Stage 33. Montverdun to Montbrison - 17kms, cloudy and mild

We awoke in our fortified hilltop bastion with thoughts of pillage on our minds. We determined to descend upon the village of Montverdun and make a two pronged attack on the local boulangerie. 

Success! It was open and the proprietor very happy to do business. We left with two fresh pain au chocolat and retired to the local bar for tea.

Today's was the last of the flat stages before we rise up into the Massif Central once more, although it did have two hills to keep us honest. Not only that, but the path on these climbs was muddy after the recent rain.

This stage held many of the features of recent days - connections with domestic animals, houses clad in red ivy and landscapes with increasingly autumnal colours.

This donkey seemed so excited to see us. He brayed loudly from the back of the paddock, and positively galloped down to greet us. He was going so fast that we wondered if he would stop in time or go crashing through the fence!! Don't you love his face.

Just before we entered the little village of Champdieu we passed through this beautiful woodland gully.

Many of these small villages still have enormous churches.

Not long after this, we began to enter the outskirts of Montbrison which is by far the largest town we've passed through on the Cluny way. It felt reminiscent of our approach to some of the larger towns in Portugal and Spain.

This roundabout was outside a school. We've never seen anything quite like this in Australia - it's amazing they haven't been vandalised!!

Montbrison is an old town or city with narrow lanes and small squares in its central ville.

There is also a little stream that runs past the huge cathedral-like church.

We arrived in good time and have now secured our lodging for the night - a room with a couple who run the local creperie. Unfortunately the creperie is closed on Mondays - our Bretagne-like galettes shall have to wait!

We are now in the last week of our pilgrimage and with a little more space in our days some more general reflections are rising up.

We are conscious that our blog, from the outside, conveys a kind of idyll. Glorious days of walking, beautiful countryside and picturesque villages, great food and hospitality. It's all true. But there's also something more difficult to convey and vulnerable to being falsified by our selected photographs and descriptions, and that is the lived quality of our days. 

Virginia Woolf once said that biography renders its subject just a little less than life sized, as if their lives are not quite as messy, ambiguous and multi-faceted as our own. And maybe any story we tell, even our own stories about our experience, runs this kind of risk.

One of the lived, embodied features of our experience in the second phase of our pilgrimage in France has been the sense of pilgrimage as a practice, and what that really means.

In 2013, our pilgrimage tended strongly towards our destination - Santiago and then Finisterre. This time, Le Puy does not loom quite so largely as a destination in itself, and this seems to mean that the daily discipline of just getting up and keeping walking for the time we've committed to comes into focus. And the discipline involves more than just the walking, there are practical matters to attend to - finding supplies and accommodation, washing and drying clothes... and emotional issues - managing expectations, adjusting to new arrangements, strange places, changeable weather, iPad idiosyncrasies, niggling aches and strains... and all of this, in tandem with someone else who is having to deal with the same things!

At one level, this is a description of daily life for everyone. We have a destination vaguely in mind, a notional goal, but meantime there's washing, cooking, daily work and relationships to negotiate. In one sense pilgrimage in fact simplifies all that - pares it down. But a difference is that on pilgrimage you are constantly on the move. There's no settled place and set of conditions from which to live. You're always arriving and leaving, dealing with unfamiliar circumstances. This is a freedom, but it's also a commitment to keep being displaced, being open to the future coming towards you.

And we wonder if this is how pilgrimage as a practice is transformative, and one of the ways you really do begin to learn in your experience what we all know in theory - that it is the journey and not the destination that is primary, and that life is about keeping on saying 'yes' to, undergoing and learning through the journey that turns out to be ours.

As always, we welcome your thoughts and comments on these emerging reflections - after all, this blog is titled 'Turn to Wonder'! In the meantime, we remain grateful for this amazing opportunity and experience.

Bon chemin

Sarah and Neil