this too

STOPPED

Well, something broke, and this is finished.

I might be here, though.

I really don't know right now. But I probably will be, as I'm rather addicted.

RIPPLES

I was surprised that I was able to take a few photos on a long walk in the park and woods on Sunday. So stunned and scattered had I been by disappointment in myself, regret and loss, I didn't know how much of me was still here.

Well, much love for all of you is still here, and a lot of sweet memories; they swell and fill me up.

FLOWN

My warmest thanks to all who've read and commented on my posts about the Camino de Santiago. It means a lot to have finally shared something so close to my heart, all these years later. 

I'm hoping to apply the lessons recalled to a forthcoming trip that is also, perhaps, a kind of pilgrimage.

PILGRIMAGE (VII) - ENDING, UNENDING

Alone again, in the very flat lands.

Photo: Michael Krier, UK Confraternity of St James

At the spanking new refugio in Burgo Ranero a note was pinned to the noticeboard from the sweet Spanish woman with whom I'd walked for a while back at the beginning. "Jim" [sic], she had written, passing through a day  or two earlier, "I hope it goes well with you and you're loving the Camino as much as I am." Yes, I thought. Yes, in spite...

In Burgo Ranero I bumped into S and E again and their breezy wit swept me along towards León. We arrived there together. A lovely, cultured city, we thought, blinking a little, surprised to be in busy streets. In the cathedral we sat beneath the high rainbow windows and let the warm light fall through us. It felt good.

I was tired, though, tired from walking 300 miles, but tired mostly from fear and then from love. More than three weeks of my month off work had passed, and I was only about two-thirds of the way to Santiago. As we were returning to the hostel that night after dinner, the cathedral's silhouette bent over us, it came to me that León could be, for now, my Santiago. I wasn't going to walk any further.

León Cathedral: photo by Michael Krier, UK Confraternity of St James

After spending a day or two there, I caught a bus to Madrid, which was hot and surprising - another country.

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"Mmm. Lovely. Interesting. Very old path, you know. More than a thousand years..." My busy, workaholic colleagues didn't really want to know, and the lessons of the Camino sat in my mind, seeds germinating slowly.

Six months later, I saw a small ad in a Sunday paper for a holiday on the Greek island of Lefkada. Quiet, green. Guided walks, and an opportunity to learn about the Alexander Technique. Among the lessons of the Camino was how much energy I spent when walking on bodily tension. So my mind pricked up. I'd never been on an organised group holiday, never thought I was the kind of person to do that. Perhaps I was becoming a different kind of person. I went, and learned, in a blue-green, sparkly, relaxing place, a little of how to be in my body and let it flow forwards, instead of clenching and pushing it. And there I took the decision to leave the job that had consumed me for years.

Agios Nikitas, Lefkada. Photo: Images of Greece

An odd Summer it was, 1997. A long Summer off, when tensions broke and assumptions shifted. The 'New Labour' government took power and I realised I had no great hopes of it, not much faith left in the party politics that had been the centre of my life for so long. Princess Diana died - the random, dramatically unexpected.

I could have gone back to Spain and completed the walk then, but didn't. Instead, I went back to Greece - Lefkada had been my first visit - and spent a long time looking at ancient ruins, thinking: huh. what now?

Back home, scrabbling to make some money from temporary work, I came upon a Buddhist meditation class in Central London, and many lights went on in my head and heart.

Back in a full-time job, I missed the daily multilingualism of the political organisation, and went back to college in the evenings to get my post-graduate qualifications in translation. In that class I made new friends, something I hadn't done in all the years I was just working, and never thought I would again.

Things were not wonderful, but in small, important, increasingly pervasive ways, they changed. The Camino was a walk back towards a self I'd lost by fleeing from difficult emotions into compulsive overwork. I learned there to trust myself and others a little more, to be a little more open and kind. The small things that change everything.

Things are not wonderful, but I've never again thought about killing myself, as I did often when I'd worked all the time for weeks and weeks, and then spent a whole weekend in bed. Although it's elusive, there's a faith in something I can reach out and touch. Not something 'out there', but right in here; a capacity to breathe through the barrier between self and time, space and others. I learned to touch this from Buddhist teachers and from many hours on a cushion. But I felt it first on the Camino, walking until I stopped thinking, feeling tentatively through that barrier to those walking alongside me and those who had walked before and were still in the stones under my feet.

