This is a great old festival here in Hot Springs. Well, just how old is it Felipe? Well, this is their twenty fifth anniversary this year. Pretty amazing.

We had a screening and Q and A this afternoon. That went super well. I got to talk with a bunch of the folks after that also. Then Maryjane and Joe, Roni, Annie and I spent the afternoon walking around the historic bathhouses and Annie scalding her little toes sticking them in the hot water coming out of the hillside. Hot water seems to bubble up all over the place.

We all talked Camino and Camino and Camino. We are so enamored with the topic. Is there life after the Camino? I have spent the last two years contemplating what it means that one’s Camino starts at Santiago. Is it all training this walk in Spain. Training for what?

Somehow at the dinner table I got on the topic of the old Zen saying that “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain and then there is.” I think this was in a Cat Stevens song at some point in the day. Maybe it was somebody else. I need to mention that it is four in the morning here and I can’t sleep so I am up writing to you.

But it occurred to me that maybe this the key to my question. Before the Camino I have a mountain, a reality, my personal reality part of our collective reality. Then on the trail I am separated from my normal life, my reality, my mountain and I learn to like that. Someone has said that the Camino is a
drug. Was that what they were talking about? Then I come back because I ran out of time and/or money. And then what? And the mountain reappears. My reality is still there. And the only way to deal with it and keep my Camino dream is to have a changed perception. To find a way to look at the mountain in a new way, a way that works now. Funny that I am using the word way so much. The Camino is a way. I am seeing that it is a way of physical movement but also a way of perceiving, a way of dealing.

Ah, 1% on my battery. Later, love, Felipe.