Navarette

The fiesta two nights ago in Navarette was a pleasant surprise. (I note that fiesta and

siesta share the same root, iesta, which surely translates to “Let’s Stop Working Again”). I drank 1-Euro Rioja and ate two bowls of migas for 1 Euro each. On top of the merely 5-Euro albergue, it was a good day out.  A live band played Spanish and Latin tunes, and the usual English-language repertoire of Lady Gaga, Tom Jones, and Spongebob Squarepants. Mom and I began singing along to “Delilah” and were joined by Marie Anne. Carrie stayed at a safe distance, for there is nothing so terrifying to a teenager as an adult body animated by music, and it’s a close call whether it’s more horrific for the music to have been produced before the teenager was born or the music is that of the teen and her cohort. Small children chased one another through the crowd.

When we arrived earlier, we were greeted by the piercing sound of an instrument (perhaps a dulcimer) that must have been designed by the court jester of some Navarran king, with the intent of disabling his enemies. It seemed to operate, like a hacksaw, on the region between the ear canal and the spinal column. When we went to investigate the piercing sound, wondering if perhaps there might be old women splayed about in the square, stockinged feet pedaling at the air, desperately trying to cover their ears, we found a stage full of small children, mostly girls and a few boys. The old women were in fact watching, and their ears appeared to be wholly unprotected.  The girls were dressed in what was obviously the local traditional dress, snow-white dresses with flowers of fabric sewn on every eight inches or so, and white tights under shoes with red straps that wound up the calves like those of Roman soldiers’ shoes.

The children kicked uncertainly at the music and toward one another in a Jota Riojana that we could see being done correctly by a few older women and some teenage girls. There were a few little boys on stage as well, one of whom, 6 years old, we later saw (shown in the Facebook photos) at a restaurant with his parents and his eight-year-old brother. I got his mother’s email address and sent her the three photos I’d taken of him and the little girl whose hand he held.

Penance on the Camino

When you think of walking the Camino, the first thing you think about, if you are

thinking clearly, is walking. But what you should really be thinking about is snoring. Get 12 to 50 strangers together in a room, and about 1 in 6 will be accomplished snorers. It’s an oddly intimate thing, to be let in on the unconscious behaviors of strangers. And of course the reactions to snorers are universal, ranging from amusement (if the snorer is going at it in the middle of the day and you have nothing better to do) to uncontained rage (if you are trying to sleep).   Marie Anne related a story of a German pilgrim who, fed up by the raucous snoring of two other pilgrims, exploded in a Germanic volcano.  “And zen,” she said, making a motion with her hands, “silence.”

“Did you laugh?”

“Of course!” she said.  “Eet was very funny.”

Some hostels will put 50 people in the same room. In others, there might be only 8 or 9. In any of them, a few features could benefit from some consulting:

• Snoring – the solution? White-noise machines in every dormitory room. The quality of sleep would go up greatly for each of the 8 to 50 people. In the albergue at Santo Domingo, they actually had a Special Room for Snorers. It’s a good idea, but what is the incentive for a snorer to sign up to sleep with his fellows? It’s like asking cannibals to share living quarters.
• Fresh air. Walk into a dorm room after people have been sleeping in it for several hours, and you’ll feel like you’ve entered a warm mist of accumulated exhalations. It’s unpleasant, but it’s also a sure-fire way to get sick. Every one of our five-person party has now gotten sick. Solution? Open windows and blankets.
• Early-Morning Noise. I’ve written about noise before. Backpacks should be stored outside the rooms. (Valuables may be kept inside or in a locker). At the very least, pilgrims should take their packs out of the rooms in order to stuff and arrange them and turn bright lights on them.  Bathrooms and showers should not be close to the sleeping areas. Signs should stress that talking should be kept to a minimum, and then only in low voices (whispers are actually louder than a low voice). Julio should be barred from all albergues.

