It seems that the Caminoheads Bureau Chiefs have lost our calendars in the last couple weeks and the boss (a.k.a. Phil or Felipe) blogging week have returned to a daily schedule… I am posting today just because, and maybe we can all (very much talking to myself here!!!) “go back to work”… (believe me… the boss is very generous with his checks ;))

Life in the south cone has become blurry again… vaccination is moving slowly and rightfully covering the frontline workers, and the high risk groups first, but indeed very slow… we only have less than 5% of the population with 2 doses of the vaccine, and we have started our fall/winter season, and Argentina is right now the first country in the world with the highest number of cases and deaths in a day per million habitants… We are back to a full lockdown (no circulation is allowed, shops other than groceries and pharmacies are closed, and we are asked to stay inside…)

Anyone who knows me, knows that I may have some Irish gen because I can be a windbag even more when writing, so let’s go back to the title of this post. Binoculars. A few days ago, Phil posted about a zoom call with the radiotherapy doctor and going to Cabela’s, the island outdoors gear store, and maybe look for “binoculars”, and that post hit close to home, as since my teenager years, I have been working on finding “my way to see” my life story. Why? Because all I knew was what I was told, but as I moved along in life, my point of view of things changed, and my canvas became wider, and I realized the way I was looking at things till then was true, but wasn’t mine.

The Camino was great for this purpose, maybe this is why one of my favorite quotes is the one from Martin Robinson in “Sacred places, pilgrim paths” that says something like “the familiar obscures the eternal not because it is not present but because it simply cannot be recognized without the experience of a broader canvas”… a similar idea is present in Rebecca Solnit’s book “A field guide to getting lost”: “Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are”, and lastly, this other way of seeing that Padraig O’Tuama tells in “In the shelter: finding a place in the world”: “… some call it Northern Ireland and others call it the North of Ireland. These aren’t wordgames either. Depending on what you believe, death was called murder or legitimate aggression.”

Phil’s mention to going to Cabela’s and check the binoculars aisle, made me think it would be sooooo great if the “key” is in the outdoors gear store… sadly it is a bit more complicated than that… but in another way, isn’t this true too? At the end of the day, the outdoors gear store also sell walking shoes…

New ways of seeing loves,

Cris