I've never been back to walk the last part, from León to Santiago, though I always thought I would one day, when the time was right. The Camino de Santiago has become hugely popular in the intervening years. I doubt I would enjoy walking with crowds. I could do it in Midwinter, perhaps. And perhaps I will, one day.

But in a way it doesn't matter, because what I learned there is that the path isn't linear, there is no destination. It's not all about control and striving and pushing. It is qualitative, not quantitative. It is here, now, going deeper, this breath, this look. Never finishing, but always complete.

Photos: Michael Krier, UK Confraternity of St James

I forget these things constantly. Then something reminds me, like Dale saying 'pilgrimage' the other day. And I reach for it and try to bring it to the next thing - not to control and stress and worry, not to mistrust and clench and withdraw again, just to really be here. 

WE INTERRUPT THIS MESSAGE...

...to flip over a rock.

 

click on photos to enlarge.

Centipede, millipedes, pill bugs (wood lice) - thanks Dave.

PILGRIMAGE (VI) - ANGEL

                        
The meseta. Photo by Michael Krier, UK Confraternity of St James.

I began the next day alone, but wasn’t alone for long. Squatting on my back-pack under a hedge eating a late breakfast of salami sandwich, I was overtaken by the first walker striding out early from Burgos, an elderly, energetic man from Toulouse, so pleased to meet someone he could talk to in French that he didn’t mind halving his pace to mine for a while.

We walked on, chatting, and the sun came out, and somehow I didn’t tell him what happened the day before. The Camino was smiling, reasserting its positive spirit. I never did tell another pilgrim that I was robbed. Why cast a shadow on their positive impressions? I couldn’t. I told no one when I returned home either, and I’ve rarely spoken of it since (what is it about blogging?).

But that didn’t mean I buried the bad thing, hardened my heart. Far from it. It completely changed, for the better, the rest of my journey. I was so grateful thereafter for the company and friendship of other walkers, for the good spirit of the path, the spirit of those who had walked before us for more than a thousand years. My heart opened then to all of it. Without the shock of fear, I don’t think this would have happened.

So we chatted along through flat, flourishing fields, and much later reached a straggling village whose pilgrim refugio, unusually, was offering lunch. As we slumped against the long table, waiting, other walkers came, and the pile of back-packs in the corner grew. This was where I met the old hippy, the bank-manager, the psychiatrist, and others.

Lunch was long and we all set out again together, on a path that now followed a country road, winding through woods, and out again across the fields. I found myself talking, first, to the Dutchman. He was friendly, but made me feel obscurely uncomfortable(I found out later that he was a psychiatrist. Ah.) So after a while I fell back, and into step with another new arrival. He was another Frenchman, tall and loose-limbed, with a long, shy, clever face. This was H. He’d walked from the Pyrenees to Burgos back in the previous Summer, with his girlfriend, then had to return to his work as a busy, globe-trotting engineer employed by the French airline. Now he was back to continue the path – his first day’s walking, still weary and stressed from work, and his feet hurt, so our strides were well matched.

We walked and talked all afternoon, and for the next week.

Blistering and despairing, he took off his boots and walked in his socks. I laughed at his very large bright blue feet tiptoeing on the stony road, and he was indignant, and indignation kept him going. My own trauma began to recede.

               
Castrojeriz

Castrojeriz (so remote it has no English-language website) was the next town we came to, and the next refugio. A quiet, dusty, rambling place, the road spiralling around a hill, and no sign of the hostel, or by now of our fellow walkers, who had all left us behind. Finally, a woman with a shopping bag in the distance, and I pounded after her, panting under my back-pack. "Señora, estamos perdidos – we’re lost! Where is the refugio?". I had to ask her to repeat her instructions. My brain was busy computing what I’d said. I’d just become 'we'.

In the hostel kitchen, H produced camomile teabags and offered me one. We sat down and eyed one another through the fragrant steam rising from our cups. This was not a stranger. I felt familiarity, ease and affection, as I had never felt with someone I’d just met.

A communal meal was cooked in the ramshackle kitchen, and while some of us fell early into bed in the dormitory upstairs, others were still down there talking until very late. Lying in bed, sleepy, with voices drifting up the stairs, I felt safe, like a child in bed and hearing the adults of her family still awake and talking. H was in the next bunk. That night and the following nights, our eyes met and smiled before we slept.

