Good morning.  Just trying to get myself back together after yesterday.  We started filming the “Phil Volker Documentary” (working title) yesterday.  It revolved around my appointments there at Swedish Hospital.  But there was time for coffee break conversations, and joking with the nurses.  Big fun.  This is for the beginning of the project which will mostly be filmed  in Spain which is less than two weeks away.  Big big fun!

So, we are hopeful and prayerful and looking forward to capturing the basic raw material on film.  Friends have started various forms of fundraising such as Kickstarter and I will get back to you about that.  But there is an account open here at the local bank if you would like to send a check to help out.  And I will give you the address:

Phil Volker Documentary Account

US Bank, P.O. Box 428, Vashon, WA 98070.

Here are some great pieces of poetry for you that my good friend Liz introduced me to yesterday:

Santiago

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside
hiding then revealing the way you should take,
the road dropping away from you as if leaving you
to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when you thought you would fall,
and the way forward always in the end
the way that you followed, the way that carried you
into your future, that brought you to this place,
no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,
no matter that it had to break your heart along the way:
the sense of having walked from far inside yourself
out into the revelation, to have risked yourself
for something that seemed to stand both inside you
and far beyond you, that called you back
to the only road in the end you could follow, walking
as you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voice
that by night became a prayer for safe arrival,
so that one day you realized that what you wanted
had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place
you had lived in before you began,
and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and the mind and the promise
that first set you off and drew you on and that you were
more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way
than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach:
as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city
with golden towers, and cheering crowds,
and turning the corner at what you thought was athe end
of the road, you found just a simple reflection,
and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back
and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse:
like a person and a place you had sought forever,
like a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond;
like another life, and the road still stretching on.

– David Whyte
from Pilgrim
©2012 Many Rivers Press

Camino, by David Whyte

The way forward, the way between things,

the way already walked before you,

the path disappearing and re-appearing even

as the ground gave way beneath you,

the grief apparent only in the moment

of forgetting, then the river, the mountain,

the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting

you over the rain filled pass when your legs

had given up, and after,

it would be dusk and the half-lit villages

in evening light; other people’s homes

glimpsed through lighted windows

and inside, other people’s lives; your own home

you had left crowding your memory

as you looked to see a child playing

or a mother moving from one side of

a room to another, your eyes wet

with the keen cold wind of Navarre.
But your loss brought you here to walk

under one name and one name only,

and to find the guise under which all loss can live;

remember you were given that name every day

along the way, remember you were greeted as such,

and you needed no other name, other people

seemed to know you even before you gave up

being a shadow on the road and came into the light,

even before you sat down with them,

broke bread and drank wine,

wiped the wind-tears from your eyes;

pilgrim they called you again. Pilgrim.

Pretty nice.  OK, I am off to walk.  Things are pretty much in a whirlwind.  The best to you all, Phil.