8th Day: Castenada to Pedrouza

"God made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us." Acts 17:26-27

The above was from the Mass reading today, May 4. I read it on a break and thought it was so applicable to this pilgrimage we are on. 

We are walking on a part of the earth where we don't usually dwell to seek God. But he is with us all the time, no matter where we are. 

He is also in the forests of eucalyptus trees. 

In flowers on the ground.

In flowers on bushes.

And in flowers on trees. We go by things that often remind me of home. I wonder what I would see if I walked through my neighborhood, like it was a Camino, looking for beautiful things to photograph.

We walk by colorful doors.

.

Old and new horreros. 

Grateful graffiti.

Pine trees.

We rely on the yellow arrows to point us in the right direction. Sometimes they are easy to see.

                            

And sometimes more difficult. Diane, one of our fellow pilgrims, is fascinated by the arrows. Wouldn't it be nice, she said, to have yellow arrows like this in our real lives. When we are on the Camino, we can think we are lost or that the road seems too hard to be right, but when we see the yellow arrow, we know we are headed in the right direction. Sometimes in life when things seem too difficult, we think we are off course. But this is not always, or maybe even usually the case. There are times when we would love a yellow arrow. Diane said that she thinks that sometimes God sends us people in our lives to serve as a yellow arrow.

We are grateful to have this pilgrimage, to have the time to walk and pray and think. It is a kind of walking retreat.

In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius says of retreats, that they "draw down upon us all the graces of God in their greatest plentitude."

We see God's graces in the beauty all around us.

We pray that we can in some small way serve as a channel of God's grace to others.