Little Peregrina

If anyone is still checking this, I'm updating posts from the trip, and I'm hiding them while I work on them. So...posts will gradually disappear and then, with any luck, reappear again, with better writing, reflections, and photos!

Are you sure? N wants to know.

The only reason I can think of to stay is to savor longer the rich homesick feeling, to receive more beautiful letters telling me how loved I am. 

There is value in knowing when to give up the ghost.

I had reasons for making this journey, things I hoped to learn, but we can never plan these things, can we? I´ve learned that it´s foolish to leave a good home, a good life, just to show I can. I´ve learned that I may be no social butterfly, but I thrive on having around me people I love and can talk with. I´ve learned that I like to be alone in the morning and in community in the evening. I prefer wet mountains to arid farmland. And I don´t like many Germans, but Koreans generally like me (this I knew before, though). I learned to efficiently pee in the woods.  I am a princess - I want my nightly bath and nice warm bed, but i can withstand quite a lot when put to the test.

And that´s just the thing - this is a test for the sake of testing. Soon, my little Korean friend (wherever you are), said that when her foot hurt (from a serious childhood injury) she thought of African women everyday walking 10 km each way for water. It encouraged her to go on, to not feel sorry for herself. But it isn´t self-pity I feel - when I think of that African woman, I wonder what she´d think of me. I thnk she´d think I was nuts, to trade my comfort for her pain. So is my lack of gratitude in evidence in giving up this opportunity, or having the conceit to take it in the first place?

I´ve spent a lifetime feeling that I always need to be going somewhere. Taking the long view. But I think maybe that ¨making somtehing of myself¨needs to be a casualty of this experiment. I am what I love and how well I love it, and mothing more or less. 

I´ve been paying attention to my earworms. This morning (as relief from the morning´s wake up song...Girl from Ipanema), was Take Me Home Country Road. 

See you on Tuesday.

I am deeply homesick. It will not subside. I am trying to find a way home. This seems ridiculous...putting my body and my heart through this...for what? For the knowledge of what home is.

Not a great day today, so far anyway, in the sense of things to see and experience, although physically I am miles better. 

Left the lovely Cirauqui this morning without breakfast. Inoa, our hospitaera, had told us we´d find food in Lorca, 5 km away. The road leading out of Cir. is a Roman road, with ancient cobbles still barely emerging from the gravel. I crossed the first of many bridges today (modern, medievel, Roman, and everything in between), to arrive in Lorca, just before 10, as Lucille from Switzerland pulled up behind me. Everything was closed, so I opened my bread bag and shared with two other hungry souls. All food is communal on the camino, no matter how it is acquired.

Made a surprisingly cold stroll 4.5km to Villapuerta, where I planned to wait out impending rain, which never materialized. Going into the panaderia, I met Lucille again going out. She´s just out of university, and speaks German, French, and Italian, because htey are all her mother tongues. Discussed the pros and cons of being from a culture where multilinguality is imperative. 

Another 4 km to Estella, passing by a lovely abandoned church, where the Griffon vultures were circling. I began to feel like their best lunch prospects. Crossed through incredibly smelly fields, ¨like a ripe shite¨said Richard from Ireleand put it. I met him day before yesterday as I ascended Mount Pardon. He has until Aug 9 for his walkabout...at least it would be ¨very advisable¨for him to put an end to it then for his sister´s wedding. He´lls have to find work along, though, which may not be too difficult. Said in Lorca (really?!) he´d met a bartender who just stopped his pilgrimage and started up in the restaurant. 

Didn´t like the looks of EStella, but my next destination seemed too far. (I couldn´t have gone on, I keep telling myself, but now I´m 2nd guessing of course.) Am staying at an albergue just on the other side of Estella, in a suburb called Arnegy. The ¨worst¨in some sense s far, as it is basiclaly the basement of a Boys and Girls Club. Nly cold showers ina  co-ed bathroom without shower doors, so no bathing for me tonight. Fighting the urge to go on to Monjardin, only 7 km but straight up a steep hill. where I know I would find Richard from Ireland and Heather and Griffin from Washington state, all people I really like. But I feel this is best for me. No one so far I can really communicate with except for Peter, the volunteer hospitalero from Germany. May be the camino´s way of detaching me and making me walk my own road. Although I´m learning not to get too excited when an albergue is quiet at 3:00...more always come along, especially more Germans. Apparently, a popular German book discusses the camino so they´ve all picked up their sticks and started walking. Considering the number I´ve encountered, I´d be surprised if there are any left in their own country. 

Briefly, this albergue is a municipal albergue, run by the government. They are all 5 or 6 euros per night. Some are very nice. This one, not so much. Other types of albergues are private, like the one in Cirauqui last night, and they cost 9 o 10 euros but are usually cozy, nice environment. Also, there are parochial albergues, run by churches, which are donativo - donation only - but I haven´t stayed in one yet. 

I hate how difficult it is to write here. No time to compose really, even though I try to do a little on paper first. I´ll fix it all up later, and I will fill in the last days tonight, I hope, but I really despise how elementary this writing is. 

Love..

1) On the way out of Obanos this morning, I could barely walk. The bunion on my left foot hurt like hell, and I had a blister under the same toe. I saw others just sauntering ahead, and I though...I just want to WALK!!! So, I put my left foot in my sandal, my right foot in my boot, and started crying. I cried all the way to Puente La Reina. 

Then I thought...so be it. So I go slowly. I will go however far I can with whatever time I have. I will do my best. This isn´t a race. Maybe, the problem is that I am becoming too attached to the people I meet. The slower I go, the more people I encounter. Let them pass by. And I will pass by that which I do not love. 

2) New skill: I peed in the woods...twice. This is good...it means I am drinking a lot of water. 

3) At only noon, I stopped at a beautiful city on a hill and sat in the doorway of the closed albergue. Werner, from Germany, came by and we had lunch overlooking the wheat and olive strewn hills beyond. I met Werner in Obanos with a ¨camino¨family...Ana from Sweden and Angela from Toronto. But they had gone on ahead...Werner was a camino widower. 

The albergue at Cirauqui was miraculous. Cozy. Inoa, the hospitalera, and her husband live there and make dinner for pilgrims every night in their basement, which is an old wine cave. We had leek soup and a spicy spaghetti. And, of course, wine. 

4) Katy and Chris from New Mexico passed on some of their 600 mg ibuprofen. I think my life has changed, now. 

Today, I also met...Brenda from Ireland, Celia from Germany, and Lucille from Switzerland.

I just wrote a loooooooooooong entry. And it got eaten. I´m in Roncesvalles, Spain. I´ll have to try again later.

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces. ~rmr


Today, I bought a plane ticket. In early April, the wind will carry me into the south of France. From there, I will carry myself across the Pyrenees, through northwestern Spain, for 500 miles. I will go alone. Some time in mid-May I will arrive in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.*

I’d never heard of it. In fact, few Americans attempt to walk. But every year, thousands of people set off along many routes that converge in Santiago, at the cathedral dedicated to St. James the Greater, the first disciple called by Jesus. (Legend says that St. James’ bones are laid there.)

I decided to take this trip to commemorate two years of transformation. Someone I trust perceived that this experience would not be so much a beginning for me as much as the consolidation of the changes in my life. And I believe she is right...the pilgrimage seems to have begun the moment I decided to undertake it.

I am so very excited. 

 

*Don’t tell my mother. I’m going to discuss it after they get back from Ukraine in January.