**Sorry for the long duration between entries. Internet cafes were sparce in the (incredibly inexpensive and a little ancient) provence of La Rioja. We are back up though, having now walked a little more than 300km from our starting point in St Jean Pied de Port in fourteen days. I write from Castrojeriz**

When you start the Camino de Santiago, they tell you, you become a Pilgrim, a Peregrino. You are irrevocably enjoined, they say, to an ancient lineage of similar kinetic experience. This trip is flooded with a sense of monumentality, as if the hugeness of history both attempts to crush you and raise you to the rafters simultaneously.

When you first walk into the Santa Maria entrance of the Cathedral at Burgos, your eyes are drawn immediately to the ceiling. Beautiful limestone pillars steam upward and cast your gaze towards austere Rococco ornamentation. Somehow, humans of three centuries past were able to make thousands and thousands of tons of stone seem delicate.

As you sit there, by the 25 foot high doors, light flitters through either side of the main cloister, which is the bottom of the Latin Cross-shaped builsing. Just below the windows are rows upon rows of carefully crafted arches, all decorated in awe-inspiring symmetry. Directly in front of you hangs a magnificent chandelier, at least nine feet tall and eight feet wide, by itself. It houses probably 200 candles (all electric now, of course). Behind that is the beautiful facade of the backside of the main Choir in which statues come together with mock columns and a massive Baroque oil paiting. It both demands your attention and confuses your eyes, for they know not where to turn first.

Throughout the entrance, just a tiny piece of the whole, are peculiarities that make you swarm simultaneously with divided focus and wonder. Its like coming downstairs as a seven year old at Christmas to find an entire room of presents just waiting to be opened, and not knowing where to dive in first.

The bell that chimes the hours is an automated statue named San Christo de Burgos who is famous for his mouth, which opens and closes as he makes the call to Mass. As 9 oclock bongs, people filter in, like the refracted light from the windows high above.

You see people of all sorts here. There are matronly old Spanish women with long skirts and sweaters who clunk with age and grace on the arms of the cane-bound Spanish men. There are younger people as well. Many families enter, and you are as likely to see a little girl with pigtails and lightup shoes as you are to view the pious priest, clad in the black of his costume and the white of his collar and hair.

There are tourists as well. Indeed, you are one of them. They come from all the countries of the world. Some are respectful and quiet. Some are vulgar and silently castigated with sharp, reproachful glances. Most, it seems, are confused as to their proper place.

They, we, are welcome in this place, but in what capacity? During visiting hours, we can pay our Euro to shuffle around the mostly unused Chapels, and maybe even sneal a few digital photos, although they ask us not too. We are even allowed to come to a Mass or two, however there, we are no longer allowed to be "touristas." No Touristas, read all the signs of the functional doors.

How do we change so easily, then? Is it the money that we hand over or the memories and sacredness that we try to burn to film that makes us tourists? Is it our attempt to claim a piece of a history that is probably not our own? Is it simply an intangible willingness to give or participate rather than simply recieve and witness that makes us a Pilgrim, or at least, not a tourist?

As you sit in the Santa Maria entrance of the Burgos cathedral, you breathe in questions of time immemorial with the granite cooled air. A sense of the gigantic swarms around you, yet there is a quiet, as well. There is a calm comfort in your own smallness in a world where we often try to be as big as we can be.

Perhaps this is one of the comforts of faith: we like to understand our own place and order of magnitude in the Universe. There is comfort in knowing the boundaries of oneself.

Yet as our history and our kicking-and-screaming history of progress can attest, in this knowledge there is also disquiet.

We are nothing if not paradox.

For now, the bell rings, San Cristo smiles and opens wide once again. The cathedral is filled with the singing of another Saturday Mass.