[Camino Poem No. 35] Having loved enough

This is the 35th of 42 posts about the poems which carried me along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Aug-Sep 2016. On this, the 35th day, I walked 40km from Portomarin to Melide.

By now, the walking had become routine. What was not routine was the emotional closeness I was developing with my walking companion. When you walk hundreds of kilometers with someone, it gives you a lot of time to talk (and also, to play twenty questions).

Most of my life, I have been good at hiding from the pain that I feel. The aliveness and depth of our conversations was not giving me much room to hide.

In the months after my father died (when I was eleven), I found ways to cut off the part of myself that felt grief, rage and fear. By now, that part had been alone for nearly twenty years - so it also felt lonely, abandoned, and shamed.

That evening, I spent time writing to that part of me. I pictured him as an eleven year old boy lost on the moors, shivering in some ditch somewhere. I apologized to him. I asked him where he wanted to be  (by a warm fire, in a house full of loving people, with plenty of other children to play with). I said I was here to listen to his pain.

He liked the poem that day -

Having loved enough (Mark Nepo)

Having loved enough and lost enough,

I’m no longer searching

just opening,

no longer trying to make sense of pain

but trying to be a soft and sturdy home

in which real things can land.

These are the irritations

that rub into a pearl.

So we can talk for a while

but then we must listen,

the way rocks listen to the sea.

And we can churn at all that goes wrong

but then we must lay all distractions

down and water every living seed.

And yes, on nights like tonight

I too feel alone. But seldom do I

face it squarely enough

to see that it’s a door

into the endless breath

that has no breather,

into the surf that human

shells call God.

[Camino Poem No. 34] Kindness

This is the 34th of 42 posts about the poems which carried me along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Aug-Sep 2016. On this, the 34th day, I walked 30km from Furela to Portomarin.

Some days open you right up to where it hurts.

I miss you, Dad.

Kindness - Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
     purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

[Camino Poem No. 33] Working Together

This is the 33rd of of 42 posts about the poems which carried me along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Aug-Sep 2016. On this, the 33rd day, I walked 22km from Alto de Poio to Furela.

After a very late and somewhat hungover start we stopped for breakfast after a few kilometres, and were delighted to run in to the mid-aged French pilgrim that we had shared dinner with the night before. My notes describe her simply as 'wonderful' and 'very philosophical'.

She chose my poem for the day - number fifteen. It was (and is) a poem written by David Whyte for (wait for it) .....  The Boeing Company. More specifically, it was to celebrate the introduction of a new passenger jet.

Somehow, Whyte finds soul food in the aerodynamics of a plane wing. Just as the wing is crafted to give a hulk of metal miraculous lift, by receiving the power of invisible flows of air, so too are we to shape ourselves to take advantage of the unseen forces in our lives.

Applied to a camino, the poem's implications may seem straightforward enough: don't be rigid in your planning, and instead develop a flexibility that allows you take advantage of the diverse places, people and lessons that will miraculously spring up in your path.

We ended the day with my second stay at Al Chemista (the art cafe). A place of rock crystal mosaics, hearty paella, and 'great intangibles'.


Working Together - David Whyte

We shape our self
to fit this world

and by the world
are shaped again.

The visible
and the invisible

working together
in common cause,

to produce 
the miraculous.

I am thinking of the    way
the intangible air

passed at speed
round a shaped wing

easily
holds our weight.

So may we, in this life
trust

to those elements
we have yet to see

or imagine,
and look for the true

shape of our own self,
by forming it well

to the great 
intangibles about us.

[Camino Poem No. 32] Intimations of Immortality

This is the 32nd of of 42 posts about the poems which carried me along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Aug-Sep 2016. On this, the 32nd day, I walked 32km from Villafranca to Alto de Poio.

The first time I read this poem through, I was squatting on the curb in a dusty car park which also serves as Villafranca's intercity bus station. I wasn't even sure that she was coming. But sure enough, when the Alsa bus arrived at 9am, she appeared.