Sherif on the right in Cairo with his Dad. (photo from S Tamim El Naggar)
There is Sherif our Caminoheads Egypt Bureau Chief. He was our constant companion on the Camino in 2014. I am always trying to pry more pics out of him as he is a wonderful photographer.
And there was news from Ron our Caminoheads Spain Bureau Chief. A tornado went through the Astorga area several days ago. Here is his report:
“We are fine, and from what I can see and have heard in the news only some roof tiles and some trees were damaged.
It has been a few days of these ‘tormentas’ (thunder storms) that would be really unpleasant to be walking in, but we see pilgrims out there every day.”
We are thankful that damage seems minimal and that everyone is OK. These kind of phenomenon are so fickle, you never know. Those pilgrims out there will have stories to tell!
Out walking this morning and there is sex in the air. It is hard to go anywhere and not have this or that fragrance of the blooms of the day. Bees are abuzzing too which follows. The blackberries, hawthorn and roses are seas of blooms. It is all happening out there.
Well, off I go. Have energy work with Janet and then lettering up the last of the bandanas. Busy, busy.
Ahh, Father’s Day 2021. The weather is beautiful this morning. And I asked for a picnic for my present so looks like a go. We are going to try and make it down to the local beach where there are tables and grills by the water. Kabobs and a beer is what I am thinking!
Also today I am trying to finish up the lettering on the Oasis bandanas so they can be shipped tomorrow. Robbi has offered to finish them up with two washings, a drying and pressing. I needed some help this time. So they will be ready for us in August.
Catherine will be here in a moment and we are off to Mass. It has been over a year since we have attended the whole celebration. I seems an odd occasion but I trust our muscle memory will guide us through.
OK, back from church and a stop at the grocery store. It was confusing but we got through it, I had forgotten so much. Everyone looked a little different and it’s sort of all about reacquainting.
And a dream, yes. Sometimes I think dreams are unimportant if they are short or mundane. Well, who is to say? So I need to talk this one out: I was the announcer at an outdoor gathering. I was on the mike and looking for two people and one was named Butt-in-ski. I forget the other. It is a stupid little thing but there it is.
Well, have to go. We are getting ready for the picnic. Happy Father’s day to all you dads out there!
Pilgrim Farmer John sent that gorgeous pic of his corn with the height of 4 foot 7 inches! And with the Phil’s Camino shirt on, John not the corn. Unfortunately shortly after this shot a wind knocked a lot of it over. He is confident that with some help it can be salvaged. Always something. Jim and I were out weeding this morning and joking about, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” We learned that in school but we changed it to, “Nature abhors a dull moment.”
Me, I’ve had too much impute today. Then it is hard to unscramble the brain and write anything coherent. Maybe in it’s own rite it is a good thing. I am not lacking in this department anyway.
With the corn here we have some plants that are one foot high and happy with that. We are no where near Iowa standards. But this is Washington on the northern limits of this crop. We are borderline as usual.
I had a great father/son talk with Wiley this morning. We brought each other up to speed on our views and feelings. This is a hard time in some ways for him to watch all this. I’m happy with our conversation and our plans.
And Ron our Bureau Chief for Spain had a wonderful post yesterday. He can bring it! And then today Ryck our Bureau Chief for the Eastcoast sent in a another great item that I think I will post this Friday. Our Bureau Chiefs abhor a dull moment, yes?
CONNECTEDNESS. Is it a word? It seems a little awkward to the fingers on the keyboard, and strange to the eyes, but I feel a strong attraction in my heart. What is this thing we share with Phil and each other?
Some years ago I took the Clifton Strengths test at work, one of those things they ask you to do and then have a session to tell you how to understand the results, like MBTI or Learning Styles assessments. With this one I learned that out of some 34 different Strengths a person can display, Connectedness was my strongest. And I was fine with that as I already saw connections of all kinds in my life.
The one sentence definition of the Connectedness strength is that one tends to recognize and use the connectedness of all their lessons learned and relationships to guide their path – to walk their journey. And isn’t that a warm reminder of why you are reading Phil’s blog? And why Phil walks the Camino? And why we in the Caminoheads community share in each victory? We are connected by events, lessons learned and relationships more than connected by stuff. Though the corn is stuff, and it is important to Phil and the rest of us.
As this idea came to me, I asked myself how can I walk along with Phil and the Caminoheads community when we are thousands of miles away living along the Camino? Even if there were no pandemic situation, most of us are unable to press our feet into the moist ground on Vashon Island, but that doesn’t stop us from employing our connection with Phil. It doesn’t reduce the thrill of looking forward to his words each day, to add his uphill parts to our prayer of asking and his victories to our prayer of gratitude. We are connected in a very special way around respect for that Saint James guy and the spirit of all those over the years that have entered the pilgrimage journey.