H was many years younger and about a foot taller than me. "You go ahead", I would say every morning, "You don’t want to walk at my pace". And off he would go, sometimes, but there he would be at the next village, the next crossroads, with a sight or a thought to share. So we shared the weather that rapidly changed from sun to rain and back, and the land that grew flatter and bleaker as we entered the meseta, and we shared conversations as long and as deep as I’ve ever known.

At Carrión, before the lovely tour of the church, we had sat on a bench overlooking a precipice, with misty ruins and tall trees and a river far below, and talked of how the city and work were hard, too hard, sometimes. And we grew silent, looking down, and we knew we both were thinking it wouldn’t be a bad place to end all the busy-ness.

"I wish", H said one day, "that I could walk and walk until I stop thinking. I get so tired of the nagging, worried voice in my head". I stared, realising with amazement that I, who’d been walking longer, had actually found this state for brief periods. Thus the seed of meditation was planted.

It wasn’t all po-faced taking ourselves so seriously. There was the bad-tempered, toad-faced hostel keeper who barked at the pilgrims and cooked us peculiar food. When we left next morning, his cross face loomed up in the window and he silently, grimly, waved. Bizarre. We looked at a each other and doubled up, giggling helplessly, floating away down the path on a cloud of incredulity and silliness.

But H’s time was limited and he wanted to get to Santiago. One day, as I struggled to keep up with him and the old Swedish hippy, who was also tall and robust, resolve and generosity seized me. "That’s it. I’m staying the night in the next town.  You go on. Yes! Go!" And they went. And I checked into a cheap hotel, in the absence of a refugio, and cried, as I hadn’t cried when I was robbed and threatened and frightened.

I don’t know quite how I believe this, how I conceptualize it. But I do utterly believe, on some level, that H was my guardian angel, who came because I needed him.

PILGRIMAGE (V) - DEVIL

As following a path inexorably becomes a metaphor for life, so, as in life, inexorably, bad stuff happens as well as good. My bad stuff happened on a deserted path through scrubby woods not far from the city of Burgos .

I was humming happily, high on my detour to Silos, where landscape, church and the voices of the monks were golden, when a pale, meagre man, visibly high on something a lot nastier, appeared from behind a tree waving a big knife, took all my money and kept on wielding the knife for quite some time, while wildly threatening rape and violence. I was numb, paralysed by shock, and unresponsive – boringly so, I think, as eventually he stopped raving, sheathed his knife and wandered off, leaving me to stomp onward to the next village and phone the guardia.

The guardias civiles, a lingering relic of pre-democratic Spain. Eleven years ago, though probably not now, the older guardias were themselves left over from those times, as anomalous and as comic-but-menacing as their funny plastic tricornes. So I didn’t relish calling them out, but, miles from anywhere with no money (though my assailant hadn’t wanted my credit card – that would have meant the end of my trip), needing a lift to a cash machine and needing a crime report if I wanted to claim my lost money on my travel insurance, I had no choice.

So I marched – on automatic pilot still – to the next village and into the bar, and demanded their phone. The elderly guardia who came, accompanied by his wife, in an ancient jeep, was in a very bad mood, having been called away from his family Sunday lunch. You can guess the burden of his discourse, I’m sure: a woman walking alone in the countryside was clearly ‘asking for it’. The following several hours in the isolated ‘barracks’ were almost as nasty as the attack. The difference between cuchillo (kitchen knife) and navaja (hunting knife) is engraved for ever on my mind – rattled, I first used the wrong word. “A gitano, a gypsy, was he?” “No, definitely not a gitano!” – and much more such unhelpful discussion, along with the caricature of the rural policeman typing out his crime report very slowly with one finger… I was deeply grateful to the younger guardia who came on duty later, drove me back to Burgos to an ATM, and back again to the village and its refugio.

By unhappy chance, for the single time on my walk, I was the only pilgrim that night in the small, untended building with half a dozen beds. I locked the door and didn’t sleep, and wondered if I would be able to go on.

I did go on, the next morning, stiffly, wretchedly, through a flat agricultural landscape, thankful to be in open fields and trying not to look constantly over my shoulder in fear. It’s extremely rare to be robbed on the Camino. I was unlucky, you might say.  Well, as it turned out...

 VI - Angel...

