Lorca

For the past several months I've been reflecting on the lessons of the Camino as I've dealt with matters of money and other related stresses that have hung over me like a gritty, dark cloud. This past week has been some kind of culminating point. I suppose it will go into the book. It may not. But things are different now.

I was walking to the bus stop yesterday, trudging along in the heat, sweating and cranky and anxious, worried about money and bills and the possibility of having to leave my longtime apartment and go elsewhere. And I felt a nudge at my back, a gentle but firm push. It stayed with me for a few blocks, this sensation of being steered by an invisible guide. I almost looked over my shoulder several times to see if anyone had come up behind me and laid a hand on my lower back.

I remember this on the Camino. I remember feeling a gentle tug, now and then, at random moments, and it was enough to redirect my thoughts—for a short while, at least—away from my woes and the steady drumbeat of I am not enough. I can't do this. I am a failure in everyone's eyes and in the eyes of God, whatever She/He is.

I haven't felt that gentle nudge since returning from Spain. If it's happened, I have not noticed. On the bus, I thought about it and my life and my bills and deadlines and perceived failures and how all of it seems to be coming to a culmination point right now. And the word "moving" came to me again. The word had already come up that day in conversation, because I might actually be moving soon.

This time, it had new meaning. I realized it was the new title of my Camino memoir. And so it is, unless something else comes along with greater resonance: Moving: Breaking Down and Growing Up on the Camino de Santiago.

Whatever else happens today, next week, next month, I'm moving again.

Photo credit: © Benjamin Scuglia.
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When my sister and only sibling, Elizabeth, died from a brain tumour at the age of 29 in August 1987, I found myself turning to poetry for succour, consolation and a deeper view of things. I called on Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and other English Romantic poets; I visited Lorca, Levertov and RS Thomas. I also began walking more and more, and further and further. In the simple act of walking, in the natural human activity of placing one foot in front of the other, I encountered a kind of fragile peace; and the sublime scenery I often walked through seemed to provide, at least partly, a benign and numinous response to my unanswerable questions.
I kept a written log of my walking routes from April 1987 to May 2006. Looking at it again recently, I'm reminded that a few weeks after my sister's death Carmen and I stayed for a while in Porthmadog (Wales), where I climbed the little hill of Moel-y-Gest and the mountain of Cnicht, and ascended the Roman Steps from Cwm Bychan. The landscape here in Snowdonia is wild, dramatic and breathtakingly beautiful.

My mother, Joan, died in November 2004, and again I turned to poetry: this time to the poems she'd  transferred to her commonplace books in a painstaking and neat hand, or cut out from magazines with scissors and pasted into her scrapbooks; and also those chosen by WB Yeats for The Oxford Book Of Modern Verse 1892-1935. Mum had been awarded this book as a prize for 'General Proficiency' at the end of her 1937-8 year at The Municipal High School for Girls in Doncaster, Yorkshire.

Three years later I completed my first Camino, and lit candles in memory of my sister and mum at various significant stages along the Way. Here's the wonderful, crazy signpost at Manjarin in the Spanish Montes de León:

My father, Fred, died in January 2009, and almost exactly one year later I walked the Vía de la Plata. I dedicated this Camino to him. We did not have an easy relationship, but all is now more peaceable. The last words he spoke to me were: 'You know I love you, Robert'.

Dad did not appreciate the finer subtleties of poetry as such, but he did love the words to the Wesleyan hymns he played on the organ each week at the Methodist village chapel. Only the other day I was leafing through his Methodist Hymn Book and alighted on John Bunyan's Who Would True Valour See (from Pilgrim's Progress):
Who would true Valour see
Let him come hither;
One here will Constant be,
Come Wind, come Weather.
There's no Discouragement,
Shall make him once Relent,
His first avow'd Intent,
To be a Pilgrim.

(The Monk's Gate arrangement by Vaughan Williams, adapted from a traditional English melody.)
Needless to say, he also loved the words of the Bible, and of course the words of the Authorised King James Version are poetry indeed. This is the title page of one of his Bibles:

Poetry and walking have been my salvation in the most challenging of times. There are times when I feel they have actually saved my life, or kept me sane at the very least.
Sorrow

Why does the thin grey strand
Floating up from the forgotten
Cigarette between my fingers,
Why does it trouble me?

Ah, you will understand;
When I carried my mother downstairs,
A few times only, at the beginning
Of her soft-foot malady,

I should find, for a reprimand
To my gaiety, a few long grey hairs
On the breast of my coat; and one by one
I let them float up the dark chimney.

DH LAWRENCE

(Collected by WB Yeats in The Oxford Book Of Modern Verse 1892-1935.)