A recent discussion on a Camino-related website addresses this very issue:

Why do you stay in albergues? Do you enjoy it??
Is it for the price? Is it because you like the bunks? Snoring? Shared bathrooms?
Is it for the comradeship of other pilgrims? Penitence for past sins?
I am curious why some people actually choose to stay in albergues even when they can easily afford other type accommodations.

I actually do both, but some people seem to believe that not staying in albergues cheapens the experience and is not a “real” Camino. I just can’t figure it out.

I’m thinking the main reason is cost.  There is simply no comparing the 5-9 Euros a night with a hotel. Of course, in many of these villages, there aren’t hotels.

We walked about 20km from Navarette to Azofra.

Marie Anne says my face has gotten thinner. I may have lost a few pounds, though I eat a good deal more than I do at home, including fine chocolate by the half-bar. I have been doing this since I was a boy in Germany, and all my German relatives knew that the price of an audience with me was one or more bars of Milka or Lindt chocolate.  (They knew better than to buy Cadbury or Hershey).

Azofra

They’re harvesting the rioja grapes, but slowly. Not far from here, it rained for about 35 days in July and August, and now it’s been sunny for the full two weeks of our stay, a combination that is expected to produce a good grape vintage.  Julio is convinced Mom made a pact with St. Peter.  We ran across a few vineyard workers who had made a fire out of dead vines and were about to roast an impressive array of sausage and chorizo on it. Mom tried to invite herself over for a bite, but the men didn’t understand her.

The novelty of walking and of small villages was wearing off. My feet still start to hurt after 10 or 15 km, and that makes the walking less than pleasant. I try not to wish it over, I try to stay in the moment, but on some days it’s not what I want to be doing for six hours a day. So my work here is simply not to resist, because walking is what I’m doing. When you resist what is, you suffer, right?

Tired. Maybe a nap. More thoughts than usual today.

Staying in Jersey City for a while – yes. Need winter clothes from Bend. Skis too? Sell some items before movers come – like the sectionals and beds, the big stuff. Get rid of the Land Rover.

Mom soldiered on during the hike to tiny Azofra (“They are so happy the Camino runs through here,” Julio said, “the other towns nearby are so jealous”), in spite of a good deal of pain and discomfort. She has terrible blisters on her toes, and her liver hurts. Once we’d arrived, I went to my room and took a rare siesta, and when I found her again, in the kitchen, she said, “I was in bed and couldn’t even get up.” She went to bed early. I met my roommate, an older Spanish gentleman who assured me that I could keep the lights on and do whatever I wanted and he’d be able to sleep. I read The Girl Who Played with Fire for a while, but the book weighed around a pound and it didn’t make it into my backpack this morning.

As a matter of principle, or something, Julio doesn’t shave while he’s on a walk. But his upper lip got sunburnt, so he shaved it. This made him look Amish, I told him. I think he got self-conscious about looking Amish, so he shaved the sides off, and now he merely looks Chinese again.

Saturday October 1, 2011 Santo Domingo

Mom was still sick this morning, but she was up early, as usual, and cooking German-style crepes (pfannenkuchen, prime ingredient of mine and my sister’s favorite food as children, pfannenkuchen suppe), which she invited Steffi to share. Kiernan, the young Irishman, scored one too.

Mom and Carrie took a taxi (24 Euros) to Santo Domingo. Julio, Marie Anne, and I walked. Marie Anne was also still sick, suffering from an inflamed Achilles tendon, and, according to Julio, not in her usual condition for walking, so we set a slow pace over the 15 kilometers. I left my pack with Mom to take in the taxi; twenty-seven pounds lighter, I moved like Gene Kelly. I used my poles like swords.

The air is noticeably colder. Julio says that as we climb to Burgos, we will need to wear more warm clothing.

The countryside was still rife with vineyards and growing drier by the kilometer. There were more of the elevated cement aqueducts the farmers once used to irrigate their crops; they now use perforated rubber hoses, but the cement is just too heavy to move. One rest area has the following:  a water fountain with potable water; three stone lounge chairs; a bench; and, near a fence leading into what is probably private property, a sign saying:

Prohibido Defecar

That’s close to “Defecation Prohibited”, or even “Elimination Prohibited” — “As if there’s a government involved,” I said to Julio — but the English version on the sign is simply hopeful:  “Don’t Shit”. But in the nearby tissue nearby I saw ample evidence of violation. (Some Germans pointed out that the graphic, which showed a man leaning forward with one arm bent high in front of him, the other bent high behind, if strictly interpreted, really only prohibited defecating while sprinting).

