This is the 17th of 42 posts about the poems that carried me along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Aug-Sep 2016. On this (the 17th) day, I walked 31km from Hornillos to Itero de la Vega.
For days, I had been allowing myself to be tired. To let myself walk shorter distances. It was as if I was unravelling months, even years, of fatigue - opening up layers of fear, sadness, and shame, and letting them gently release.
When I rose early to walk on this, the seventeeth day, I felt excited. Fresh. The pre-dawn landscapes were mysterious and inviting. I marvelled at the blinking red lights of the distant wind farms, beckoning in every direction.
Simple pleasures, really. To be walking, breathing, exploring. To be free.
As I stopped for a break mid-morning, I stumbled into two pilgrims from New Zealand that I had met several days before. I had them pick a poem. Felt easy at first. Sweet rhymes and bumper sticker wisdoms. I was trying to lose things on this journey. To let go of expectations, to not know where I would end up each day, to not worry if I left something behind at a hostel, to accept the arising and passing of the many 'camino friendships'...
The end of the poem rocked us all. 'A kick to the stomach', I wrote in my journal. Perhaps some losses are disasters. And that is ok too.
One Art - Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
For days, I had been allowing myself to be tired. To let myself walk shorter distances. It was as if I was unravelling months, even years, of fatigue - opening up layers of fear, sadness, and shame, and letting them gently release.
When I rose early to walk on this, the seventeeth day, I felt excited. Fresh. The pre-dawn landscapes were mysterious and inviting. I marvelled at the blinking red lights of the distant wind farms, beckoning in every direction.
Simple pleasures, really. To be walking, breathing, exploring. To be free.
As I stopped for a break mid-morning, I stumbled into two pilgrims from New Zealand that I had met several days before. I had them pick a poem. Felt easy at first. Sweet rhymes and bumper sticker wisdoms. I was trying to lose things on this journey. To let go of expectations, to not know where I would end up each day, to not worry if I left something behind at a hostel, to accept the arising and passing of the many 'camino friendships'...
The end of the poem rocked us all. 'A kick to the stomach', I wrote in my journal. Perhaps some losses are disasters. And that is ok too.
One Art - Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
The art of losing isn’t hard
to master;
so many things seem filled
with the intent
to be lost that their loss is
no disaster.
Lose something every day.
Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour
badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard
to master.
Then practice losing farther,
losing faster:
places, and names, and where
it was you meant
to travel. None of these will
bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And
look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved
houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard
to master.
I lost two cities, lovely
ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two
rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a
disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking
voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied.
It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too
hard to master
though it may look like (Write
it!) like disaster.
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