Outside the royal city of Madrid lies Philip II's great palace of death, El Escorial. The king retired there to die a long and painful death in 1598. He surrounded himself with the sarcophagi of the kings and queens who had predeceased him -- as well as relics he had rescued from certain destruction in Protestant regions across the Pyrenees.

Like the royal court itself, death had its attendants. Philip II annexed a monastery to his palace, so that perpetual masses could be said for his soul. The Spanish poet Garcia Lorca summed up Spanish attitudes toward death: "In all other countries death is the end. It arrives and the curtain falls. No so in Spain. In Spain, on the contrary, the curtain only rises at that moment...." Philip II intended to keep that veil between the worlds raised.

But Lorca must have never visited the 13th and 14th century tombs of the dukes of Burgundy in Dijon. The tombs reside in a "charterhouse" or monastery for the Carthusians, an austere monastic order. As they prayed the hours, the monks walked the cloister, a sheltered courtyard adjacent to the church. The dukes commissioned miniature cloisters at the base of their tombs, filled with statues of mourning monks. These mourning monks would attend them in perpetuity, circling their bodies in perpetual prayer.

Renovation in the monastery in Burgundy, now a museum, allowed these sixteen-inch alabaster figures to walk on. As part of an exhibit called "The Mourners," they traveled from the Metropolitan Museum in New York to the Minneapolis Institute for the Arts this winter. The exhibit closed on Palm Sunday. Walking with these alabaster pilgrims was the way to begin Holy Week.

As they walk, the monks move through the postures of grief: faces contorted with weeping, bent, burdened shoulders, downcast heads, a cowled hand wiping a tear from a cowled face. Despite the unyielding stone, their robes reveal forward motion. The monks still walk their cloister, offering frozen alabaster prayers for the departed souls of the dukes. The curtain is always lifted.

As we move through Holy Week, we journey toward resurrection. We want to sprint toward Easter, but these stone figures remind us to take it slow, tend to our tears -- and watch as the curtain slowly rises.

The transit from life -- to life abundant.

We are now in Lorca, a small town at the top of a hill that consists of a single street of houses. We walked 13 kilometers today in an effort to recuperate our ailments. While we survived the much shorter trek ¿we were originally going to go another 9 km to Estella? .. those are supposed to be parenthesis, but this keyboard is messed up... we are still in rough shape. Dan discovered that his Chacos did not aggravate his blisters so walking was a little better, but now he is feeling sick to his stomach. I still have shin splints in my left leg, but there is now a bruise which makes me wonder if they are actually shin splints.

So, here is our new idea. Tomorrow we are going to walk the 9 km to Estella because it is a bigger town that might have some sort of public transportation. We are going to catch a bus toward Burgos and then hopefully stay in Burgos for a couple of days to see the cathedral and relax a bit. Then we will cross the flatlands to Leon via train or bus where we will resume walking. This shorter trek will still take us by all the places we wanted to see, and will give us about 3.5 weeks of walking which is still fairly substantial.

To our future selves who may be looking back upon this and thinking that we messed up and wussed out: We are walking through a desert, sweating more water than we can consume. We are walking an average of 14 miles a day for about 8 hours each day. The trails are rocky and have steep climbs and descents. There is very little shade. We cannot sleep well at night. The daily routine of making sure our most needs are met is exhausting. We do NOT need to walk every single foot to feel like we have accomplished something.

Something Spanish Grandpa said to us yesterday really struck me today. He was surprised that we were going all the way to Santiago at our age and wondered what kinds of sins we had committed. He said it as a joke, but really... we are people who like nature, who like experiences. We are not overly religious and lack the type of motivation that a devout Catholic would have to atone for their sins. I can see where they would find that atonement, as every step brings you more pain, isolates you from your home and surrounds you with people who will help carry you toward your goal. We have met people from all over the world; Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, Korea, Canada, Finland, Sweeden, Holland, Slovenia, Brasil, Italy... it is amazing to be a part of such a community. Amazingly enough we do not know anybodys name. Instead we refer to them by nicknames we have given them such as Hurt Foot, Pirate Pilgrim, Boa Lady, Purple Lady, Overfriendly Spaniard, Crazy Foot lady... it is really cool to see the same people every day and form a bond. Honestly, for me that was the hardest part of deciding to skip a few days of hiking... we are going to lose our travel buddies. But, it is what is best for us as a couple... especially now that Dan is not feeling well.

I will keep you all updated as often as possible. Do not worry parents, we are in a country with a socialist healthcare system so if we ever need anything it will be super affordable, and we are doing all we can to stay healthy and not push ourselves too hard.

A really freaking awesome married couple in a race to hike 490 miles of the Camino de Santiago across Spain in 38 days.