I was more than tickled by all the surprises. One of the best which happened over and over again due to the nature of the flow of pilgrims was to catch a glimpse or suddenly be in the presence of someone that you knew from earlier on the trail. To renew a friendship was always fun. People were always coming and going in the flow. Some decided to stay in a certain place to explore or some would have to heal up for a few days. But then later they would catch up because you slowed down for some reason. Reunions were fun!

Then there were all the religious and spiritual reminders along the trail. From grand cathedrals down to little crosses or piles of stones
made by those that had been there before. There were the carved stone crucifixes that were every so often that were centuries old and the funky crosses made of two sticks and lashed together with some fiber at hand. I remember Kelly my walking partner would get on me for repairing these humble gestures when they fell apart. Then he was so moved by that place where there is a half a mile of chain link fence paralleling a highway that was covered with thousands of pilgrim crosses woven in to it. The crosses where mostly made of sticks but some were artistically crafted of windshield wipers and other automotive debris. We made crosses but I remember having to climb up the adjacent hill to the woods to find some material because everything close by use used up. Kelly was very moved by all that.

And it seemed like God was prodding and poking us the whole walk with those type of artifacts. People there before us had created so many and they included all kinds of hearts laid out in stones and all manner of things. A huge map of the world done in old tires was spread out on one hillside. All this continuously reminded us of the purpose of the walk.

Speaking of walking, it is walking time here. And bird feeding time.

Love You spelled out in old tires on a hillside loves, Felipé!

OK, now that we have dealt with the reptilian intrusion we can move on with Number Seven of our Pilgrim Beatitudes. Geez, of all the crazy things! OK, here’s #7:

Blessed are you pilgrim when you don’t have words to give thanks for everything that surprises you at every twist and turn of the way.

Whoa, does that include marauding crocodiles? Well, I don’t know about that but surprises are still with us, right? I guess we just need eyes to see. If we don’t see it we will easily pass it by. Until finally it trips us up perhaps.

OK, I have to go for today. Let me try and remember surprises from the Camino for tomorrow. It seems like a long time ago now but maybe it is all the stuff that has happened since that filled up that time so fully.

after while crocodile loves, Felipé.

Just when you thought you were safe, crocodiles show up. It’s all William’s fault really. He wrote a comment about yesterday’s post and that’s where it started. My post said that I would see heart rocks on the Camino when I really needed some inspiration. And William commented that that was just for me as in I was the one that saw them. Maybe someone else didn’t see them but was inspired by something else. OK, got it. But then he starts writing about the pic on yesterday’s post has a crocodile on it and it is going to chomp down on my thumb! What?

And I look and there it is. Can you see it? I thought I was looking at a map of the Camino. But for William it morphs into a reptile and it’s open mouth is by my thumb as I hold up the “map”. So, William proves his point. We very personally see what we see.

Which brings up a technical point. If you get this daily post on your email I don’t think you get the daily pics. If you connect by going directly to the www.caminoheads.com website you will get the pics which I think adds to the post. So, you have to maybe get to the website to see the crocodile.

On the map a yellow line is the Camino from Astorga to Santiago and it forms the top edge of the open of the crocodile. Teeth seem to hang downward and are numbers that mark the daily stages. The lower edge of the mouth is a line formed by the words Ourense and Ponferrada. The pièce de resistance is the eye formed by the city of Oviedo. And there it is for William to see.

Time to go. Have a walk this afternoon. I haven’t been all the way around it since the snow fell. Maybe I will make it today.

more later loves, Felipé.

I really don’t know how this works but I can remember so many instances of climbing some grade on the dear Camino and just feeling exhausted, like I can’t go on, and then spying a heart rock in the soil. It happened so often that I grew to expect it or I suspected people of planting them there. Were those hills piled high with heart rocks and dusted over with a little soil, maybe? Somehow this happened and the result was a tremendous help to me. Someone or some force was taking a step back to help me. After a while one might think that they are blessed.

But most of the time we people helped we people. It just seemed like the natural thing to do. After a while of walking the fresh edges of the new pilgrim have worn off and we are left humbled and knowing that we will occasionally need help ourselves. We learn that this thing is not a competition and we have no need of “beating” our neighbor. And we learn that we are not always going to be the helper. Sometimes we need the help. We are continually humbled.

I guess at some point we have to realize that we are on the same team and that team relies a lot on teamwork. Maybe the sooner we realize this the better. Yup, it wasn’t pretty maybe but we finished together.

team loves, Felipé.

Blessed be you pilgrim if you discover that one step back to help another is more valuable than a hundred forward without seeing what is at your side.

I just hope that is self explanatory in this day and age. Not only that but that we should feel that in our fibers. We should know this without saying, simple right? But it does get more complicated in real life when we start seeing people next to us that don’t look like us for instance. Or we see people that somehow don’t make the grade with us. Or people that have maddened us or betrayed us. How do we navigate through?

Early this morning I had a dream and like most of my dreams they were just glimpses of things. I don’t see a lot of build up or context just maybe intent or emotion. But the jest of it was that I was working for a group that would deliver baskets of tapas to places. Donors would call in to buy a basket and the idea was they could send it to a certain street corner in the city. Tapas may appear at your corner. Maybe there were tables on all the corners in that magic city, anything is possible.

It sort of fits in with #6 nicely.

nicely loves, Felipé.

Actually, all of us experienced that shift from when we were just “passing by” to “contemplating”… There was a moment for me for sure… when I realized that my mind changed… and the Camino somehow made me a part of it, or I made myself a part of it, I don’t know… (I think that land has something…) but it was then when my authentic Camino began, when I became the experience… instead of being a “mere visitor coming to see”…

It is also true and vastly covered that the Camino begins once you arrive to Santiago, but I think you have just fallen into a new path with this typo, and certainly one i love!

