The mere act of walking, often considered a last resort to an American culture obsessed with fast cars and quick solutions, has the potential to be a life changing experience, according to Paso Robles residents Petra Wolf and Mike Metras.

The married couple, who moved to Paso Robles from Germany earlier this year, are spreading a message of how their own personal journey, charted along the back roads and countryside of Northern Spain, gave them a new perspective on life and set them along a new path for the future.

The pair met while along the Camino de Santiago — translated in English to The Way of St. James — which is a collection of more-than-1,000-year-old pilgrimage routes that lead to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. The town of Santiago is thought to be the final resting place of St. James and every year the pilgrimage attracts somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000 different people from all walks of life and from a kaleidoscope of different ages, races and religions.

“There are 100,000 people that walk and there are 100,000 different reasons for why; everyone has his own reason,” Metras said.

For the now married pair, each of their own journeys along the Camino de Santiago started independently with a calling that they could not ignore.



A call from the heart

In 2003, Wolf was living in a German town that intersected the Camino de Santiago when she said she felt a call to walk along the path. Temporarily leaving her life behind, she decided to walk from Germany to Spain with nothing more than a pack on her back and a willingness to chart a new path for herself.

For Metras, the call to make the journey happened “very ambiguously.” Three years after retiring from life as a technical writer, he was reading about Spain — and northern Spain in particular — and was more than just interested; he said he was drawn to it.

“The hairs stood up on my arms and I had shivers down my back,” he said.

The singular experience didn’t dull over time, and he too decided to set out for northern Spain to walk along the Camino de santiago.

Though the pair started from different points along the Camino — Wolf from Germany and Metras from the Pyrenees Mountains in Spain — they managed to meet each other along the way and stayed together for the rest of the journey. Wolf’s journey through northern Spain to the coast lasted 110 days and roughly 1,500 miles. For Metras, his long walk along the Camino totaled 550 miles and 40 days. They are totals that the two look back on with humor.

“I like to say I had my 40 days and 40 nights in the desert,” Wolf said.

The trip had lasting ramifications on the pair, as somewhere on the grassy expanse of Spain, the two gained a new perspective on the world and a new philosophy on how to live in it. And it wasn’t just them, Wolf said, everybody who walks the path comes away a different person.

“You can learn a lot about your life and sometimes you know that you have to change something in your life when you walk,” she said. “You will not come back the same, if you go on a long walk you will change.”



A new philosophy

Wolf and Metras have translated their experience walking the path into a metaphor for how to approach life and a directive to follow their hearts at all times.

“If you hear the call to do something, follow it,” Wolf said. “It starts with the first step like when you walk — when you take the first step on this path you will go through.”

Everyday living while walking on the Camino also offered the pair a new view of the more material things in life. While on a trek, walkers carry everything that they will need on their backs and stop along the way to eat and sleep at what are called refugios. Wolf’s pack, for example, weighed in at just 18 pounds and held everything that she needed for close to three months of living on the road.

“When you have such a change in your lifestyle from living in a house with everything there to living where you are carrying your life on your back, you realize that all that stuff in your house doesn’t mean anything,” Metras said.

Another piece of advice from the Camino that has worked its way into a part of the couple’s lifetime philosophy is to “learn to walk at their own pace.” The roughly 100,000 yearly pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago not only come from different countries but from highly disparate experience and fitness levels. Some, like Wolf and Metras, walked 15 miles a day and some, like a 78-year-old Kentucky man that Wolf met on the trail, took the journey a few hundred yards at a time before stopping to rest. Still, no matter what their pace, they all made it to their eventual destinations.

Metras and Wolf have parlayed their experiences on the road, not only in treks and pilgrimages across Spain but also through Italy and Germany, into a philosophy that they call walking with awareness, by which the walker incorporates all their senses into “seeing the things around you” and discovering the self.

“It is about being alive when you are walking,” Metras said.

“The walk can give you answers that you perhaps need for your life,” Wolf added.



Passing on the Message

In an effort to spread the message of walking with awareness, Metras and Wolf will be giving a slideshow documenting their universal pilgrimage to Santiago on Tuesday, July 15 at 7:30 p.m. in the Live Oak Room at Centennial Park, 600 Nickerson Drive in Paso Robles. They have presented similar slide shows all around the country and in Germany. The presentation incorporates pictures that they took along the way, the story of their long walk and music as a backdrop for their words. Admission for the event is $7.

“It is an adventure story but it is a life story,” Metras said. “It is a life story where we indeed ourselves have walked with awareness across northern Spain and carried lessons out of it.”

Metras, also an author, has even written a book about his experiences on several pilgrimages across Europe. “Walking Life: Meditation on the Pilgrimage of Life” is available through the couple’s Web site, www.walkingwithawareness.com.

Metras and Wolf also host a variety of workshops connected to the art of walking, including “Walking your Sacred Path,” set for Friday, July 18 to Sunday, July 20, “Spiritual and Practical Preparation for Walking a Pilgrimage” from Friday, Aug. 15 to Sunday, Aug. 17 and “Walking with Awareness Walking Classes.” For more information on any of these classes, visit their Web site.

Through their informative slideshows, workshops and Metras’s book, the two are spreading the message that how one physically walks through life can be indicative of how one metaphorically walks through life. In each of these cases, Wolf said the object is to “enjoy every step.”





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