Just a big Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. It is certainly shaping up to be a big deal around here. So, we are grateful.

I successfully cleared all the hurtles on my trip to the Institute yesterday. I had good conversations with my contacts there. I even found a little financial aid from the hospital to cover parking and some groceries. They are interested in me gaining weight.

Have to relate to you this little story about the stop to get my new driver’s license. It is a little bit of a process to sort through documents and answer questions, eye test, photo and etc for the enhanced version. This very delightful African-American woman was waiting on me. I mention that because it sort of flavors what I am going to say next. So, we got to the photo part and she said to take my hat off and she goes, “Ou, I love your hair; I’m going to chase you around!” That cracked me up so bad! Hey, when you got it, flaunt it, right?

This morning on FaceBook there was a wonderful piece by David Whyte put up by one of my nurses and I want to share it:

GRATITUDE

is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without and beside us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things must come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.

To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face across the table, of a son’s outline against the mountains, is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit even stranger inner lives beneath calm surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witness all at once.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort, this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege.

Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.

….

from ‘GRATITUDE’
In CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press 2015.

So, a big Happy Thanksgiving!

lots of gravy loves, Felipé.

Debra’s Blogpost

I’m at the Institute with a little free time till I see the Doc. The sun is brilliant and streaming in through the windows. The nurses are scurrying around on their appointed errands. Patients are busy on their phones and fighting with the coffee machine.

Got into town early and ran through the Department of Licensing office and captured my Enhanced Drivers License with the Veteran notation on it. That was a chore really coming up with all the right documentation. Who would that guy be tht would want to sneak in and try and be me anyway?

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving so that is the important thing. We got an invite to go with Wiley and Henna to the in-laws for dinner. My Rebecca making her world famous cornbread dressing. We just got done processing and packaging all the died corn from harvest. Even Yankee me has switched over to loving the Southern dressing.

Oh, and the funeral yesterday went well. I think all the Bible Guys and half the wives showed up to pay respects. We were all happy that we all were there, you know what I mean?

Well, Happy Thanksgiving to our American readers. Hope we have a few minutes here and there to contemplate on the topic. It is so easy to take things, a lot of things, for granted.

corny loves, Felipé.

I am still lingering in my mind with the conversation that I had with the audience on Saturday. I know that my words are incomplete or the thoughts behind them are incomplete or I’m not exactly sure of some major point. Buenos Aires Cris is listening to me lately and writes this comment:

Hi Phil,

Yes, I think I have come to realize that no matter what, there are two ways to do the Camino: and inner way, that is a pilgrimage, and an outer way that is a hike. And neither of them is better than the other, they are just different and people may be ready to do one and not the other. A hike requires a pretty healthy body, a lot of physical resources, is fueled by calories coming from fat storage, and is more successful when you have the right equipment and gear. While, a pilgrimage requires vulnerability and an awareness of the frailty of our hearts, is fueled by pains, hurts that we carry, doubts, etc., and is more successful when you carry the very basics. In a hike, the experience is the best when you are prepared. In a pilgrimage the experience is the best when you are unprepared for what you may encounter. In the hike, you do better when you are an “expert”, in the pilgrimage, when you are beginner.

This maybe why people who have faced adversity in life arrive to Santiago’s Cathedral after covering by foot 500 miles and their lives are transformed.

Likewise, may this is why those who have the tailored backpack and the right gore-tex clothing and carry the perfect weight and the right getting-to-the end mind-set, hike 500 miles from France to a town in Galicia called Santiago de Compostela.

Just a thought; as I know there was no way I could have hiked to Santiago.
Pilgrims Love,
Cris

There is a major divide there between the hike and the pilgrimage. They seem miles apart. When I talk of the Camino in any way it is always about pilgrimage, end of story. And when I falter with an audience it is because I may be talking one thing and they another. I see that now. And I have been messing with this for a long time and I am just realizing this?

Thank you Cris for you have shined a light on the fork in the road. One way is about performance and the other about vulnerability. When I try and go back in time to remember how I thought about this back then it might be: “I am buying this new pack and new shoes so that I can perform well enough to have the experience.” In other words, the experience (the pilgrimage) is the foremost idea.