One panorama not far from Azofra will stick with me. The corduroy golds and browns of fallow fields all helter-skelter of angle, various plots of yellow or green with parallel lines sketched by either ploughs or vines, copses of trees, and finally the hills beyond, from the blue nearest us to the charcoal to the light-grey in the distance. I kept worrying that at any moment I would thrust my walking stick in front of me and tear right through the canvas. Naturally I had no camera on me.

We stopped at the club of our first golf course on the Camino, the Rioja Alta Golf Club, and where there are golf clubs there will be other firsts, like yellow Porsche Caymans and unsuccessful plastic surgery.  The bocadillo we at there, though, was delicioso.  Leaving the golf club, we passed through a large suburb of hideous (e.g., American-style) boxy apartment complexes that was almost completely devoid of life.  “Se Vende” (For Sale) signs littered every balcony.  Here was another example of the crash of the speculative real estate boom in Spain. It was like walking through a post-nuclear-holocaust landscape.

Santo Domingo is named for a man (Domingo) who so failed at his monk studies that he was invited to leave. But he then spent the rest of his life building the area into a way station for pilgrims, and often got royal support for his efforts. The place became a village and now boasts numerous very old buildings, from a cathedral with fine examples of art to a Cistercian monastery.  And eventually he was canonized (Santo).

There’s a legend that repeats itself in various places in Europe, “the hanged innocent”. Most of them have the action taking place in Toulouse, but Santo Domingo has its own version.  (Legends are the bread and butter of the tourist and pilgrim business, along with relics like shards of Jesus’ cross, patches of his robe, and so on).  A man, woman, and their son, all from Germany, pass through Santo Domingo (or Toulouse) and stay at an inn. The innkeeper’s daughter propositions the son, who demurs, and she arranges to have his pack filled with silver from the church. The authorities catch him with it, and he is hanged. (This story could also take place in Texas).

After his parents walk all the way to Santiago and back, they return to the body, still hanging from the gibbet a month later, and are shocked to hear their son assuring them he is alive.  “Santo Domingo supported my weight all month,” he tells them (in Toulouse, it’s Santiago himself).  He neglects to explain why no one else has noticed him hanging there alive, or what he ate whilst hanging.  The parents leave the boy and run to tell the mayor, who is roasting chickens. He laughs, saying, “Your son is no more alive than these chickens,” whereupon the chickens spring to life, grow back their feathers, and run away.

The town still cares for two chickens.  Sheerly by coincidence, Julio and Marie Anne bought about two chickens’ worth of chicken breasts for lunch today, and added scrambled eggs just to get in the whole fowl lifecycle.

We were told that Azofra had a hostel like a fine hotel, but the one in Santo Domingo is at least as nice. Azofra had a cozy enclosed courtyard and a fountain in which pilgrims cooled their feet. The exterior was a modern design of stone and wood slats. It had a kitchen and rows of dining tables. It even offered double rooms for everyone – so far unheard of on the Camino. And the washing machine was free. (Curiously, the rooms lacked electrical outlets, so that we were all forced to stretch cords across the dining area to the two outlets available there).

In Santo Domingo, the hostel is several stories high. There is – and I’m not making this up – a lounge with a television. There are a dozen leather, or at least pleather, sofas. A kitchen. Lots of fine pictures of pilgrims walking. The construction is fine. And the showers are peerless. Six hooks on which to hang both old clothes and new, lots of water pressure and hot water, and no timer.

I write this after lunch as Mom saws logs and Marie Anne purrs in a lighter mode.  We’ll go to see the cathedral later. There is nothing I would like more than a yoga class right now.