I encourage you right now to plant a seed of Connectedness in your mind to recall all the blessings you received and provided delivery of because of our Caminoheads community. And then maybe share that blessing as a connection happens today. The possibilities are many but some that have come up for me include meeting friends who are on the cancer journey, walkers in general, veteran or soon-to-be pilgrims, or those rejoicing in the season changes that bring us displays of Creation’s color, form and fragrance.
Enjoy what might be an increased awareness of just how connected we are, and what a blessing that is …
And finally, I’ll share with you another connectedness characteristic that I enjoy – and we might all be missing this year: Hugging. I use the term #HTL: Hug Too Long. Just a little longer than usual, to really get a needed, memorable connection with another earthling.
The temp is 71 degrees F here at the tapas table. This could be the perfect temperature for me. There are bees and butterflies. Catherine is over volunteering to help My Rebecca in her garden. I’m awful late with the post today but I have an hour now.
So, another dream this AM, this string is pretty phenomenal really. Yesterday’s has fully captivated me and here is another knocking. Ready? I’m a with a day full of classes to go to. I start out with a folder with one sheet of paper in it, a schedule for the day. I go through the day to most of my classes and I meet this young girl in the hall. She is in first or second or third grade and has a folder with her. I’m an adult here in the school and she is an elementary student. Her folder is full of little scraps of paper that are notes that she and her chums passed back and forth in class. She insists that I see them all so we are sitting in the hall looking through them. I still have one class to go, Music. So, we get done finally and I start looking through my folder for the schedule. Where will this class be? My folder is half full of her little notes and then all the other debris from the day. I never get to music.
I am back to a school building now after I have bought the hotel recently. Oh well. And there is that anxiety that always seems to be there. But this time I get all these messages from the girl and forgo Music. I don’t remember any of the messages but perhaps it is enough to know that I received them.
So there is yesterday’s dream with young Wiley sitting next to the volume of water. My Rebecca stepped in to say that volume of liquid are my remains. Yes. I see that. There is a new process for breaking down the body in the funeral world. And I chose this because it is more Green than cremation, no smoke. It is a liquefaction process and two things are left: one liquid and two ground up bone. The bone goes in the urn and the liquid is used in fighting wildfires. Yup. That is so strong and vivid that image of Wiley with my remains.
Well OK, enough of that. Have to go for now. Working on the Oasis bandanas. Miss you.
Last November, Wiley in the elk woods. (photo J Hyde)
I do hope that this dream stuff isn’t turning you off but it seems to be in my news lately. It is here butting it’s way in. Lately I may wake at 4AM and think, oh boy time to dream and fall back asleep. So I have been kind of inviting them in.
Here goes the latest: I found Wiley our son sitting with a large glass container of water. He looks about eight years old and he is shirtless. He has his young wrestler body it is wet and his buzz haircut is a little over grown and is spiky. He looks deflated like he just lost a match. He speaks to me but I can’t make out his words. I know that he has been on some sort of hike alone for a few days. I listen to him trying to learn more but I can’t make anything out, his words are exhausted. My attitude is let’s go home, take a break and have a steak and a good nights sleep.
So, I am trying to just sit on this and relax in regard to figuring it out. But of course I take some early wild stabs at meaning. Wiley seems an extension of me or maybe my future. He seems overwhelmed by his quest. He has been working hard to the point of exhaustion. Hmm, that is all I got for now.
Jim is coming to work on the corn weeds and I will go out to tackle a few myself.
Yesterday morning was misty so I had my rain jacket on. I disturbed a feeding buck and I wound up praying for him as he went to cross the road. And I ate salmon berries that I picked along the trail.
Had an important thought about my hotel dream that was posted yesterday. In the past my buildings were always school buildings or military facilities where I was a cog in the machine. There was always some sort of anxiety going because I couldn’t find something or I was late for something. But this time I bought the hotel! No anxiety. I’m happy.
Got out this morning to get some fish fertilizer on part of the corn. The southern third of the patch was looking behind in growth so I gave it a boost. Have the old knee high by the Fourth of July coming up.
Well that’s the news from Raven Ranch, nothing earthshaking but part of the narrative. Come back tomorrow please.
My dream, it was several mornings ago actually but it has been brewing in my memory since. I am so lucky to be getting these messages at this time, they have gotten to be a major part of my inspiration. This seems to put me closer to some new stage in my life.
