Dear Caminoheads,

I have been intrigued and enchanted by this poem I posted yesterday since the first time I encountered it. The title of the poem, “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade,” has a great sense of humor in it, doesn’t it? — the idea that any teacher would teach 9 or 10-year-olds how to chant the Psalms while taking cigarette breaks is fantastic.  But it speaks to the strong sense of a person feeling that they missed out. How could any of these things be wrapped into the story of a life? This poem invites, I think, to look back to the story of our own life and to reflect, where were the times when I felt with no ground under my feet, when I didn’t know what to do, when I felt that nobody told me that this would be happening, and not only did nobody tell me, but nobody prepared me to know how to survive the fact that I wouldn’t know what to do.

This poem imagines that there was a moment that this all was taught, it is just that we missed the class. But even in that imagination, we were absent from that day so we probably had to teach ourselves all of these things.

How? Well, to me, the Camino was the way where I learned a lot of these things. Clearly, not to chant the Psalms while taking cigarette breaks, but for sure, I learned ways to remember my grandfather’s voice (this happened specifically in Ponferrada, while eating “pimientos de padron”), how not to feel lost in the dark (when despite the darkest hour just before the dawn, there were still yellow arrows), that I have enough (I think this is THE lesson), that I am is a complete sentence (well, this is also THE lesson!!!!), how not to squirm for sound when my own thoughts is all I hear, and it also taught me the most important math lesson: that hundreds of questions and feeling cold and all those nights spent looking for whatever it was that I lost are part of who I am also. And it is perfectly ok.

Maybe the author has no clue what the Camino is, but I bet Mrs Nelson does!!!!

Lessons learnt loves,

Cris