PILGRIMAGE (IV) - CHOICELESS AWARENESS

Puente la Reina

The Pyrenees are a hard start, but a great one because once you’re over that (and over sleeping with twenty strange men), you pretty much know you’ll continue. A great start, too, because they are silent, grandiose and soaringly lovely, and you know there are more such wild, joyous landscapes to come… although not for a while. For the first few days in Spain the landscape was very varied: green foothills, pretty villages, not-at-all pretty villages, considerable time spent walking through prickly brush and along melting, roaring main roads in the endless peripheries of Pamplona, not to mention the afternoon spent skirting an isolated factory, where murky, viscous effluent trickled all around and across the path. Gulp. Spain in its endless variety, and many forcible reminders of what an extremely hard, rocky, prickly country it is!

I don’t drive a car and have always walked everywhere, in town and country. But the thing about a long, linear path is that it has to continue no matter what, so it takes you where you’d never normally choose to walk. And you keep going – no option. What a long walk has, though, is rhythm. It has joy and satisfaction, too, even on a bad day. A bad day is a good day when it’s over. So the good/bad duality, the instant evaluation, starts to be eroded.

When I summon sensory memories of the Camino, so much comes rushing back: sand, rock, rain and heat, prickly scrub and panting uphill… and the texture of cheap, slightly sticky nylon bedspreads. Walkers’ hostels that are free or extremely cheap, run by churches or local authorities, were sometimes furnished with loving care, more often a parade of the discarded and the tacky. They were sometimes not too clean, and you never knew who you might wake up next to. And they were palaces, cherished homes for a night, exquisite nests for exhausted bodies. Many years later, I read in Buddhist texts about ‘choiceless awareness’ – just experiencing the stream of phenomena as they are, not rushing to classify and judge. It’s a tough concept for the children of consumer society. A difficult concept, but not so difficult in reality. Here is the only available bed in a one-horse place and you need to lie down on it now, soft or lumpy, clean or grubby, alone in a cavernous dormitory or cramped in dubious company. You have no choice. And it’s fine. It’s a liberation.

I went walking on the Camino alone, over forty, and not particularly fit. A daft, graceless enterprise, it was, with low expectations. Of course, I’d limp and sigh and linger while taller, fitter, younger more experienced walkers would keep passing me and disappearing over the horizon. They did. And that was a liberation too. Only this path, this time, these aims and obstacles, and a miraculous, relieved arrival somewhere every day.

Eunate, photo by Michael Krier, UK Confraternity of St James

I’m so glad I set off alone, for so many reasons. You aren’t really alone, of course, on a path walked by so many – far fewer eleven years ago than walk it now, but still I never went a day without meeting other pilgrims, walking and on bicycles. In October, outside the Summer holiday season, some were young and unemployed; some, like the bank-manager and the psychiatrist, had left their jobs and were unsure what next; many were newly retired from work and free for the first time ever to leave home for many weeks, people like S and E, who left their home beside Lake Geneva on foot the day after E finished work on his 60^th birthday. They set out accoutred with Swiss comfort and precision. By the time I met them several weeks later, they’d posted home their sleeping bags, all their books except the Spanish dictionary and most of their clothes. They each had one change of underwear only, and when it wore in holes they looked up the Spanish for knickers and purchased more

I could speak to most of the pilgrims in English, French or Spanish. Being much in demand as a translator made up for my slow pace and small daily distances. Fit, fast walkers could cover 25 or 30 miles in a day. I, on the hard, stony, uphill-downhill path, with my stuff on my back, could cover 12 or 15 miles, and more than once I had to stop for a day, my feet swollen, burning and leaden.

Quickly, though it was wonderful. New friends and new landscapes every day. Movement, achievement, variety sufficient unto themselves. Life reduced to the path, and the path as a metaphor for life. Just one foot in front of the other. Choiceless awareness.

In the Rioja vineyards, near Logroño: photo by Michael Krier

PILGRIMAGE (III) - CHEATING ON THE FIRST DAY

A good place to start, if you didn’t have time to begin as far away as Le Puy or Vézelay in central France, was St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, on the French side of the Pyrenees. You walk on the first day over the mountains, crossing the frontier into Spain, and spend the first night at the monastery in a place of great historic and literary resonance, Roncesvalles (great website, worth exploring).