It’s a crisp morning in Logrono.  It’s going to be another beautiful day in Spain, if perhaps a bit hot, especially given our late start.  The women have gone ahead, while Julio and I sit in a café-bar called Ibiza and consume bocadillos and café con leche (me) and hot chocolate (Julio).  Julio reads El Pais, one of the national papers, and translates for me the occasional outrage.  Julio often sounds outraged, but you don’t ever detect

real anger, resentment, or bad faith.  It’s more of a stance, like performance art done by someone who’s a comic at heart.

I’m now sitting at a table outside Ibiza, opposite a park.  The streets are largely deserted.  The dearth of thinking I have done on where I shall live, or what I shall write, or what direction to take next in my vocations, is more than a little surprising.  There was a time when I could not get certain topics off my mind.  Now I can walk and have nary a thought enter my head that’s aimed more than a few hours into the future.

But I must credit my instinct with knowing what I need, and apparently what I need is, truly, a break from the thinking and weighing and analysis.  Indeed, yesterday I had an intimation, a sense, that the detachment I feel from the life I led before the trip would prove to be fertile ground for feeling my way into what’s next.  I had the sense that I needed to quiet the chatter of before so as to be receptive to the whisperings of what I might want now.  This is a change from what I expected, which was to have ideas drop into my head via the alchemical process of walking meditatively.

Some of the Spanish cheeses are delicious.  Yesterday I discovered ventero, a soft cheese reminiscent of freshly-made parmesan.

I’m hoping Mom’s ailments do not worsen.  It would be ironic if, on this spiritual-

emotional-health pilgrimage, her health deteriorated simply because she could not get access to the food she needed.  Her diet in the U.S. is so rarefied and esoteric (compared to what now passes for nutrition in our country) that she usually has to shop and cook for herself to stay on it.  It’s even more difficult to be a vegan in Spain than in the U.S., and that’s not even counting the pilgrim’s diet.  To eat as a vegan here would require her to do more investigation in each town, walk farther, and spend considerably more.

But her spirits are indefatigable.  There is so much life in her that it’s unimaginable that it could leave her anytime soon.

In Estella, when I first met the Lebanese women, they told me that they’d spent a few

days traveling with a man who had recently lost his son.  “But tomorrow was the son’s birthday,” one of the women told me, “and I think he wanted to be alone.”

In Los Arcos there is a cathedral, the Iglesia Parroquial de Santa María de la Asunción,

that was built over a period of 600 years.  It betrays a mélange of styles, from Mannerist (~ 1530s to 1600) and Baroque (late 1500s to early 1700s) to Churrigueresque (late 1600s to early 1700s) and Rococo (1700s).  We walked through all of it and I took the pictures now on Facebook.  We sat down near the back of the church.  It was quiet.  There were perhaps eight people in it.

Suddenly, from behind and above us, from the choir, we heard a magnificent voice.  We turned to see a small, white-haired man, in a blue shirt and shorts like swim-trunks,

with his arms spread before him, perhaps toward Mary in the retablo, and he was singing “Ave Maria”.  I immediately turned on the video of my SLR camera.

For ten minutes, he sang three haunting versions of “Ave Maria” – Schubert’s, Gounod’s, and one we didn’t recognize – as the handful of us in the church simply sat motionless, aware that we were in the midst of something rare, powerful, and beautiful.  “My heart was beating so fast,” Julio would later say.  He sat on one side of a pew behind me, and Mom sat at the other end of it, wiping away tears.

By the time he was finished, I had walked with my camera up to the choir.  Again and again he reached his hands out over the bannister at which he stood, in supplication.  He reached the end of his last “Ave Maria” and turned around, drained, and made his way to a pew where two of his friends sat.  He sat down briefly, and then they all stood up and walked past me.  “Grazie,” I said.  He nodded at me and walked out the door.

Our group went outside into the quiet and light of the cloister, still emotional, and then

he was there too, like a magnet, but also looking frail, spent, and awkward, with tears in his eyes.  Seeing Mom’s own tears, he leaned toward her and said, in Italian, “I sang to remember my son.”  Marie Anne translated this, and Mom reached for him and hugged him.  He seemed to receive this awkwardly.  We were all crying.