Somewhere in the talk the other evening I mentioned that there are people that walk the Camino with no money. That sort of stopped the show for a while. These pilgrims trust so much the idea that the Camino will take care of them that they can undertake this. I am very impressed by someone who would even consider doing this. It is really thin ice, being very vulnerable, very trusting.

Food for thought as they say. And time for me to go. A funeral later today in Seattle.

vulnerable loves, Felipé.

The point is a lot of great things were accomplished with way less than great gear. If we put things off till we get the latest “gee wiz” stuff, that is a mistake. Advertising is saturated with all kinds of over-engineered gear these days. We begin to think that stuff equals success.

Half of success is technique if half is gear. Development of technique may take time and effort but zero money. This is working smarter, the phrase that we have all heard.

I love the pic of Grandma Gatewood next to the Appalachian Trail sign with the burlap sack on her shoulder. No backpack just a sack, pretty funky. In the 1960’s I had the opportunity to hang out with Earl Schaffer the man credited with walking the AT for the first time in it’s entirety. Then he hiked twice more, once when he was seventy something. All his gear was army surplus when I knew him.

I copied him of course. Boots with no socks, modified Korean War era pack, poncho shelter. He ate dried soups which he would boil up with corn meal in it. I am trying to remember details. A guy like that could survive on pure technique and maybe a knife. “We don’t need no stinking gear!”

He is probably a major reason why I am in the Pacific Northwest. He had hiked here in the Cascade Mountains and had fallen in love with it although his home was Pennsylvania. He raved about it. And I see that he died there in the East in 2002.

Anyway, maybe I am just old school but think about it. Things don’t have to be perfect for you to start. “Just do it” as they say.

don’t hesitate loves, Felipé.

I am off to a funeral in the afternoon on Tuesday and the walk for that day is cancelled. Thank you, Felipé.

There is a Seahawks game on this morning and just back from Mass so I am going to blog away with the sound off hoping to accomplish two things at once. Catherine is coming over to join me watching at halftime. So, onward.

Last evening My Rebecca and I went to a “slide show” on the Camino by author Cathy Fulton. She walked the Norté as part of a trek around the world. Very impressive, her story. So I got invited to add something where I could. It was so hard to keep my two cents to a dull roar.

I was telling this to Catherine this morning as we drove back from Mass and she wanted me to write about it. Cathy the speaker and myself were the only ones who had done the Way and there were a dozen folks in the small audience. It always strikes me the divide that becomes apparent between the two groups no matter where it happens to be.

The folks who haven’t gone ask lots of questions about equipment, facilities, communications and routine. I probably left some categories out. But regardless the questions center around the engineering of the journey. And this is where I always have to bring up the “fact” that the original guys did this walk in burlap underwear. There seems to be something important to me about this. Just trying to steer rookies away from these physical concerns.

The interesting point here is that veterans barely talk of these concerns. They talk about all the community stuff, the spiritual stuff, the beauty encountered. They talk about emotional stuff. They mention cafe con leche. They talk about snoring and friendship. Everyone has a getting lost story.

See what I am getting at? They are world’s apart. Not that I didn’t have rookie concerns beforehand, I did. But I did realize that there was the inner journey to prep for, to expedite.

OK, Seahawks 10 Eagles 3, second quarter. It’s not like I am beating up on rookies, just saying that they generally really don’t know what they are in for.

Sunday loves, Felipé.

I got a nice haircut this morning to look good for the week ahead. Massively big week coming up for Phil. Tuesday is the funeral for our dear beloved David, founder of our Bible Guys group. He had many ties in business and law in the Seattle area. There are going to be hundreds of folks there.

Wednesday I have a day at the Institute with Dr Gold, also beloved by the way. How many years has he kept me alive, he better be beloved. So, the salon will happen there which is my favorite part. Then before that I have a few hours so I was going to try and get my Enhanced Driver’s License, the one to make air travel easier. So, it’s a whole day.

Then Thursday is the big American Turkey Day. We just got a big invite to our daughter-in-laws’s parent’s home. Yea, sounds good. Maybe some football squeezed in there or charades perhaps.

So a lot to do and a lot to contemplate too. How about Cris’s post on Friday? That was terrific. We have so much talent hanging around here I tell ya.

