[Camino Poem No. 21] The Tobacco Shop

This is the 21st of 42 posts about the poems that carried me along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Aug-Sep 2016. 

I took a rest day, staying another night in Sahagun. Self-care. I am learning.

In the morning, I stayed in bed, flicking through TV shows I did not understand. Later I worked a little on my PhD, bought postcards for my family, and joined the nuns at the local convent to hear them sing their daily vespers. 

Returning to the silence of my room, I found myself jolted into new layers of grief, pulled back almost two decades to the days and weeks following my father's death. There is, it seems always more. More grief. More of the fear that holds the grief in (will it overwhelm me? will it overwhelm the people around me?). And more of the anger that comes from wanting to have grieved more back then. 

Community - Starhawk

I just returned from a week spent facilitating workshops at Atlantic College - an international sixth-form in South Wales that I attended between the ages of 16 and 18. 

The days *working* there got me thinking a lot about community. Within our facilitation team, I found abundant play, understanding and inspiration. Through our workshops, we were hoping to cultivate deeper connections between the students. In the time since, I have I found myself vividly recollecting the awe-some level of community that I experienced during my years as a student there. 

Community matters. Here is a poem about that.