Marie Anne and Julio thought he was Italian.  Julio thought he heard the day of his singing was the anniversary of his son’s death, perhaps even the third, rather than his birthday.

He would sing again that night, after mass, from the front of the church.

The next morning, he and his friends passed us on the Camino trail, in the dark.  His two friends walked on either side of him, and one step back.

To Viana

Last night in Los Arcos Julio and I shared two bottles of Rioja with our young friends Steffi, of Germany, and Jethro, of England.

Julio wanted to get up at five in the morning.

“Julio, that’s not humane.  I still have three hours of REM sleep left at five.  I wouldn’t ask a dog to get up at five.”

I may as well have gotten up at five.  Between the noises in the night, the rioja Julio forced down my throat, and my worsening cold, I slept fitfully.  I woke up feeling at least as sick as yesterday, but I was not going to take the bus again.  And on the evidence of today’s mostly very pleasant walk, I see that it’s more than possible to walk 20K even when you feel sick.  The way I feel at 6a.m. is apparently not predictive of how I’ll feel later on.

The countryside was beautiful today.  At first, we couldn’t see any of it:  we were underway at a quarter to seven, guiding ourselves by looking slightly away from the path so that the rods of our eyes, or perhaps it’s the cones, could discern the slightly lighter path from the surrounding field.  The sky was clear and the stars were popping.  We walked toward Venus, which is as close to romance as the Camino gets.  After an hour or so the sun stretched tentative orange fingers from east to west.  The light before and just after dawn was something to behold, draping soft warm tones over the ploughed brown of the furrowed fields, the yellows of the grasses, the dozens of different greens of the olive trees, the small but numerous vineyards, and, later, the pines and almond trees.  We were walking through 19^th-century landscape paintings.  We ate almonds from the trees and blackberries from their bushes.

The physical pains are mostly receding, at least for me. Soon we may all be enjoying ourselves as Julio does. Today I experienced moments of real enjoyment in the rhythm of stick-stick-sticking my way across the landscape, taking in the smells and the light and shadow.

We spent a good part of the day walking with (or near, because no one on the Camino walks at the same pace for more than a little while) two pleasant, lovely lasses from England, one from Leeds (Jenny), the other from London (Katrina).  Their good natures and medical kits came in quite handy, the latter for Mom’s wasp bite and my first burgeoning blister. Katrina just stopped by our dorm room to get this blog’s address, saying they were taking the bus onward in the morning and we’d likely not see them again, so now they’re here, practically famous. Do come walking in the U.S., girls!

Meanwhile, the Koreans still dress like Himalayan mountaineers on expedition.  Their entire heads and faces are covered with hats and bandannas.  They wear glacier glasses, long-sleeved jackets, and gloves – every last bit of skin or hair is covered against the sun.  I was passing one of them, seated, her features only barely apparent beneath all this protection, when she pointed at my feet and chortled merrily to her friends (if non-English speakers could ever be said to “chortle” – Lewis Carroll invented the untranslatably English word by combining “chuckle” and “snort”).

Julio told me more about what he said to the Belgian woman yesterday.  “I tol’ hair, ‘Why are you here?  You don’ speak the language, and in your veins there is no blood, only Coca-Cola.’”

“You said Coca-Cola?”

“Yes, to do this job you have to have some dynamism, not be there with your lists and your forms.”

“Did she understand you?”

“Of course not!” he said.  “I had to repeat myself.”

“They did seem to be unaware of the thousand-year-old tradition of the hospitalero, didn’t they?  Kings were constantly funding hospices for the care of sick and injured pilgrims – even leprosariums.”

“That is correct.”

Outside a café-bar where we stopped, Mom got stung by a wasp, twice, on her big toe.  She cried out and hopped around and we found her a chair and some ice.  “You’re going to have to suck it out,” she said to me, pointing to her leathery big toe.

