Walking El Camino and Waiting at the Makaha

I do love this land.

What a sky to match this land!

I waked through here with a young friend from Brazil who played the Celtic soundtrack from Outlander. We might as well have gone back in time and place. I could feel it.

Then back under the shadow play of oaks.

And back out with a sunrise.

Off to the distance…

Hills, forest, soil, gravel trail, fields, and a big cool blue morning sky.

The villages we pass through here always sit on hills. They are very old. They have supported pilgrims for centuries. The church, always impressive, is the center of the place. The bells ring as we approach.

That’s a momentary built into the mountain. It has secrets. And there are many caves. It is not open to visitors.

Ahh… another cool water fountain stop.

And life has not changed much in these villages.

You almost never see the people work the land.

The road is very long. And it’s much longer in the afternoons.

I loved that morning when I left early from the 800 year-old church hostel in a tiny village to turn the corner to find…

that…

I was walking westward into a a full moon setting right in front of me.

So I followed that moon all the way into the village for coffee, juice and toast.

Safia, An 18 year-old Australian recent high school graduate, and I walked into a coffee house at the same time and shared a mid-morning break together. We shared some stories and one thing led to another, to which she asked for my thoughts on how she might choose a path in life. I said that whatever it was that she would do, it would be good if that activity called for the qualities that she so obviously had in such abundance: courage, openness and joy.

Then we were back on the Camino, each at our own pace, and as I watched her slowly pull away into her unknown, but likely bright future, I wished her well.

The Camino is thinning out now. For a bunch of reasons, likely, there are starting to be fewer people on the road. We are still a river–more a steam–of humanity coming through, playing our current part in the never-ending flow of centuries of pilgrims, but it gets down to a trickle now and then.

Anyway, as I was walking alone I thought about the four prayers for the Camino that I set out at the start.

I thought of that prayer about growing and nurturing virtues in many the parts of my life–personal, family, ‘ohana, community, ‘Oahu, the Islands, my nation, and the world. I think this is a turning point in history–we stop polluting at planet climate changing scale and stop being so weird about people who are different than us, and things get good. We don’t… we all go down, within a generation, two at the most.

And then it came to me… Growing virtues is so general. Really, what specific virtues do you want to grow?

Well, “Those qualities you saw in Safia, that were as plain as day, are perfect–they are the ones I’d like to have as closer friends: Courage, Openness and Joy!

And then for a couple hours as I walked I sang a song with a made-up tune with those three words as lyrics: courrrage, oooopenness and… jooooooye, over and over, my Camino Mantra for the day.

And later, that night, and every day since, I have see that song come true. I realized that these qualities ARE the Camino, not just for me, but for so many who walk these sacred paths.

I love it that I didn’t choose or grab for virtues that I wanted or that I thought I lacked, or wanted more of. I love it that the Camino, being those very things itself, chose to choose them for me. The Camino is courage, openness and joy.

Ask almost any pilgrim you meet along the way and they, with openness and evident joy shining through whatever foot and leg pain they may have, will tell you so.

Rioja is the next region we are walking through. Here is some Rioja:

Rainy morning

Headed out early

The sky is a great friend.

More of that rain on the mountains we’ll walk through.

My kind of place

Camino

Camino

Camino

Camino

A triple energy metaphor– sunflower, wind turbine, electric line (this is from a couple days ago)

And

And

My muse

Ahh…

Olive trees along the Way

My Way

Everybody has “their own Camino”

Another early start

With a sunrise at my back

Nice to see the big wide open sky

Another cool early morning

Love that history

Into Lograno

I feel like I move at snail’s pace.

I took an alternate route today, hours and hours without seeing another pilgrim.

An albergue

Leaving early in the morning.

Out of the village

On the Way

Past stone bridges

Yep

Onward

Way out there

Making hay while the sun shines… (sorry!)

Going

Into that alternative! Feels absolutely medieval in this forest!

Good thing the is a sign here once in a while.

That guy ran up the mountain past me.

That’s it for today.

Today we walked from Puente through a history steeped in the history of the Roman Empire (around the year 0) and the Knights Templar when they were in their heyday 12-14th Centuries)

My friend, Shannon from Alaska, crossing an old Roman Bridge.

The Camino goes through here.

Navarra

The Way sign

More friends (this time a father-daughter team) from many parts of Spain–with my Spanish really coming back–along the way.

The Camino itself has become my muse, my chosen focus for photography. To share the Way with you.

We’ve been headed here.

Now the pattern of the days has established itself: arise at 6 am, walk in the dark by 6:30, go about 6 kilometers, stop for breakfast, walk more ’till 1pm or as much as 4:30 pm on the long stage days) then rest, wash, eat, see, talk, eat, sleep and then get up again.

More muse

And more

And more

And

I love Navarra

On the 800 something kilometers of the Camino from St. Jean to Santiago, we walk through 4 major (autonomous) regions of Spain. The first one we’ve been in, and continue to be in for now, is Navarra–the mountainous Basque countryside. I love Navarra.

Here now, are pictures of our next day’s walk: the 24 kilometers from Pamplona (through amazing beauty and cultural history) to our next rest stop in the albergue in the old town of Puente de la Reina.

The morning urban walk out of Pamplona.

Along urban fields

Headed out of town, Walking ever westward.

Great color all around–subtle, diverse, shifting, light-capturing and wonderful. The light is my constant companion on the path.

It’s so much about the food producing capacity of this historied land–olives, almonds, wine grapes, pears, tomatoes, wheat, barley, oats, hay for cutting for feeding, pasture for grazing, bees for honey, on and on…

Out of town and back on the Way…

The land and the sky begin to open up.

