I should start out with a good pic of the lad but am short on that.  Will have some soon.  Maybe I will take a shot of the coffee table next to me, it’s his play workbench.  It is complete with books, trucks, a Lady of Guadalupe candle, skull and heart shaped rock.  OK, move over Grandpa for the next generation.

Here at the ranch there is a strange mix of fog and smoke outside.  The weatherman is giving us a possible change in the weather bringing rain and relief from the smoke but that is this weekend.  We will have to bear with it a while longer.  And today could be the day of the first corn.  I am so antsy to start.  Still waiting for my canopy to come by UPS for the roadside stand.  Maybe all this will happen today!

I am feeling better.  These new rounds of chemo are kicking my butt but it doesn’t last forever.  Eventually the poor guy surfaces for a few days of normalcy before the next round.  Major fun.  Thanks for all your prayers and good thoughts.

Due to FaceTime with Buenos Aires Cris this afternoon.  We haven’t met for a while, too many things going on.  I wish that she could come up for one of our women’s archery retreats.  That would be bring a lot of different worlds together for me.

Walk this morning in a few moments.  It is tough these days to make it around as there are so many juicy berries to pick as we go.  They are especially big this year, a result of the late spring rains we endured.  So this is the payoff.

We had a nice dinner party out on the deck under the cherry tree last evening.  Our daughter and her friends meeting before they come and go on summertime trips.  There are a bunch of pix up on Rebecca’s FaceBook page today.

Well OK, that’s what it looks like here at 8:22 AM today.  Hope that today is peaceful and profitable for you whatever time zone or hemisphere you are in.  Love you, Felipe.

I am working away at reading Marjana Soldo’s book on the apparitions at Medjugorje, My Heart Will Triumph.  Maybe seven eighths the way through.  Just don’t have that much time for reading but it is most interesting.  I knew next to nothing  about this happening before reading this book.  What an amazing journey.

There are a couple of paragraphs from page 319 that we could talk about:

“People think that the existence of suffering disproves the existence of God misunderstand their own existence.  If the world were devoid of sorrow, could we recognize joy?  If sickness did not exist, would we cherish good health?  In many ways a pilgrimage to Medjugorje is a metafor for life.  The pilgrim endures the pain of long-distance travel and the exhaustion of climbing the hills, but in the end he realizes that all the suffering opens a doorway to love.”

“I always tell people that come to Medjugorje that a spiritual healing is infinitely more valuable than a physical one.  Only one kind of healing leads to eternal life.  A man can enter Heaven without an arm or a leg but not with sin in his soul.”

Don’t those things sound familiar?  They are 7/8’s the same as caminotalk here at Caminoheads.  The pilgrimage as a metafor for life is a biggie around here, right?

Then the importance of healing over curing or as Marjana says it that a spiritual healing is much more important than a physical one.  I would say that we are on to the same idea here and it is not that either one of us thought of these ideas on our own.  They are more like observations that come with time.

OK, I need to get out and fertilize the corn as it makes its final push.  I can look see if there are any ears that are getting close to ripe.  Our daughter and her family just rolled into the ranch last night from the East Coast, how perfect is their timing?

The best to you pilgrims out there, love, Felipe.

Honey Bun’s sweet corn just days away from being ripe.  Very exciting for this guy.  Not only do we get to munch on it soon but the roadside stand can open up and everyone else can too.  Harvest time, it just doesn’t get any better than this.

If you are local please stop down to the stand, come early and come often.  The total season for corn, early plus the later variety will be less than a month.  So don’t dilly dally on this one, no substitute for fresh.  If it isn’t fresh we aren’t selling it.

OK, thanks for bearing with me on that.  You probably live too far away to drive over here.  But I have to inform my good neighbors.

I know that we were talking about the Transfiguration and it would be great to continue with that.  Maybe just maybe it could be compared to the fresh corn.  It is that peak of goodness when all the factors are maxed out.  It was less a moment ago and it will be less a moment from now.  The peak is the peak!  I know there is a difference between our corn and the splendor of eternal life.  Yes, for sure but we mortals can’t take too much, it scares us, it confuses us.  That is why the Transfiguration probably lasted seconds or minutes.  It was a glimpse, just a glimpse.  And I know the fresh corn is just a glimpse, just a moment to remember and hold on to.

OK, off I go to shop and pay bills.  Have one heck of a day.  Can actually see the blue of the sky here, most of the wildfire smoke has cleared out.  That’s the way the morning of August eighth looks from here, love, Felipe.