“You’re thinking of snakes, Mom.  You get bit by a snake, I’ll be there.”

The Monastic Life

I didn’t realize the extent to which we would come to live an almost monastic existence on the Camino.  We wake up when it’s dark.  We then eat bread, perhaps with butter.  We strap on a hunchback (Mom calls her backpack “Quasimodo”) as a Catholic penitent might put on a hairshirt.  We walk, and walk, and walk. At nine or ten we stop for a snack. It’s an indescribable pleasure to simultaneously sit down after walking and eat after nearly fasting. The mid-morning break is one of my favorite times. Julio says that his favorite part of walking — and he told me he walks 250-300 days a year — is the eating.

At around one o’clock we check into the albergue and then Mom, Marie Anne, and Julio go shopping. I stay behind to wrestle with wi-fi or my Vodafone USB connection, upload photos, write blog posts, and check emails. We eat lunch communally around a wooden table, simple meals of real food, not far divorced from nature.

We sleep, often under nothing more than a sheet (in my case, a bedbug-resistant silk enclosure) on mattresses as thin as adult diapers, in bunk beds located in chaste dormitories, with people called pilgrims, or peregrinos.

I don’t have privacy, or no more than a medieval pilgrim might have had during stolen moments in an outhouse.  There is no night-life in the small towns, and even in the larger towns where there is night-life, it’s irrelevant to us:  hostel doors close at 10, or even 9:30.  There is no TV.  Indeed, just having a computer with Internet access and iTunes makes me more plugged-in than most, though all the hostels have computer terminals for hire.

Lights go out at ten.  I wake up in the dark.  And walk again.

And women do not enter anywhere into it.

This must be good for me somehow.

The End of Childhood is the End of Certainty

I won’t get into how, but I found myself explaining to Carrie what I know of the imago, or our image of what attracts us in a mate, and the operation of transference, rationalization, the unconscious, and denial.

The moment we realize that our parents, teachers, or other mentors are flawed – that they are human – is the end of innocence.  The god-like are seen in all their messy humanity.  To come to see the limitations of those we look up to and depend upon is a necessary, if painful, rite of passage.  But not everyone makes this passage.  Not everyone is ready, in this sense, to grow up.

The fundamentalist, the narcissist, the dependent and the victim for example, will simply double-down, insisting on their belief in certainty, such as in someone’s infallibility (in the case of the narcissist, his own), or the inerrancy and clarity of a text.  The fundamentalist purports to see absolute clarity in texts that are not only not clear, but were never claimed to be clear by anyone at anytime before Darwin.  The entirety of modern-day American-style fundamentalism is not “fundamental” to the Bible at all, but a relatively recent invention of the mid-1800s.  Rapture theology, for example, did not occur to anyone before it occurred to the Englishman John Darby in the 1830s.  How clear could it be?

But in the black-and-white, in easy answers, there is comfort and certainty, and comfort and certainty were never needed so much as when Darwin’s natural selection and geologist George Lyell’s dating of rocks, in the mid-1800s, both showed the earth to be far older than a literal reading of the Biblical myths would suggest.  Indeed, before the advent of science and reason in the Enlightenment, which was terrifying to some of the pious (and which Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann recently, and revealingly, identified as the root of all of America’s problems), no religion ever insisted upon the historicity of their sacred texts.  They did not take it literally.  They saw the tales as mythos, the stuff of finding meaning and of understanding the sacred, and not as logos, the province of fact, rationality, history – or science.

Once you confuse mythos with logos, it becomes difficult to think clearly.  Once you start building museum dioramas, as one can now find in Kentucky, in which humans frolic with dinosaurs, purportedly only a few thousand years ago, you will have so successfully rejected science that you are now at liberty to dispute without either evidence or science-based rebuttal the nearly universal conclusion of scientists worldwide that the earth is warming dangerously.  The same science that sends people into space, powers GPS, runs your cell phone, and heals the sick is dismissed when it runs into conflict with our beliefs, tribal mores, or other indices of identity.