The DNA encoded information in these decades old rootstocks tells the plant how to catch the sun and pull carbon from the air and make them into sugar which people will then ferment and drink as wine to fuel their walk through this very place!

There I am, a pilgrim in the early sun, my morning shadow always long and in front of me.

Lunch on the road, with it’s source right there!

Roman roads, 2000 years old.

Coming into a village for some Cafe con Leche and some fresh squeezed oranges turned into into sun-filled pulpy juice.

It turns out I am beat at the end of 25 kilometers with 10 kilos on my back and there is a lot to do after the walk like finding a place to stay and washing clothes and eating and stretching and lots of other stuff. And wifi (pronounced wee fee here) can get pretty sketchy in the some of the alburgues in the villages, so though I want to post and keep you current every day, that might not be so possible. I will catch you every time I can and for sure when I get my next rest day in Burgos at the end of the first week of September.

So, if not before, see you then! And I’d love to hear from you!

The blueberries are not quite ripe. Maybe another week.

And if you want to read these posts of experiences in the order that they happened, start with Spa in Pamplona and work your back to this.

Aloha!

I love all my new friends.

Staying back a day in Pamplona I am not sure I’ll catch back up with some of them who have moved on. I’ll miss them and I will meet new friends to love and miss as well up the Way ahead. But I think each person that I come across is my Camino so catch up or not they will always be with me. That’s a cool kind of easy love. A kind I like a lot.

But for now, Hannah, such good wishes to you! I hope you can complete this Camino now here on this blog with me and then come back and finish it with your legs as well someday…

Aloha for now, Juan, Ivan, Nacho from Madrid!

Last night, arriving in Pamplona…

Turns out that Spanish is the language in which I flirt, in which I cut a little looser, play more openly with grown ups and laugh easy and abundantly at the humor that is all about–that is the happy warp to the pains and losses that are the woof of human life.

Perhaps it is that I lived in Spanish speaking countries from ages 15 to 30–the natural flirting time, when (in that way) we are at our most motivated and when we are at our best, perhaps. Since then, for me, those skills just atrophied. For after that I married (once again) and after that the waters that ran past my personal life’s historical bridge made that kind of playfulness quite dangerous and could likely get me killed. So it was fun to find it wake up once again. In Spanish.

At the end of a long and tiring day, walking slowly past cafes on the cobbled streets of old Pamplona, looking for a bite to eat–some fish and some tomatoes too–led quite naturally to spend quality time at a streetside table with a couple of Pamplonan “jovenes” (young men in their 60’s, like me too), one of which knew all 200,000 people who live in this town and the other who knew half of them. I learned some insides of this place. For example, these two guys have lived here all their lives and have never once run with the bulls. They said, “Solo los cobardes corren.” (Only cowards run.) That sounded wise to me! And I learned more about how Navarro really is quite wonderful and when I return (and I will) I’ll walk the Camino Norte next time–and we laughed from one thing to the next as wits and repartee got shaper, enlivened all the more by the minute, honed to great good fun.

All through the Camino I’ve seen beautiful organic tomatoes growing in the gardens that I passed. Well, with the healthy mountain soil in which they stood and the cooling rains they drank and the sweet sunshine they absorbed in their juicy red bodies, I really wanted to eat one! In doing so I would be eating Navarra, my walk fueled from the very place I’m walking through. But the people in the restaurant said that it was early and the chef wasn’t in yet and so there were no tomato dishes I could eat today.

Alas, my new work-averse, fun-loving friends to the rescue. The businessman–the one who makes his living talking on the phone buying this and selling that, friend of everyone (famous singer on the streets each night after an afternoon and evening of visiting his friends around the town with wine) got them to slice a fat fresh one up for me with salt and olive oil. A tomato I am sure I won’t forget. It took forever for it to come (who knows if this was not the instructions to the barkeep by the flirtatious one) and in the meantime we drank the delicious wine he sold to that very same establishment and that he bought for me… so we called the dish “tomate lento.” (The slow tomato). Well that was my evening of fast men and a slow tomato. Laugher, fun, and yummmm…

So for now, a bar of a song the three of us sang together, “Gracias a la vida… que me enchant tanto,” puts things perfectly.

The Camino has already become a self luminous diamond of experience. I am immersed in many layers of European history. And this is an adventure plain and simple. And there is the sheer physicality of it and the health benefits that surely are to come. Not to mention the grand beauty of old world nature filling me up at every turn. And the newfound fun of taking a shot at artistry with my new camera toy. And the social well-being of meeting mostly open people from mostly everywhere.

But surely the foundation of pilgrimage is spirit and discovery, inside not just out.

I light a candle at the start and carry four blessings on the Camino that I received from my meditation teacher on her birthday, as I absorb and understand them and make them my own:

1) That good thoughts will want to come through my mind.

2) That I will always be grateful for nature and in love with her and will remain in gratitude for every chance to live not just in a virtual world but in a real one, under wide open natural skies lit by the sun and moon, and that humanity will get its act together to care for those skies and not let them warm too much and that we will do that soon before things all get burned or flooded out.

3) That virtues will grow within myself and in my country and in my world, and work themselves up closer to the surface of human nature and that things like patience and compassion and courage and honesty and generosity and freedom and humility and kindness and openness and respect (the good list goes on and on) will find ever more their way (and ever more ways to find their way) through an adolescent species into maturity. We live in a society that hurts nature and people in ways it doesn’t need too and we all know could be better than it is. And maybe it’s naive but I don’t want to be the judge, rather the nurturer, in any way I better can, so peace and justice and balance work their way through the world and people get a chance to keep their cool and feel how good composure and upliftment feels.