Dear Caminoheads,

Hope all is well with you! “Quilting this neighborhood”… This is a thought that came to me as I was reading Ron and PFJ’s comments on yesterday post…

Ron was talking about “looking up” and how this activity that he felt became sort of like a ritual when walking the Camino, was combined with PFJ’s thoughts who told us that he experiences the sky as something not “separated” from him, in fact, it is what somehow, marks the rhythm of his activities, so so so ruled by the weather and the time of the day, and so combined with his look “down”, as he looks a lot to the soil where he is planting, harvesting, or building… …  After reading their comments, I started to think what do I do??? and I realized that while I look at the sky during the day, I do not see it because a lot of the times I am “outside” in a big city, there are lots of tall-ish buildings occupying my visual and if not, huge signs advertising something, and the driving or the walking has to be done mostly looking “ahead” and not “up”. Then, I thought about Ann (from Ron and Ann <3)… if you are friends with her in the facebook or instagram, you will immediately note that Ann looks at “her sides” and this is how she discovers (or sees?!) the most amazing flowers and plants. And what about William, our Canadian BC?! Have you paid attention to the posts William sends to us? They always come accompanied by several pictures capturing details, those tiny particularities that make a snowflake different from the other, the petal of a flower different from the petal next to that one… And then I thought about Phil… where used Phil to look at? And while he had a “360 view”, he used to look “inside” a lot… praying, talking to his tumors… Do you read Kevan’s comments? Kevan looks at “facts”, he creates a genealogy tree of information…

And I could continue writing, describing my own impressions of each of us who owns a piece of this neighborhood… and the verb “own” is so right I believe, because what I am trying to say is that every one of us brings to this neighborhood with a way of looking at things, different from the one the other has, and with the comments and posts, what ends happening is that we overlap the view that each of us brings, and we end “composing” a new landscape, wider, bigger, deeper, more colorful, more refined, with more details, … a quilt could be the best word… not a puzzle that is about “adding”, but “composing”… as the result is something more creative, abstract, more beautiful, more appreciative of the differences

I think Phil would have approved this concept, don’t you think?

360 loves,

Cris