Here is this event, the Transfiguration, that happened two thousand years ago.  What an amazing happenstance.  I have a feeling that it is so amazing that we can’t hardly but start to understand or appreciate it.  How may times have we read the text in the Bible or heard about it in sermons but we still don’t “get it” I think.  Not that there is some secret knowledge here, God doesn’t like secret knowledge but it is so powerful as to be dangerous.  Dangerous in a sense that we know it will easily overwhelm us.

But Jesus says to Peter, James and John something like, “Get up and don’t be afraid.”  That is the most common saying in the Bible, “don’t be afraid”.   We seem to need constant guidance and reassurance.   Somehow I have a feeling that it is this fear that keeps us/me from getting to close to this story even now.  When I would say the rosary walking on my trail I would come to the spot to say the Thursday’s fourth event, the Transfiguration, and I would blank out.  What is that?  What goes there,  I haven’t a clue?

I don’t know exactly where this conversation is going but I just feel that it is worthy and seems unexplored.  So expect more to come when the Spirit moves me, as they say.  Catherine will be here shortly for our Monday morning walk and I need to get up and going.

Just a note that we had two great visitors yesterday, Greg and Lisa from Tacoma.  They were a joy and we do hope they come back to be with us again.  This is what we do, we Caminoheads, we get together.

The blackberries are ripe and producing.  The corn is so very close, maybe less than a week.  The smoke from the 240 fires in British Columbia lingers.  And the Caminoheads get together.  Love you guys, Felipe.

Catherine drove this early morning to the Father David’s eight o’clock Mass.  And there it was on the front of the church bulletin, an icon with Jesus beaming, Elijah, Moses standing and Peter James and John flattened again the side of the mountain.  I was ill prepared.  The transfiguration has really been speaking to me this year, giving me the business.

So maybe we should talk about it again here and now, a kind of review.  It all started out in Lent when I was asked if I would give a little two minute speech about one of the topics on the list.  It was part of a program where different parishioners would contribute something each week of Lenten period.  I don’t remember all that was on the list but the transfiguration was there looking at me like a lonely puppy at the animal shelter.  I had just identified it as the one event on the rosary that I had the most trouble remembering or perhaps identifing with.  So, it was the idea that I would learn about something by picking it that drove me on.

What was this extraordinary event all about?  So, I prayed about it and made a plan.  I was going to attend a weekend retreat with a group of bible study guys and I would corral one of them to get the hot scoop.  Well, it didn’t really happen exactly as planned although I did have a breakthrough there on the trip.

I had a dream on the first night.  And that gave me an experiential knowledge of the transfiguration that was so much more valuable than reading about it or talking about it.  The dream was that I had met and was traveling with a woman who was extremely captivating.  I was so taken with her that I never wanted to leave her side.  But here is the deal half of her face was beautiful and totally normal but the other half was badly disfigured.  You couldn’t get around the disfigurement, it was there to stay.  But she was so alive, so aglow from the inside out that I was unaware of the “problem”.  How could that be?

She obviously was transfigured.  So much of the Spirit was shining through her that that was her reality.   Everything else was secondary.  Jesus shows us the way on this.  We have to die to things before we can really have a chance to be alive.

OK, time for lunch, haven’t eaten all morning.  Love again, Felipe.

THE CALL TO LIVE EVERYTHING

One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts. We should never forget that death is waiting for us. A man in Connemara said one time to a friend of mine, ‘Beidh muid sínte siar,’ a duirt sé, ‘cúig mhilliúin blain déag faoin chré’ – We’ll be lying down in the earth for about fifteen million years, and we have a short exposure. I feel that when you recognize that death is on its way, it is a great liberation, because it means that you can in some way feel the call to live everything that is within you. One of the greatest sins is the unlived life, not to allow yourself to become chief executive of the project you call your life, to have a reverence always for the immensity that is inside of you.

John O’Donohue

Excerpt from WALKING ON THE PASTURES OF WONDER
John O’Donohue in conversation with John Quinn

Inishbofin / Co. Galway – 2017
Photo: © Ann Cahill

I get a certain amount of spam on this blog site and one that I just trashed said something like “finding your thoughts beneficial and your ideas really work.”  Something like that.  That would be nice if it was actually directed toward this blog but this kind of stuff is written so it applies generally to anyone and everyone.  But a good thought none the less.