You know I LOVE Richard Rohr… I want him for my night table specially when I have insomnia and would need someone as clear as him to align my flying thoughts…!!! This is why the idea of contemplation that he offers is the one I was thinking of when I read the beatitude as you wrote it… Here are his words:
“Contemplation is simply being fully present—in heart, mind, and body—to what is in a way that allows you to creatively respond and work toward what could be.

“Contemplation is both personal and communal, internal and external. It helps us let go of our usual, self-focused way of thinking and doing things so that our compassionate, connected, and creative self can emerge. Through contemplation we develop the capacity to witness our egoic motivations, bringing this awareness into our day-to-day actions and living with increased freedom and authenticity through deeper awareness of our self and God’s Self.”

Isn’t that what the Camino is and made of us?

I think we should all get a tattoo of the beatitude with the typo… Just saying!

From Cris’s comments.

A Change of Scenery

Last year I wrote a guest post where I shared how a 3 ½ week pilgrimage to Italy did not go as planned when I got very sick my second week there. I was given some sound advice from Father Murry Bodo who tried to help me understand that perhaps God wanted to me to have an inner pilgrimage on this trip. Well, 2020 started out like any normal year but by March the lockdowns began and within a few months we all become well aware that despite our plans, the year was looking to turn out very different. It appeared it was going to be giving many of us an opportunity for an inner pilgrimage.

Slowly we watched and adjusted to a situation we had never experienced before. I held out hope for Veranda 2020 in August at Raven Ranch and was greatly disappointed when Felipe made the decision to postpone this very recent annual event until this year. (It is with fingers crossed and whispering prayers that I do hope The Oasis can happen this August.)

For my husband and I, 2020 brought some unforeseen challenges and changes. Some we had control over and some we did not. In June it was discovered that Jim had a health issue that could be very serious and just after this news, we learned that he was going to be laid off from his job of 24 years in IT. These would have been great challenges to face in a year without a pandemic!

Thankfully, after 6 weeks of waiting, the health issue turned out not to be serious or life threatening (though it will need to be addressed in the future.) The end of a 24-year job at the same company was both shocking and freeing. Unexpected, we began to explore options that a month earlier wouldn’t have crossed our mind. In August we began to explore life outside of California. Both of us having been born and raised in the state, we began to consider the unknown.

Tonight, I am writing this guest post from our new home in Prescott, Arizona. If you had told me at the beginning of 2020 that by Christmas time, we would have sold our home, Jim would no longer be working for his company, and that we would be moving out of state by the end of January, I would have bet against you! But I began to look at our journey considering the words Fr Bodo said to me back in 2018. 2020 provided Jim and I the opportunity for an inner pilgrimage with the choices we made and how we responded to all that happened, the good and the bad. Yet we also had the opportunity for an outer pilgrimage as we shifted our hometown from Ramona to Prescott.

There is value in both the inner and outer pilgrimages which I can finally see. Both can lead us to unknown places where we have the opportunity to learn more about ourselves and others. Both can also lead us to changes of inner and outer scenery and how much more are we blessed if we can not only learn to appreciate the process, but also the views, once we arrive…

Rho Densmore
SWCBC

Monday 0900-1000
Tuesday 1530-1630
Thursday 0900-1000
Sunday 1530-1630

See you, Felipé.

“Blessed are you pilgrim if your backpack is emptying of things and your heart does not know where to hang up so many feelings and emotions.” That’s number five of our ten Beatitudes. I think that we can all relate to this one pretty easily.

We went with less stuff than we normally have in our day to day lives, a lot less and it was still too much. So we gave some away and left some and threw some out. We jettisoned, we had to. Then we lost some things and left some clothes on the line. At some point the weight became more manageable. Of course we were getting stronger in a number of ways and that helped.

And as we thought and worried less about that we had more time and energy to take in the sights and the sounds around us. We fell in love with everything. Everything was fair game to fall in love with. We were kids in the proverbial candy store and we had the currency of the kingdom. And there reached a point where, yes, I didn’t know where to put things. I was full and just wanted to sit somewhere and cry. And it was the opposite of sadness but I laughed and cried and cried and laughed trying to adjust.

There came to be a richness that I wasn’t used to. It was crazy and overwhelming. Yes and that richness included pain and discomfort and hunger and thirst and sometimes sadness. But it all seemed to have a rationality of it’s own, it all made sense and was natural. And our backpack or our beings became full to overflowing with things that we found there.

And fortunately like women who in the memories of the highs of childbirth tend to minimize the memories of the pain, the same happens to us. We tend to downplay the hard grind and the sharp pains and they are largely forgotten. But the richness remains.

overflowing loves, Felipé.

So, if we go with this typo just for the heck of it. Just because. Just because it may be an example of a lucky mistake. We will go with it to see where it goes.

This is tricky because we are aware that we can’t say that there is only one way to do a Camino. It is all so personal. But there seems to be a difference between a pilgrim’s journey physically and his/her journey internally. A difference between say walking and wondering.

Monday I was talking with Janet my energy worker. I asked her to give me some idea about contemplation. I was casting around trying to get a new way to think about it. Janet said that in simplest terms contemplation was the aligning of the individual with the universe. That’s good and more streamlined than anything I had.

The typo reads “the authentic Camino begins when it is contemplated.” There is something to be said for that in anyone’s case if the inner Camino can lead to such an elegant journey. So, we are lucky that we stumbled across this I would say.

I am going about half speed today since I had my oral surgery yesterday. I will slowly get it together.

thank you loves, Felipé.