I knew St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, having visited there while on a seaside camping holiday at St-Jean-de-Luz. A pretty, familiar town, it felt like an easy place to start. It is the hardest place to start. Day one, on unaccustomed legs, with an unaccustomed back-pack, right over the Pyrenees, with nowhere to stop until you reach the other side.

The road begins to climb right outside the town, and the scenery is glorious: rocky peaks, lush mountain grass and clean air. It’s hard walking. Hours and hours, with still no sight of the summit and the pass into Spain. Painful breath and heavy legs. Oh god, I wasn’t going to make this – all a terrible mistake!

I was sitting on the roadside when up drew a shepherd and his dog in what had once been a car. It still went, with a bump and clang, but now had no doors. Did I want a lift to the pass - it was all downhill from there? I did. This was 'not allowed' of course, the whole point being to do it on your own two feet. But it was that or giving up on the first day. No one saw me hop in and hang on tight, or scramble out again a few minutes later and squint upwards as he pointed out a clump of trees and rocks: "that’s the frontier; then it’s all down hill through the forest".

It was all down hill then, indeed, a long and mysterious walk through the oak forests to Roncesvalles - the fear of not making it to the summit replaced by the fear of getting lost among the ghosts of Roland and his army.

Towards a stream that flowed amid that land
Sones fell Gue into perdition black
All his sinews were strained until they snapped
And all the limbs were from his body dragged
On the green grass his clear blood gushed and ran

(Read the Chanson de Roland in the original Old French, and in English translation – and another translation. I’m sure there are versions now that read better to modern ears, but not on line).

The first sight of the monastery’s outline in the early evening – oh! And then the shock: unisex dormitories. Large and cramped, with large, sweaty bodies, and some of these guys could snore for, well, for wherever they were from. I slept. It was fine. As much a rite of passage as reaching the mountain pass.

In retrospect, I don’t think it was cheating to take that lift on the first day – the only one I took. I wasn’t going to make it, if he hadn’t come along. The Spanish bank-manager told me later how he’d been laid up for a day with a bad knee, and then taken a lift for 20 miles to catch up with his new friend the Dutch psychiatrist, so they could continue the walk together. I don’t think that, done for love, was cheating either.

Photos of the Pyrenees by Maureen Measure and of Roncesvalles by Michael Krier, UK Confraternity of St James.

More to come, but not one post for every day of the walk...

PILGRIMAGE (II) - WHY?

I’m not sure we ever know why, really. Perhaps it always goes deeper than the mind can stretch.

There’s my first ever visit to Spain, in 1973, when I was 19, with S. I loved S. Looking back, I would have liked to marry her. But women weren’t marrying women in those days. I’d never have thought of such a thing in relation to myself, and I’ve never felt that way about a woman since. But I loved S – oh yes, a lot. So the thoughts and memories of that time are intense. We were two bright working-class girls, all at sea in Cambridge, which was much less cosmopolitan than it is now, but still most of our fellow students of modern languages had grown up in more than one country, while we had scarcely been out of England. We knew so little about anything, had no idea where we should go in our first long university Summer vacation.

The FEVE route - nearly all the way to Santiago

S had been brought up Catholic and must have known about Santiago de Compostela. It must have been her idea, I think, to travel on the FEVE (nice website), the slow, extremely cheap narrow-gauge railway all along the North coast of Spain. I don’t remember much detail of that journey, having then none of the assumptions or reference points I look for now. We found extremes of picturesque and horrible in Franco’s Spain – fantastic kindness and closed minds, dusty poverty and smelly drains.

On the long, slow train journey we saw a few walker pilgrims, returning from Santiago. They were grimy and wind-burned: very exotic. I can see them now. So it goes back as far as that. 

More than twenty years later, the name of a dearly beloved novelist, David Lodge, as presenter led me to watch a TV documentary about the Camino. (He published soon after a lovely, lovely novel featuring the Camino, ‘Therapy’, wherein a successful but unhappy middle-aged man…) On TV, the Camino looked beautiful, interesting and in places intriguingly remote. I knew a lot of the world a little by then, and Spain quite well. But I’d never been back to the green, rural and industrial North.

But neither of these was the immediate reason. That was the commonest one: overwork, middle age and an inchoate longing for ‘something else’. I’d been working 12 years for the politicians. We all worked like shit and never took all our annual leave. I was owed several months, so requesting one month was not unreasonable. “I’d like the whole of October off”, I was surprised to hear myself say.

 III – Cheating on the first day…