Dear Caminoheads,

And today is one of those days because… it is BRAIN DAY!!! And believe it or not, the brain and poetry are great partners…

Once, I listened to a psychiatrist who was explaining the role of poetry in the “human movements”. From the perspective of the psychiatry, he had been able to experience that art was a healing experience, but that words had the power to make real the path humans wanted to take. John O’Donohue, the late Irish writer who many in the Caminoheads neighborhood love, wrote a book of blessings; and in that book, he said that a blessing (a bunch of words too) is “a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal, and strengthen. … when we bless, we are enabled somehow to go beyond our present frontiers and reach into the source. A blessing awakens future wholeness.”

And I thought that this psychiatrist and John, who was a Catholic priest, were talking about the same… the healing power of words for our present and future. So, I would like to invite us all to read Ithaka, this moving poem of Constantino Cavafi, that speaks so much as us, pilgrims.

 

As you set out for Ithaka

hope your road is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

 

Hope your road is a long one.

May there be many summer mornings when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

 

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

 

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn’t have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

 

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

 

C. P. Cavafy, “The City” from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Translation Copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press.

 

Pilgrims love,

Cris