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Published: June 14th 2010
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I arrived June 5th and now it is June 14th.
This week I spend time with my family: Scott, Whitney, Mom, Dad and Scott's gal Robyn. We relaxed, visited chateaus and museums, ate food, drank wine and beer, I smoked three cigarettes, my dad exerted his control issues over the music volume knob in the car, we got to know the frogs in the pond behind our place, I found deep stillness a couple of times, we met up with Marie Ange and Phillipe (our French friends), we bbqed fish, and much much more. I could drown in the details. But details are the most wonderful thing about life. Although I also enjoy broad strokes because they are like the elements: sweeping and powerful. So I like broads and details. I like the details of broads. Like eyes and boobs and lips and legs and such. But I also love souls. I love the heartbeat, the yearnings and the frustrations, the growings and the dyings, the wheat which blows this way and that way in the gentle Southern wind. Any confrontation with the natural world will turn a man upside down and fill in his sad holes. Or it will break
him open moment by moment, leading him through all the wonderful variety of his inner voices, the happy, the sad, the angry, the dumb, the paranoid, the outrageous, the all the all the all, and then into a moment of inner silence when there is no difference between him and the silly frogs who are croaking in the pond.
So the first week in France with the family would be hard to capture, play by play. But at some point I couldn't sleep and I went to the computer and felt it might be time to look forward and think about what I'd do next. Some little faint voice had been saying: "Portugal, Portugal" and I looked into it. I don't know why Portugal. Maybe the "unknown-ness" of it for me. The way it is on the edge of Europe. I had very little imagination attached to it and that is why I liked it, I guess. But somewhere on the way of surfing the net I came across the Camino de Santiago. And I got caught. I got seized, somewhere around the heart region. Not a violent seizure, but something softer, less apparent at first. In the next days
in my silent reverie (unlike the frogs who never stop talking) I noticed that I was less free in my mind and heart. Something had a hold on me. It was the camino. Something about this endeavor was taking me over.
Now, four or five days later, it is probably going to happen. IT has become more real. Today at the advice of my mom who walked in a cancer walk in Atlanta, I put on my big pack and walked around the region here for 1.5 hours, just to see what it felt like. Needless to say: it felt exhilarating. I was moving. And I like to move. I was seeing. And I like to see. I was thinking and I sure like to think. There were fears coming up, the same fears that have probably occupied me throughout most of my life and probably the same fears that live in the hearts of all people the world across. I worried that I'd use up all my travel time doing the camino. I worried that I wouldn't let myself stop, even if I wanted to and it felt right. I worried that if I did it and had an
amazing experience of great profundity, that I would be more distant and removed from the people I love back home in the US. I haven't really been worried about the physical ordeal and considering what it is, I probably should be more worried about that. Basically the Camino de Santiago is a 7 or 800 km walk across the North of Spain from a small French town called St. Jean Pied du Port, across the Pyrenees Mountains and all the way to Santiago de Compostela in Northwest Spain. Each day is an average walk of 20-25 km (12-17 miles) with the rucksack on the back. Each night there are pilgrim hostels to stay and eat in, only if you've purchased your "Pilgrim's Passport" at some point. There are various caminos which lead to Santiago de Compostela. I am taking the one called: Camino Frances.
At least I think I am.
Who knows?
First I plan to take a train to a small town on the coast of France called Seignosse which is one of the more active surf zones in the world. I found a kind of cheap bed and breakfast to stay in and the dude who runs it
will give me a couple lessons. Perhaps I'll stay a few days and just once and for all learn to surf. It seems that learning to surf has been a part of my destiny and only in the past year have I begun to develop it. From there I can take a short train to St. Jean Pied du Pont, get the pigrim's passport and begin. I have 45 days or so until my return to NYC.
The trip of not-knowing, 2010.
To not know, more and more.
To bridge the gap between the sacred and the mundane.
All is one.
"After ecstasy, the laundry"
A POEM:
Bullfrogs croak in an old pond
Hills rise and fall in the distance
Eyes open and close and wonder
Am I awake yet?
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