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

The Retablo

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,

The cupola and retablo (Mary at lower left)

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,

Mary in the central retablo

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.

The amazing cupola

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

I change the mood by pointing out that Mary´s pose makes her look a lot like the Buddha

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.

We spent a few hours yesterday in a café-bar in Pamplona.  The woman tending bar there thought I looked like a certain actor.  I left to get a haircut.  Several places offered them for 30 Euros, but I found one that was available for only 18 if you were willing to get your cheek cut with a razor.  When I got back to the bar, the bartender said, “You are very handsome today.”  Today.  Mom thought this was just grand.

Morning, Zubiri.  Is it really necessary that pilgrimages begin before first light?  I can just as well do my penance in daylight.

“Well,” said Julio, from his bed, “there was no concert,” said Julio, “last night.”

“Oh yes there was,” Mom said.  “David and my son.  My son snored all night.  I was hoping someone would adopt him.”

An ever-smiling woman from Salt Lake, Lela, heard of my mother’s struggles to get some healthy food and handed her some packets of greenness, some kind of dietary supplement.  She refused to take payment.  She asked to see the calf.

“Got some mental blocks today, eh?”  She was under the impression that my calf issue was, in addition to being psychosomatic, something new.

“If I’ve got mental problems they pre-date today,” I said.  “But I was very handsome yesterday.”

She began to massage the calf.  “Oh, it’s very hot,” she said.  “You do have some inflammation there.”  After a bit, she hugged and kissed Mom, saying, “You’re so cool!” and took her pack and was off.  I don’t think she had stopped smiling since the day before.

We said goodbye to the turtles in the pond, to the grounds of the albergue in some disrepair, and the hopeful, half-finished second-floor addition that had been interrupted when the Jesus y Maria albergue in nearby Pamplona came about.  And then we left Cizur Menor.

Stiff and tender.  The left calf, of course, and now a flash of pain in whatever that part of the foot is called that’s at the very top.  Thankfully it was on the same foot, so one limp took care of both of them.  So I had that going for me.  We had 19 kilometers to cover.

It was beautiful country.  It put me in mind of both Northern California and Tuscany.  Once again we were blessed by the weather gods.  Stick, stick, stick.  I did some walking meditation as I’d learned it from the Shambhala Center in Portland, attending to the feeling of the feet hitting the ground, the way they rolled, the feel in my ankles and knees and hips.  It was good.

“Walking into the future”.  A nice thought, that of walking toward Santiago and arriving in my future – with firmer ideas of where

I’d live, for example, and what writing projects I might do — but it’s still just a story, not a reality.  I have thought many times that I have seen or felt the last of something, or someone, and been wrong.  For example, coming here I thought certain things were behind me.  But there last night, defeating all storylines, was an email from someone who shall remain nameless, declaring me responsible for all the bad that had happened in the world in the last half-century, with the possible exceptions of the Kennedy assassinations, the modern concept of jihad, and U.S. representative Michelle Bachmann.

So sometimes I was not in the present, the only place joy is found.  Sometimes I was in the past, and at others, I was in the future.

Ungrateful . . . take responsibility . . . victim . . . ow . . . foot . . . get those personality disorders under control . . . hungry . . . interesting landscape . . . wind turbines . . . like north of San Francisco . . . OKCupid . . .  New York . . . thirsty . . . chocolate . . .

Mom sang German lullabyes.  I filmed one of them.  “I used to sing that when you were young,” she said.  “Before I started yelling.”

“Ah, you didn’t yell that much.”

“I know.  I was just always so stressed out.  I always wanted it to be later on so I couldn’t be in the moment.  ‘If it was only ten years from now,’ I’d say.  Now I’d do anything to get those years back.”  Stick, stick, stick.  “But I could never have imagined in a million years I’d be here.”  She then gave thanks to her beloved brother Gunter, now deceased fourteen years, and his wife Elfriede.  “Because Gunter earned it, and Elfriede saved it and then passed some of it on to me when she left.”

I asked Julio about women.

“Well,” he said, as if approaching a subject of some enormity.  “I am using –“ he stopped and searched for a word.  “I have been using—“

“In English we say hookers,” I prompted.

“No, not hookers.  That was in Cuba.  Recently I put an advertisement for someone to travel around the world.  For one year.  Man or woman.  Most of the responses I received were from women.  And they were not so interested in traveling as in finding a husband.  So that’s that.  Maybe I will try again.”

“But what about dating?”

“I tried twice and it did not work.”

“I don’t mean Marie Anne.  Dating now.”

What he said was complicated, but it seemed to involve his lack of interest in women who either spent all day before the mirror or wanted men to repay several hundred years of chauvinism immediately.  “And when they start talking about a family I go the other way,” he said.

“Do you think you could be what we call a commitment-phobe, Julio?”

“Maybe,” he said.  “It could be.”

“I used to think I was.  I thought the solution would be to get married.”

“Of course,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Puente La Reina.  The public albergue charges only 4 euros, and we sleep in rooms of eight.  I met a social worker from Tel Aviv, Schlomit, who had heard of the Camino only two months ago, a young Brit, Jethro, who’s been walking for three months, from Britain, and an Italian, Marco, who runs a hostel in southern Brazil.  Mom and I explained to Jethro that English accents make everything sound more intelligent and more funny.  And he was in fact quite witty.  He said he was out of money, so I invited him to join us for dinner with the understanding that he would entertain.  He didn’t disappoint. Marie Anne had somehow turned rice and mushrooms and other ingredients into something like a great risotto.  Marco also joined us for dinner.  He and Jethro and I watched YouTube videos of James Brown, and then we all went to bed.