Day 25 or Have You Seen the Light

Notes on day 25, March 20, Leon to Vilar de Mazarife.

Holy Thursday dawned and the first morning Easter Week procession was gathering outside my hotel in the Plaza San Isisdoro. I decided to watch for a bit before heading out of Leon. I noticed one of the barge carriers had no shoes on. I pointed to his feet and said to the people next to me, ¨No zapatos!¨ Apparently someone takes their penance muy seriously. Walking barefoot on cold medieval cobbled streets? Either he´s crazy or he did some bad shit.



Today really tested my navigational abilities. They are not the best to begin with either. I got lost no less than three times. The suburbs of Leon, the signage, and my maps all conspired to confuse me. Once I started down a road and a car honked at me and the driver stopped to tell me I was going the wrong way (thank you random nice man). Once I had to slog across a poo filled field to a village to find out from a garbage man if I was going the right way. And once I walked at least a half a km without seening any trail markers, decided to go back, found the trailmarker saying that I was indeed heading right afterall, then retraced my steps and found the needed trailmarker ten feet further on the trail than where I turned back. Grrrr.



I did stop in a little shop and got some empanada (my first in Spain) for the road. The was not the little pocket of stuffed dough I´ve had in the states (Mexican you know). It is more like a stuffed pizza, but without the sauce, or the cheese. This one was chorizo and bacon. Nothing like pure pork fat and pastry dough. It was tasty, but it kept coming back up for visits by way of very violent burps for the next hour.

But once the confusion of the suburbs and the obstructions in my esophogus cleared, the trail opened out on wide farmland, past fallow fields with silvery winter grasses bending with the wind. The frosted mountains still beckoned and daunted from the distance. They loomed so large that they looked close, like I could be in the foothills in a few hours. But they are yet a few day´s hike away, and that means these beasts are huge.



But inevitably, like a scale returning to zero after it´s preoccupation is gone, my thoughts returned to my ex-it. It drives me insane that my mental set point is still set to him. I replay dramatic scenes in my mind, repeat heated words that were said, and futilly fantasize about changing the outcome of a history that is already indelibly written. ¨If only I´d said this or done that, that would´ve trumped him, that would have trapped him.¨ But then I realize that if I had indeed said A or done B, he just would have said X or done Y, and I´d be right back where I am, never having achieved that penultimate blow to his incomprehensible ego, never having found the right combination of words to leaving him standing, staring, mouth agape, unable to respond to my piercing truth.

It´s like an endless game of tic tac toe against a computer. No matter where you put your X, it is always a draw. No one ever wins. No one can. And so in frustration I find myself chucking my ruminations in favor of one fervent wish to the universe that a bomb drop on his house.

Which is why I NEED to follow my Aunt Linda´s advice and ¨just BE.¨

You see, my mom took a rather straight and narrow path into adulthood. Her sister, my Aunt Linda, on the other hand, did not. Her road had significantly more harrowing curves, detours and some dead ends. Which is why during this last year of crisis, when my mom did her very best to understand but couldn´t always relate, my Aunt knew my anguish before I even articulated it. ¨I know, I know,¨ she´d say, ¨you´re me.¨ Everything I was going through, she had already been there, taken that road, found that detour, hit that dead end. I am so lucky to have gotten so close to her this past year, and I am amazed at how prescient so much of her advice, so many of her warnings, so much of her hope turned out to be. I didn´t always believe her when she warned me, or told me things would get better, but it was some shred of optimism to cling to in the darkest moments.

Anyway, this angel of an Aunt is constantly reminding me, because I constantly need reminding, to ¨just BE.¨ And I know she is right. But how exactly does one DO this when one´s internal monologue is a perpetual litany of expletive laden insults aimed at one´s ex-it? The sole goal of which is to invent that zinger hum-dinger epithet which employs just the flawless combination of vituperative sarcasm and stinging wit that would've sent his dignity limping back to its hidey hole?

Just BEING doesn´t seem like something that should be so hard, and certainly not when you are hiking in Spain beside adorable Spanish sheep and carrying tasty Spanish clementines. It doesn´t seem like something we should have to practice, or like something we should be able to forget how to do to begin with. And I know we all are born with this ability. I watch my four year old niece just be when I am playing space ship or pirates with her. She is an expert at just being. When do we lose this? Because we do. And why is it so hard to find again?

So I thought of my aunt and my niece today and practiced just being. Giving myself a mental slap whenever my ruminations started to creep back in and take root. Reminding myself to look around and remember where I am!

On the trail I passed two pilgrims who embodied the spirit of being. They were lounging under a tree near the trail. They looked utterly content and in no hurry whatsoever to do anything other than just lay there. I thought this would be the perfect way to ¨be¨ for a while, and 1km later I found my own lonely tree in a field that wanted some company, and I sat down, took off my shoes and socks, drained some blisters, massaged my feet, and went to sleep. For a while on the edge of a field under the Castillian sun, too close to the ground for the wind to bother about, I rested, and breathed, and just WAS. And when I got up and moved on, I WAS all the way until I reached Mazarife, where I chose an albergue based on my book´s description of it´s ¨atmosphere¨.

It was another of those rehab terrors. The hospitalero had provided crayons for pilgrims to ¨decorate¨ the walls. Often they scrawled cheesy love poetry, syrupy spiritual platitudes, drew hearts and rainbows (hurl). But occaisonally there appeared the astonishing bit of artwork, the funny cartoon, or the witty proverb. And in the Albergue there were only two other pilgrims, the two pilgrims, in fact, that I had seen lounging under a tree on the trail earlier today. Liam, the Irishman from Belfast living in Barcelona, and Uwe (pronounced like the vacuum cleaner, Hoover, only without the H, or the R at the end for that matter) from Berlin. Uwe is the guy you want to be your doting gay uncle for life. Liam has that viscous Belfast accent where the words form in the back of the throat. I secretly repeat everything he says in my head just to practice that off the chain accent. Uwe met Liam on the train to St. Jean an they have stuck together for the entire Camino.

We had dinner together in the big hot spot in town, which is the only spot in town. I asked Liam what he does back in Barcelona. He used to be a barkeep but got tired of drunken assholes. ¨I guess you could say I´m a writer, but I haven´t had anything published yet.¨ So he is the kind of writer I am, the dreaming kind. But I quickly discern over dinner that with his sense of humor his name will be in print long before mine. And Uwe is quite possibly the sweetest man I have yet met on the Camino. He has a partner back in Berlin and a PhD and does something important and boring (according to him) in public transportation planning and is feeling, somewhere in the region of his heart, that it is time for a change.

On the way back to the Albergue Liam and Uwe asked me if I had ¨seen the light.¨ ¨If you´re talking about the light at the bottom of a glass of Pacharan,¨ I said, ¨then yes, I have.¨ But they showed me pictures of a real light they had seen in the sky right near the sun above Puenta La Reina a few weeks ago. It was an eerie light, casting a sharp vertical ray that sliced through the horizantal stratus of clouds. Strange and mysterious looking it was, so Uwe had gotten out his compass. The Light, as they called it, appeared to the west, hovering directly over Santiago.