2 women walking on a hiking path with mountains in the background

Buen is Spanish for ‘good’ and camino can mean road, path, journey or way. The phrase ‘buen camino’ is a greeting most commonly associated with the Camino de Santiago or the ‘Way of St. James’, a network of walking routes leading to a shrine to the apostle James in Galicia in northwestern Spain. Per Wikipedia, the pilgrimage has attracted 200,000 pilgrims a year.

The phrase carries many spiritual or philosophical meanings beyond its literal meaning of ‘safe journey’. Buen camino is often spoken as a blessing, and a form of encouragement and a statement of shared solidarity in our individual life journeys. Beyond an expression of connection, it expresses a hope that we walk our various paths with intention and purpose and that we find a meaningful mission.

Buen camino to you and yours…

Closing Quotes:

“The only journey is the one within.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-1926, Austrian poet

“Your life is a journey of learning to love yourself first and then extending that love to others in every encounter.” – Oprah Winfrey, b. 1954

“Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older, we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us, we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are.” – William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1923

As always, I share what I most want and need to learn. – Nathan S. Collier