Just a prelude to my dream I have always interpreted the symbolism of a house, building or facility to be one’s total being. It represents the box that my total life is in. So, it seems in my dream I purchased a hotel. How about that for a facility! But it wasn’t just any hotel, it was in some important place like Washington DC or New York City. It was some place where important people gather. It had been there for years so it had lots of history within it’s walls as well as room for more.
I had decided to start with one room and clean out each room to freshen things up. So, I checked out drawers and inside this and that. And shelves and the sofa and everywhere. And I came up with a huge amount of historic debris. There were notes, theater tickets stubs, even a false tooth for example. Oodles of artifacts. I put it all in a big ziploc and marked the room number on it. There were ninety nine rooms to go but I just got through one. Who knows what would show up, guns, knives, gold nuggets, long lost poetry.
Yea, there was strong flavor in all this to me. It seemed a good thing. It seemed a place I could really move into with my personal cast of characters. The dream was very simple really but had oodles of flavor, it was rich.
This goes along with my own personal waking life predicament of having decreasing physical capabilities. This is my payoff for negative things happening. Loose some, gain some. This is the way I chose to look at it.
Cris reporting from Buenos Aires, Argentina. And I cannot be more excited to share that if the right people would read this blog, the Caminoheads would be candidates to the Peace Nobel Prize. Yes. Just as you read.
Yesterday, I was listening to a mind-blowing talk with Dr. Gabor Mate, Dr. Dan Siegel, Sará King and Angel Cordero; it was part of a documentary called “The wisdom of trauma” and they were talking about intergenerational trauma, epigenetics, social justice and racism. ~~These terms might sound complicated, but they are not, bear with me!~~
The conversation was full of science behind the reasons why our minds and bodies identify the other as someone different from “me”. All these ideas that are so imprinted in our beings that have the capacity to pass by in our genes from generation to generation (this is what “epigenetics” is, and let me make a side note here with a brilliant explanation by Dr. Dan Siegel: genetics, our DNA, is like the books in the shelves in the library; epigenetics is what allows the book to open). With this, what he meant to say is that we have the capacity to modify the “epigenetics”, we cannot modify the book, that comes with us, but we can modify what we express. And here is what would jump us to the Nobel Prize: WE, the Caminoheads and pilgrims, HAVE PROOF OF WHAT CHANGES THE EPIGENETICS!!!!
~~Bear with me a bit more, please; I swear I am not crazy!~~
Yesterday, these 4 experts concluded that this imprinted belief that the other is different from us is at times so intense that we can only see what is different as a “threat”; so “the cure” for this is to imprint instead the belief that we are “similar” not “different”, because when we are “equals”, we “belong”. This doesn’t mean to ignore our genetics, what is in our DNA cannot change, we cannot expect all of us being purple skin or have blue hair to “belong to the same group”, we need to find our sense of belonging in things led by epigenetics. And we pilgrims and Caminoheads are the guinea pigs that confirms this is true.
In the Camino and the Caminoheads neighborhood, we became experts in “togethernessing” (Dan Siegel calls it “MWE” and the Zulus “Ubuntú”). We figured out that we are all equals, we find joy and safety in becoming closer to the other , we welcome the other (won’t you be my neighbor?), we hug each other, we BELONG. We understood that the real healing happens in community and we healed and continue to heal together.
I wish I could take all of us to the laboratory and study our telomeres, I am sure they are all super long (which would be scientific proof)… That is the only piece needed for us to win the Peace Nobel Prize. Meanwhile, let’s take pride on the fact that these are the believes that we are passing to the next generations, and to those that we cross our paths by. It is even more important to change the world than to have a trophy in the shelf, don’t you think?
Just got done with my weekly Bible Guys meeting and we covered the parable in Luke 11 v 5-13. It’s a story about a guy who has unexpected company in the middle of the night and he is unprepared. He has no bread to feed them. So he goes down the street to a friend’s and bangs on his door. He finally wakes his friend up and pleads his case, he needs some bread! The guy in bed puts him off numerous times with his own excuses. The needy guy persists and wakes up the neighbors with his pounding. Finally the rich guy gets up and opens the door and hands the poor guy three loaves.
It is a parable or a story to illustrate a point. We are supposed to get that persistence furthers. That we need to keep at it with our petitions. We cannot quit too early. It is not that God is a lazy guy but He maybe preparing us in some unseen way perhaps. Probably there is something we don’t understand in the mix.
Anyway, it has inspired me to pray on in my life. And not only for myself but for others. To be persistent is the idea, the plan.
