The Iron Cross

“When your heart becomes tired, just walk with your legs – but move on.”

Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage

During these final days of a turbulent 2020, I’ve been reimagining what it might look like to “be the change I want to see in the world.” And as I prepare to move on into the new year, I ask myself the question, What can I let go of?

Last year, prior to the pandemic, I walked a portion of the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage route that leads to the tomb of Saint James in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. A high point of my journey—literally, the highest point of the Camino, erected on a 4900-foot summit—was the mystical Cruz de Hierro, or Iron Cross. It stands between the towns of Astorga and Ponferrada at the edge of the Leon Mountains.

Along the way, I’d visited the majestic, awe-inspiring cathedrals of Burgos, Santo Domingo de la Calzada, and Leon, but here on a knoll was a humble, equally awe-inspiring outdoor monument: a simple black cross, stationed atop a thirty-foot-high oak post which was grayed by age and weather. One of the oldest shrines along the Camino, it offered no Romanesque arches or vibrant stained glass, just open sky and the muted blue of a cold, drizzly, late September afternoon.

Pilgrims traditionally carry a stone symbolizing a sin or burden from home or from the starting point of their Camino journey. They relinquish it here, at the base of the cross. The Iron Cross isn’t situated on a natural hillside, but on a huge mound of rocks and stones left behind by millions of pilgrims from around the world each year.

The enormity of the pile was heartbreaking.

I pulled a rough, dark gray stone from my backpack and held its weight firmly in my hand. I was ready to cast off the heaviness of a regret I’d carried, an emotion that did not serve me. I was ready to surrender it at the altar of Cruz de Hierro.

I climbed the hill.

I felt chilled, buffeted by wind, as I stood beside the towering mast. Looking down, I noticed more than stones and rocks. People had left behind shells, photographs, notes, paintings, trinkets. I smiled at an abandoned pack of cigarettes. With silent words of gratitude, I added my stone to the pile.

The cross then urged my gaze upward, to connect with something beyond the burdens of humanity laid at my feet.

Nature offers countless variations of “letting go” ceremonies. Carefully placing a stick in a burning fire, releasing a leaf onto a moving stream, tossing a flower into the ocean, blowing dandelion fluff into the breeze.

But my experience at the Iron Cross was different from these ceremonies. Laying a stone here symbolized the release of a burden, but that stone didn’t disappear. It wasn’t consumed by fire or swept up and carried away by water or wind. It remained tangible, to serve as a testament and, possibly, an inspiration to others. It became part of a collective, one with the burdens that pilgrims have entrusted to the hill over the centuries.

In this “letting go” ceremony, it was up to me to take action and move on, to be the agent of change. At Hierro de Cruz, the work of releasing was not performed by flames, current, waves, or wind, but by me.

That afternoon, I continued the trek ahead, feeling a bit freer. Now, more than a year later, events that transpired following my Camino experience make me eager to leave 2020 behind.

The journey that lies before us will be challenging. As fellow pilgrims, may we all learn to travel more lightly.

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal”