We all know how much fun it is to have a new person to talk Camino to, fresh meat My Rebecca would say.  We are so enthusiastic about the topic we could probably talk to a stump if we had to.  We can’t help ourselves as Annie would say.

Our daughter and her family have been here for almost a week and that has been fun.  Rebecca getting to spend lots of time with her grandson.  And you know, general celebration.  So old friends of Tesia’s show up to hang out.  And yesterday one of her old friend’s Sasja walked with me for the Sunday afternoon walk after we watched the film.  She had never seen that.  And we cried, have to add that.

Anyway I had her ear for a mile and a half.  Well, it is not like I talked for the entire time but I tried to get in all the important points.  But it occurred to me this morning as I thought about our conversation that the Camino as I describe it sounds like a pretty amazing place.  I was trying to imagine our roles changed and me hearing about it for the first time.  I would be saying, Really?  Really?  Really?

It is pretty amazing when you think about it like that as in imagining hearing about it for the first time.  How did we get so lucky to stumble on it?  Personally I will have to thank Martin Sheehan and the “Way” which is still probably the best easiest introduction to the whole phenomenon.  Anyway, I consider myself one lucky guy.  And if it had been for that we wouldn’t know each other and we be carrying on the way we do, pilgrimage junkies and tapa animals.

Just sayin, love, Felipe.

The blackberries are thick and juicy.  It’s hard to walk without picking.  Everything good.

Monday 0900-1000

Tuesday 1600-1700

Thurday 0900-1000

Sunday 1600-1700

We usually have tapas and wine  after the afternoon walks.  Felipe.x

One more thing about corn. I know, I know, you are up to your ears. Oh, good pun Felipe. OK but the correction is that the variety of corn that I am so impatiently waiting to ripen is called Sugar Buns and not Honey Buns. Yea, not a big difference but somewhat, just in case you were trying to look it up.

Now that we have that straight let’s get on to what’s next. Yesterday was St Clare day and maybe we are not done talking about her. There are some great paintings of her that artists have done over the ages:

Well, maybe a picture is worth a thousand words.  I have to go, the ranch calls.  The best to you, love, Felipe.

The 15th of August, that is my new prediction of when the corn will be ripe enough to stock the roadside stand.  I know you are probably tired of hearing about Felipe’s corn but it is a big topic around here.  And my new canopy came yesterday and we got it erected and tied down out by the road.  Got the signboard, cooler and cash box out there too.  Looks like a roadside stand to me.  All we are lacking is the produce.

So today is St Clare day, the 11th of August.  I vividly remember this day on the trail in Spain.  I was walking with a teacher from Assisi, Italy whose name was Clare and she celebrated all day long.  She was celebrating her name day which was a new one on me.  She could have been St Clare in modern clothing there just for me.  The old magic moment on the Camino.

A bio of St Clare:

https://youtu.be/OE6wg17lVOs?list=PL58g24NgWPIzvBk2IQVES_xC4WTm6-CDI

Ok, have to go.  Enjoy it, love, Felipe.

I am so craving a BLT and a cob of corn.  Of course they would have to be tomatoes and corn from here at Raven Ranch.  I picked a few ears last night but it’s just not ready.  But there is a lot of it coming.   And the tomatoes, they are all green but again there is a lot of them.   Yea, I will have to put in a revised ETA of August 15th for all that, the bacon we have.

Have one more itty bitty chapter in my Medjugorje book.   I don’t know if I have ever read a book quite like that before.  That part of the world is very foreign to me for one.  The apparitions themselves seem so unusual which they are.  Marjana’s good nature and durability seem amazing under all the circumstances.  And it’s statis with the Vatican is still not settled I think.  It is all sort of surreal in it’s unusualness.  The book definitely broadens my view of things.  Thank you Loretta for putting it in my hands.  That title is My Heart Will Triumph.

I forgot that a few weeks ago I was including in the daily post a quote from Thomas Clark on Walking.  Let see if I can find that to get it going again.  Well, it seems to be avoiding me for the moment.  Perhaps a couple of quotes from the Medjugorje book:

“Even after all these years, time seems to stand still when I am with Our Lady.”  Marjana Soldo.

“My Son could have won with strength, but He chose meekness, humility and love.  Follow my Son and give me your hands so that, together, we may climb the mountain and win.”  From Our Lady’s Message of July 2, 2007.

OK, it will all come together, promise.  Love, Felipe.

I should start out with a good pic of the lad but am short on that.  Will have some soon.  Maybe I will take a shot of the coffee table next to me, it’s his play workbench.  It is complete with books, trucks, a Lady of Guadalupe candle, skull and heart shaped rock.  OK, move over Grandpa for the next generation.

Here at the ranch there is a strange mix of fog and smoke outside.  The weatherman is giving us a possible change in the weather bringing rain and relief from the smoke but that is this weekend.  We will have to bear with it a while longer.  And today could be the day of the first corn.  I am so antsy to start.  Still waiting for my canopy to come by UPS for the roadside stand.  Maybe all this will happen today!

I am feeling better.  These new rounds of chemo are kicking my butt but it doesn’t last forever.  Eventually the poor guy surfaces for a few days of normalcy before the next round.  Major fun.  Thanks for all your prayers and good thoughts.

Due to FaceTime with Buenos Aires Cris this afternoon.  We haven’t met for a while, too many things going on.  I wish that she could come up for one of our women’s archery retreats.  That would be bring a lot of different worlds together for me.

Walk this morning in a few moments.  It is tough these days to make it around as there are so many juicy berries to pick as we go.  They are especially big this year, a result of the late spring rains we endured.  So this is the payoff.

We had a nice dinner party out on the deck under the cherry tree last evening.  Our daughter and her friends meeting before they come and go on summertime trips.  There are a bunch of pix up on Rebecca’s FaceBook page today.

Well OK, that’s what it looks like here at 8:22 AM today.  Hope that today is peaceful and profitable for you whatever time zone or hemisphere you are in.  Love you, Felipe.

I am working away at reading Marjana Soldo’s book on the apparitions at Medjugorje, My Heart Will Triumph.  Maybe seven eighths the way through.  Just don’t have that much time for reading but it is most interesting.  I knew next to nothing  about this happening before reading this book.  What an amazing journey.

There are a couple of paragraphs from page 319 that we could talk about:

“People think that the existence of suffering disproves the existence of God misunderstand their own existence.  If the world were devoid of sorrow, could we recognize joy?  If sickness did not exist, would we cherish good health?  In many ways a pilgrimage to Medjugorje is a metafor for life.  The pilgrim endures the pain of long-distance travel and the exhaustion of climbing the hills, but in the end he realizes that all the suffering opens a doorway to love.”

“I always tell people that come to Medjugorje that a spiritual healing is infinitely more valuable than a physical one.  Only one kind of healing leads to eternal life.  A man can enter Heaven without an arm or a leg but not with sin in his soul.”

Don’t those things sound familiar?  They are 7/8’s the same as caminotalk here at Caminoheads.  The pilgrimage as a metafor for life is a biggie around here, right?

Then the importance of healing over curing or as Marjana says it that a spiritual healing is much more important than a physical one.  I would say that we are on to the same idea here and it is not that either one of us thought of these ideas on our own.  They are more like observations that come with time.

OK, I need to get out and fertilize the corn as it makes its final push.  I can look see if there are any ears that are getting close to ripe.  Our daughter and her family just rolled into the ranch last night from the East Coast, how perfect is their timing?

The best to you pilgrims out there, love, Felipe.

Honey Bun’s sweet corn just days away from being ripe.  Very exciting for this guy.  Not only do we get to munch on it soon but the roadside stand can open up and everyone else can too.  Harvest time, it just doesn’t get any better than this.

If you are local please stop down to the stand, come early and come often.  The total season for corn, early plus the later variety will be less than a month.  So don’t dilly dally on this one, no substitute for fresh.  If it isn’t fresh we aren’t selling it.

OK, thanks for bearing with me on that.  You probably live too far away to drive over here.  But I have to inform my good neighbors.

I know that we were talking about the Transfiguration and it would be great to continue with that.  Maybe just maybe it could be compared to the fresh corn.  It is that peak of goodness when all the factors are maxed out.  It was less a moment ago and it will be less a moment from now.  The peak is the peak!  I know there is a difference between our corn and the splendor of eternal life.  Yes, for sure but we mortals can’t take too much, it scares us, it confuses us.  That is why the Transfiguration probably lasted seconds or minutes.  It was a glimpse, just a glimpse.  And I know the fresh corn is just a glimpse, just a moment to remember and hold on to.

OK, off I go to shop and pay bills.  Have one heck of a day.  Can actually see the blue of the sky here, most of the wildfire smoke has cleared out.  That’s the way the morning of August eighth looks from here, love, Felipe.

Here is this event, the Transfiguration, that happened two thousand years ago.  What an amazing happenstance.  I have a feeling that it is so amazing that we can’t hardly but start to understand or appreciate it.  How may times have we read the text in the Bible or heard about it in sermons but we still don’t “get it” I think.  Not that there is some secret knowledge here, God doesn’t like secret knowledge but it is so powerful as to be dangerous.  Dangerous in a sense that we know it will easily overwhelm us.

But Jesus says to Peter, James and John something like, “Get up and don’t be afraid.”  That is the most common saying in the Bible, “don’t be afraid”.   We seem to need constant guidance and reassurance.   Somehow I have a feeling that it is this fear that keeps us/me from getting to close to this story even now.  When I would say the rosary walking on my trail I would come to the spot to say the Thursday’s fourth event, the Transfiguration, and I would blank out.  What is that?  What goes there,  I haven’t a clue?

I don’t know exactly where this conversation is going but I just feel that it is worthy and seems unexplored.  So expect more to come when the Spirit moves me, as they say.  Catherine will be here shortly for our Monday morning walk and I need to get up and going.

Just a note that we had two great visitors yesterday, Greg and Lisa from Tacoma.  They were a joy and we do hope they come back to be with us again.  This is what we do, we Caminoheads, we get together.

The blackberries are ripe and producing.  The corn is so very close, maybe less than a week.  The smoke from the 240 fires in British Columbia lingers.  And the Caminoheads get together.  Love you guys, Felipe.

Catherine drove this early morning to the Father David’s eight o’clock Mass.  And there it was on the front of the church bulletin, an icon with Jesus beaming, Elijah, Moses standing and Peter James and John flattened again the side of the mountain.  I was ill prepared.  The transfiguration has really been speaking to me this year, giving me the business.

So maybe we should talk about it again here and now, a kind of review.  It all started out in Lent when I was asked if I would give a little two minute speech about one of the topics on the list.  It was part of a program where different parishioners would contribute something each week of Lenten period.  I don’t remember all that was on the list but the transfiguration was there looking at me like a lonely puppy at the animal shelter.  I had just identified it as the one event on the rosary that I had the most trouble remembering or perhaps identifing with.  So, it was the idea that I would learn about something by picking it that drove me on.

What was this extraordinary event all about?  So, I prayed about it and made a plan.  I was going to attend a weekend retreat with a group of bible study guys and I would corral one of them to get the hot scoop.  Well, it didn’t really happen exactly as planned although I did have a breakthrough there on the trip.

I had a dream on the first night.  And that gave me an experiential knowledge of the transfiguration that was so much more valuable than reading about it or talking about it.  The dream was that I had met and was traveling with a woman who was extremely captivating.  I was so taken with her that I never wanted to leave her side.  But here is the deal half of her face was beautiful and totally normal but the other half was badly disfigured.  You couldn’t get around the disfigurement, it was there to stay.  But she was so alive, so aglow from the inside out that I was unaware of the “problem”.  How could that be?

She obviously was transfigured.  So much of the Spirit was shining through her that that was her reality.   Everything else was secondary.  Jesus shows us the way on this.  We have to die to things before we can really have a chance to be alive.

OK, time for lunch, haven’t eaten all morning.  Love again, Felipe.