If we are meaning-seeking creatures, then it is great comfort for meaning to come easily, and for answers to be readily at hand.  Humans fear few things so much as uncertainty.  The unknown has always been terrifying to our species.  And so we may seek to remain in, or return to, the comforts, the lack of uncertainty, of childhood.

On the Cushion

Yesterday morning I found myself once again thinking, Now, why am I doing this again….this Camino?  Is it fun?  If it is, will it remain fun?  Is fun even the right question?  I have slowed down a great deal, but apparently not so much that I have stopped craving more stimulation than is available.  Rural trails, small towns largely emptied of the young (or the middle-aged), few cafes, no night life.  I don’t even have books.  I suppose I could download more onto my MacBook’s Kindle app, but lights go out at ten.

Here is what is different.  I am not doing much on online dating sites.  I don’t check my phone for emails or texts – there are none there.  I’m not doing any coaching, and sending and receiving few emails about it.  Some of the Tourette’s tics (but only Type I – I don’t get to shout or curse, damnit) are largely in remission.  Because Tourette’s is exacerbated by stress, I take this as the clearest, most objective evidence of change.  One tic that had become quite prominent over the summer arose from an urge to pop my left knee as you might crack your knuckles.  I haven’t seen it in about a week.

Yes, this is embarrassing.  I’m out now.

And I’m still not giving much thought to where to live.  The house in Bend already seems a memory.  By the time I return, it will be completely out of mind – just as my things will be out of the house and in storage.  I may never see it again, and that’s all right.  The letting go really sped up in the end, surprising my expectations.

Nevertheless, I am reminded of meditation retreats, where people may at times find themselves wanting to run away, screaming.  But that is exactly the point of watching the mind.  You will eventually see things that you aren’t keen to see.  Resentment, cravings, attachments, irritability, annoyance, jealousy, rage, desire, rejection, discomfort.  Meditation doesn’t make the unpleasantness of the outside world go away – it brings our relationship with the outside world into sharp focus.  The path to any kind of enlightenment isn’t filled with peak moments.

You could even say the path doesn’t go anywhere in particular.  The goal may simply be to stay on the path, the middle path, in which we neither cling to, indulge in, or identify with, nor push away, reject, repress, or condemn.  We may choose either erroneous path out of a craving for certainty, whether the need to have an identity or an explanation we can cling to, or the need to reject what is going on in order to hold on to the storylines we have, or to avoid painful feelings.  The middle path is the one where we observe our experience without judgment (pushing away) and without attaching ourselves to it (clinging).  Only then can we see clearly, and make decisions rooted in what we know to be best for us.

To Los Arcos

Monday morning. Woke up many times in the night, and knew I was sick.  I can feel it in my chest.  Further dreams of seeing clearly, and of letting go.  I decided to take the bus to Los Arcos (“The Bows,” named for the decisive role archers played in winning a great battle) rather than suffer through a 20k walk.  Mom and Carrie sent their bags ahead and the group of four left me at the bus station.  At the bus station I ran into three young Israeli women whom I’d seen prior albergues, and two Lebanese women I met last night.  I helped them find the right bus and introduced them all to one another.  The countryside we passed through was gorgeous, all greens and browns and yellows, everywhere rolling hills and citadels and iglesias, and granite cliffs in the distance.

Once in Los Arcos, I walked around for a bit, finding the stores (drinkable yogurt,potato chips, muesli bars), the public hostel (albergue municipal, always the cheapest), and a Café-Bar called Abascal, where I had a green-and-red-pepper omelette bocadillo and tea.  I leafed through a Spanish magazine and got caught up on which American celebrities are sleeping with which other American celebrities.  I still don’t understand who Kim Kardashian is, or why she is.  I especially can’t understand what would justify the Spanish caring.

In the tiny plaza outside Abascal I sit abreast of my new amigos, or the local retired community of hombres.  A seventy-something man walks back and forth over the 35 yards as if counting steps, as if trying to catch the distance in the act of being different on just one of his passes, and thus reveal even una plaza to be subject to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, one big cosmic joke.