I don’t know about my ideas really working but I do hope that my thoughts are beneficial.  Lisa one of my favorite people that I met at the Hot Spring Film Festival last year asked how my treatments were going.  She had a teenage son die of cancer and knows the whole drill.  I told her that the treatments were kicking my butt lately and I was feeling like the proverbial little flower coming up through a crack in the sidewalk.  Not really any good reason why I should have survived this long, just too ornery I guess.

I used to think about myself being a three legged dog when first wrestling with this cancer of mine.   Not that there is anything wrong with those guys but I am thinking that the flower in the crack is better for where I am at lately.  I just must have work to do yet and God is keeping me around for that reason that is all I can figure out.  But that seems like a plenty good enough thing at the moment.

Alperfect really, love, Felipe.

Such nice thoughts have come in on the comments lately.  I am really blessed with such a great audience.  I may feel beat up because of the chemo but I am “mighty because of Grace.”  Thank you Nancy for that.  Cris and Loretta sending blessings and covering me with prayer.  I am in the flow of pilgrims for sure.

Speaking of pilgrimage, Phil’s Camino is looking for another route to walk here.  We finished our second SJPP to Santiago and then just recently Santiago to the coast and back.   Maybe you have a guidebook or map detailed enough to extract the little towns and distances between them.   Any recommendations?  We might even be ready for Ireland or Italy.

Today is supposed to be the hottest of of the days in our current heat wave.  We will be up to the 90’s and some places even low 100’s.  That is broiling for us wimpy northerners.  The air is full of smoke from wildfires.  That is always creepy.  I am going to get my walk in here in a few minutes and say a rosary or two before it gets any warmer.

OK, thanks agin for being here with us.  We are walking our pilgrimage even though we are not physically together.  That is about right isn’t it?  Love, Felipe.x

At the hospital getting ready for my 100th chemo treatment.  I got sucked into working on the jigsaw puzzle in the waiting room but just got myself away from that to be with you.  So, here I am.  How’s by you?

Last week I was writing a bit about our focus here at Caminoheads.  My question was are we doing anything beyond me journaling away on life.  That has some value but now that I have your attention we should be doing something beyond that.  And as Cris from Buenos Aires and Dana from our neighborhood have expressed to me lately is that we are doing something greater.  And that is that we have been able to keep the Camino flame alive away from Spain, away from the Camino proper.

Cris put it that we here at Caminoheads we’re providing a place, a space for it to exist.  And she can read the blog and feel connected to pilgrimage.  Maybe she doesn’t have anyone to get together with in her world to do that with and that is why she likes to check in with us here.

Meanwhile Dana came to walk at yesterday’s walk and we had time to work on the question.  She  always has great takes on things and she came up with we had the Camino in real time.  We are present to it.  Then she came up with the metaphor that we were like her shell tattoo in that we were a constant reminder.

Well, just clarifying things for ourselves.  Just trying to do the best we can at what we should be doing.  OK, good to see you again, Felipe.x

Yesterday we flashed back to July 31,’14 and that seemed to shake a bunch of stuff loose from you all.

William from Calgary was relating to Emily’s thoughts about being frustrated with her body’s weaknesses.  So, his Camino moment occurred when he started noticing all the slow moving but relentless snails traveling along around him.

And then Jim from Lake Arrowhead, CA sent this ancient but timeless prayer:

“Pilgrim’s Prayer This Pilgrim’s Prayer is from the Codex Calixtinus, the 12th-century guide book to the Camino de Santiago. God, You called your servant Abraham from Ur in Chaldea, watching over him in all his wanderings, and guided the Hebrew people as they crossed the desert. Guard these your children who, for love of your Name, make a pilgrimage to Compostela. Be their companion on the way, their guide at the crossroads, their strength in weariness, their defense in dangers, their shelter on the path, their shade in the heat, their light in darkness, their comfort in discouragement, and the firmness of their intentions, that through your guidance they may arrive safely at the end of their journey and, enriched with grace and virtue, may return to their homes filled with salutary and lasting joy.”

And then Gracie from Australia posted this new pic of herself on FB.  Gracie was in Phil’s Camino in a number of places.  She was with me at Mass when I passed out and saved my head from bonking on the stone floor.  Yes, I went to church and fell into the arms of Grace, it’s true.

Ah, so many great memories we have right?  And how about, “filled with salutary and lasting joy.”  It makes me all smiley inside, love, Felipe.