Breeze shakes memory

June, 2005.  Carrion de los Condes, Castille y Leon, Spain.  Siesta.  I'm restless, wandering empty streets, with my bad ankles.  (With the pack on, I only manage to hobble from one village to the next.  I'm hiding the injury, not wanting to be told to stop.  I don't know what else to do.  I don't know who I am if I can't finish this, if I have to quit.  I'm not clear-headed, I think I have something to prove.  I do get stopped, tomorrow, four people will block me and send me back.  They'll take off my pack, sit me down, remove my shoes, bless my feet, and give me medicine and bandages.  When one offers to carry my pack as well as his own, I am humbled and turn back: I'm carrying a lot of baggage.  I'll catch a bus the day after that, but not today.  Sadly, I don't actually learn from this, yet.)  It's overcast, and warm.  I am feeling abandoned, having lost all sense of a feeling of "God."  A wind blows through a playground up on a hill top, rattling the chains, metal against metal; all the vegetation seems dry and brown.  I wander back to the refugio to wake up the other American to see if he wants to go look for this chocolate café we've been seeing posters for.  (Turns out to be across the street, more or less.)  And I want to talk to someone.  The sense of loss stays with me across the Meseta, and though the sense of "spiritual expansion" that I'd felt for most of my life never does return, when I reach Galicia, I do find a resolution.

There is a line between pushing beyond what you think you can do and growing from that (because you've been building up to it) vs. pushing yourself because you have something to prove to the point where all you are doing is hurting yourself because you refuse to listen your body's and your intuition's cries to "Stop!"  It's not always easy to hear the difference.  Two years later, second day on the Camino, I've walked 4 kms so far and I'm tired, I feel lazy stopping so early in the day.  I meet a Brazilian woman, she says  her legs are sore.  She says that she's going to stop (it's 10 am).  She says she doesn't see any reason to "walk uncomfortably."  And it hits me then: Yes, you can treat yourself with kindness.  You don't always have to prove something to "them" whomever "they" might be, someone outside (or even inside) yourself.  Some things take a long time to unlearn.

New Documentary

This is a link to a Camino documentary that is slowly making its way across the US.  It's self-funded, go and see it if it comes to your town.  It follows six people as they walk the Camino Frances in the spring of 2009 from St. Jean Pied de Port to Santiago de Compostela.  The producer is Lydia B. Smith, and she had walked the previous year herself.  It does a good job of conveying the community and the individual struggles we all go through, such as the physical (foot issues, tendonitis, etc) and the mental (the belief that you need to prove something that you really don't need to prove-such as walking further than your body wants to go; or physically conquering anything.)  You'll probably recognize places (physical and within yourself) if you have walked before. 

If not, it gives a good sense of the adventure and the beauty of the walk.  Don't let the hardships put you off.  (Before the screening I saw, she asked how many people wanted to walk, and most people raised their hands; after the film, she asked again, and there were fewer hands raised.)  If you feel drawn to go, there's usually a reason, find a way to go.  (I had internal urgings four times, the first with an actual date in my mind.  Maybe there is a conversation or experience you need to have, or someone you need to meet.)  Sometimes life calls you to do strange things, like take a month away from your everyday life and walk across a country amongst strangers who become friends, and to find time for contemplation and to listen to yourself and the quiet voice inside you.  Time to find your inner guidance and your own truth.

Anyway, here's a link to the film's website. http://www.caminodocumentary.org/

Buen Camino!