Well, here I am trying to get this done and we have a social engagement lurking within the hour. It’s a tapas party with a slide show of an Islander’s Camino trip. Ok, let’s check that out!

Off we go, social butterflies R Us.

stay wonderful my friends, Felipé.

Conversations that need to happen

The Camino is a conversation-igniter. We had conversations with other pilgrims, with the hospitaleros, with the owners of the shops, with the farmers, and certainly with ourselves and our own story. Phil (and Felipe) in Caminoheads keep us in our toes to do the same. And Wednesday’s post “Stay Productive My Friends” challenged me, once more to have a conversation with myself, and hopefully with you all, like in the Camino. Is it true that the only option we have when life gets hard is to stop living?…

It is easy to think we don´t need to reinvent the wheel once more, that we don’t need to find a “work around”, why would we? “Stop walking if you have blisters”, that is what we have to do, that is what others always did…Why should we do something different?

Like “people with cancer die”… but then we have Phil WITH cancer FULLY LIVING. I thought how this conversation we are having here challenges me… and challenges this concept that “this is how things are”.

The truth is that the obvious is not so obvious, and what has been in front of us or has been part or became a part of our “always”, or of our “new” identity, often is seen as just a birth mark that cannot be changed, something that has nothing to provide other than what already did, even it is a horrendous present, and hence we will walk with it until the last breath, un-questioned.

Some time ago I listened to David Whyte (English Poet) explaining his poem “Working Together”. He wrote that poem per the request of the Boeing Company to celebrate the anniversary of one of the planes. And he came up with the idea that we can fly in planes because what existed since always: air and shapes, were seen with new eyes, were questioned, and engaged in a conversation that had never happened before, despite they had been there since “always”.

Like the rounded shape and the plain ground.
Or the stone and the friction.
And life and its challenges.

And Phil’s post set me off to think in this idea of David Whyte: which are the parts of me that need to talk to each other? Which are the conversations that are yet to happen? What will I see if I let the familiarity go, the concept that “this is what has always happened when…” ?

Working Together

We shape our self
to fit this world

and by the world
are shaped again.

The visible
and the invisible

working together
in common cause,

to produce
the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way
the intangible air

passed at speed
round a shaped wing

easily
holds our weight.

So may we, in this life
trust

to those elements
we have yet to see

or imagine,
and look for the true

shape of our own self,
by forming it well

to the great
intangibles about us.

Conversational Loves,
Cris

Henriette said some of my blog post titles were confusing so I thought that I would throw that in to make matters worse. She was here on Tuesday for a couple hour chat and the usual walk and tapas. She has this book going about Cancer and the Camino and I am going to be part of that. Pretty exciting it is.

We had a most valuable session this time I thought. In the process of answering questions and unpacking ideas a certain clarity arrives. Certain aspects of my journey are starting to come into better focus. Some things that seem haphazard now seem parts of a plan or at least a trajectory.

I thank Henriette for attempting to unravel the finer points of my “battle” against cancer. This so reminds me of Catalina, Kate Barush, our star art historian that puts my journey in the bigger artistic context. They both look and see things that I don’t see because of their training and experience. It brings clarity to me and that helps me to operate at ever higher levels.

So thank you to both of you my intrepid investigators. As we continue we add to the increasing body of knowledge about living life and more specifically living life with Cancer. Everyday we are putting a finer point on our pencil and finding out new things and passing them on. It is interesting and rewarding to be a part of that.

absolutely positive loves as always, once more, Felipé.

this is worth a week on the Camino

Every once in a while there is a rent in the veil of reality and it stops you in your tracks. You didn’t plan on it but it was waiting a long time for you. You didn’t believe it at first but it wormed it’s way into you. And part of you still doesn’t believe it because it was too different or too good to be true.

Just chuckles in general this morning. So, the situation is that we ran away with the Camino like kids of old ran away with the circus. And it’s not Kansas anymore for us. We live in a slightly different place than we used to. And most of the time we can’t exactly put our finger on it, the change, but it lingers and we savor it’s particular flavor.

These young singers have rent this veil for me. They are precious aren’t? Their energy is contagious. It sends me to this Camino place just like that. That’s what is going on here for me.

this is worth a week on the Camino

Off to Wednesday loves, Felipé.