Encounters

The pilgrim

People call him a pilgrim, a wanderer, a walker. But maybe words aren’t enough to describe someone like him.

When he arrives with his worn walking stick, his dreadlocks tossed by the wind and that backpack that seems to hold everything he needs to live, I always feel that somewhere, time slows down.

He walks. He simply walks.

He crosses mountains, small villages and the back roads around Bergamo, Brescia and the rest of Lombardy as if the world were still made of real distances, of steps and seasons.

He sleeps wherever he can. Wherever someone opens a door, offers a quiet corner, a roof, a meadow. Sometimes he asks for something to eat. And almost always he finds someone willing to share a piece of bread, a bowl of soup, a word.

Once a year, he comes to my place too.

What really strikes me is his relationship with time. To reach a place we would get to in two hours by car, he might take two days.

And those two days aren’t a delay. They are the journey.

When he talks about his travels, the people he met along the way, the trails, the rain, sleeping outdoors or in a farmhouse, I feel I’m listening to something from another era.

As if he carried within him a way of living in the world closer to two centuries ago than to today.

We pass through places. He lives in them.

He owns almost nothing. And yet he carries stories, encounters, silences and roads that many of us have forgotten.

Maybe that’s what makes him special: just by walking, he reminds us that a human pace of time still exists.