Maria Shriver says she is walking the Camino de Santiago alone, away from ‘the noise’

By Helena Thorncroft

WASHINGTON — Maria Shriver, the journalist, author and former first lady of California, told readers this weekend that she is walking the Camino de Santiago, alone and away from “the news, the notifications, and the relentless pull of a world that wants every last bit of my attention.”

“When you read this, God willing, I will be on the Camino de Santiago,” Shriver, a 1977 graduate of Georgetown College (Georgetown lists her as C’77), wrote in her weekly “I’ve Been Thinking” column in The Sunday Paper, dated Oct. 24. “I will be walking alone.” The column ran again on her Substack on Tuesday.

Among the things she said she wanted to step away from was a week of news that included the White House’s new women’s health initiative. President Trump signed an executive order on Oct. 19, “led by First Lady Melania Trump,” creating a White House Women’s Health Task Force and directing the National Institutes of Health to set up a Women’s Health Division, according to a White House fact sheet. The administration said the order “rescinds the initiatives of the prior Administration in order to broaden beyond research and prioritize translating research into improved clinical care.” It added that “while previous administrations have invested in women’s health research, the Trump Administration is enhancing, streamlining, and elevating Federal efforts.”

Shriver, who worked on the Biden White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, disputed the president’s description of the new effort as a first. “I am not attacking Melania Trump. I welcome her into this space,” she wrote. “I sincerely hope this new initiative will be backed by the funding women in this country need and deserve.” The Inquisitor has asked the White House for comment on her column.

‘Not a vacation’

Most of the column is about the walk. Shriver wrote that the pilgrimage had been “on my list for years,” and that she told readers in the spring she “couldn’t stop thinking about doing it.”

“So I stopped waiting for the perfect time and decided to just go,” she wrote.

She was firm about what the trip is not. “The Camino is a pilgrimage. It’s not a vacation, and it’s not exercise,” Shriver wrote. “It’s a deliberate, physical, spiritual act of putting one foot in front of the other and trusting where the road leads.”

The timing, she said, was tied to a birthday. “I have a birthday coming, and I wanted to walk into a new year of my life grounded not in my calendar or my to-do list or the latest outrage demanding a response, but in my heart and soul,” she wrote.

A friend’s line

Shriver wrote that a remark from a friend before she left had stayed with her: “If someone doesn’t know your feelings about this well, then they are not paying attention to who you are.” She turned that into the column’s theme, which is attention as “an act of love.”

She described rushing as “a form of unkindness I inflict on myself.” She listed what she now protects: “my sleep, my food, my exercise, my spiritual time, my quiet.” She also wrote that she wants “real, unhurried time with my children and grandchildren.”

She quoted the French philosopher Simone Weil twice: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” and “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” The second line, she wrote, “is why I am on the Camino.”

“That is what I am going to do out here on this road: pray,” Shriver wrote. “With my feet and my breath and the silence and the miles.”

The week before

She also wrote that the news cycle had worn on her in the days before she left. She cited the school shooting in Bend, which a fellow journalist told her had become “a blip” in newsrooms, along with riots in France and the run-up to next week’s election. She ended that passage on an optimistic note about voters. “I’m feeling encouraged as we head into this final week before Election Day,” she wrote.

Shriver closed by asking readers where their own “unmixed attention” will go this week. “Not the scattered kind,” she wrote. “The full kind.”

The Inquisitor has sought comment from Shriver through The Sunday Paper, and from the White House. This story will be updated with any response.

Photo: Maria Shriver (cropped). Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.