than jealousy or what underpins resentment or what sinister messages can be lurking behind nostalgia. Like Dr. Brown’s almost incredulous surprise at learning resentment has it’s foundational footings in anger, I was also taken aback. It made me think about the recounting in Pilgrimage to Eternity where Egan tells of his friend, Ron Simms, who is a familiar name to me having lived my whole life in the Seattle area. Simms was the first black King Count Executive, and has gone on from there to hold high ranking positions in the Obama administration. Egan tells of Simms journey along the El Camino Road, letting each experience of racial injustice and personal experiences of racism directed at him his entire life fall from his fingertips as he walked. He felt lighter and lighter with each step. I had to look hard at how quickly and easily I can recount the times my mother-in-law has mis-treated me. She’s so mean. The time she refused to eat anything except salad at the first Thanksgiving meal I cooked. The time she cooked my husband a birthday dinner, the menu and dessert everything his former girlfriend made for him whom she preferred and wished he married. She made sure I knew this is what Nancy used to make for him for his birthday. The time she looked at my then 18-month-old son with hemophilia wearing his dinosaur covered bike helmet at the Easter egg hunt so if he fell, we wouldn’t have to go to the hospital for a CT scan to make sure he wasn’t bleeding into his brain and said, “isn’t it bad enough you gave him this disease now you’re making him wear a helmet too?” (genetically, hemophilia came from me). My stomach is in a knot just recounting these. My backpack is heavy with them. Hers is not. It is I who need to lay them down. Again.

What I am learning, and why I want to walk this Via Francigena, is faith requires living with questions and the understanding that pain inflicted by others has to be set down or my pack will simply be too heavy. It’s not just my mother-in-law. My own story and journey with my parents is complicated. They chose to put another man’s name on my birth certificate and let me grow up not knowing who my dad was until I was an adult. This secret and betrayal of keeping it from me runs deep within me. I must practice the forgiveness I have cherished in my faith most of my life. There is also pain that comes not from people, but just life. Sickness, accidents, disasters. Systemic injustices can feel too large to even find a source, but they inflict pain, nonetheless. But that doesn’t change the fact that I can really only afford to carry that which is life giving: water enough to get me to the next town, a rain jacket, a layer for warmth, some nutritious snacks. Pain inflicted by those who were supposed to protect, like parents or pastors, is the hardest to lay down, but that also means it’s likely the heaviest. And we each have to carry our own pack and are ultimately responsible for what is left inside it. That’s a hard truth. But only then, with a pack properly supplied, can I travel on my journey unburdened and able to live into the gifts and work I am meant to. God help and sustain me.