This one night? In Malaga?

Three weeks ago, I was emptying out my hiking pack on a lawn, in front of a hotel room in Manapouri, and I found something I thought I had lost.

It was dark and my pack smelled of garbage juice that had dripped down to the bottom. I ripped my sleeping bag out and spread it on a patio chair outside the sliding door and gave the pack a shake. Plastic mugs with dried coffee grounds stuck at the bottom, a headlamp, a soggy diary and a few other things I couldn't identify hit the ground then fell away into the dark.

I've been back in New Zealand a month now. When I shower I'll still look at my belly and see the sunburn I got that last week on the deck in Santa Ynez - the week that was so hot you just wanted to walk around in a t-shirt and flip flops, and sip gin and tonic with limes in a fold-out chair forever - I'd watch it fade a little bit, night after night.

In the morning I zip up a dirty red down jacket with a piece of duck tape over a rip on the right sleeve. It's dark by 5. What I do see in the landscape is as piercing as ever to me - a wintry overlay on the late summer/early autumn I left behind in April. But since I'd been back here, if I see any magazine covers at grocery store markets with any beach or sun or girls in sunglasses, I turn away and look at something else.

That night inManapouri I felt around on the ground, in the grass and my hands wandered around picking up pens and coins and a few gross, damp, garbage juiced wads of something, and then my fingers roamed across it, and I just sat back on my haunches for a second and thought of course I'd find this tonight. And I even wondered if I should just throw it quickly back in my pack.

But I did pick it up, and I wondered how it had gotten so lost, and I flicked it open, just like I did that one night at a cafe, in Malaga, on the beach, wearing my gold sandals, lip gloss and a silvery summer dress with little pieces of copper embedded in the neckline.

I remember taste of the sweet wine my cousin loved, and thinking how beautiful she looked with her fiance beside her. The warm night air, the bread baskets, the bacarones, more sweet wine that led to morning and me in a churreria, chin on hands, watching the slow delicious drip of espresso filling a tiny glass with gold through red blurry eyes.

There were the days leading up to the wedding - the arrival of guests from around the world, sitting in hotel lobbies with the sea just there, and a drink just here, expressing myself with lots of big hand gestures like I was still speaking another language. Washing out the same dress in the sink of the apartment above the streets and the ocean every night with pomegranite and tangerine shampoo and drying it on the balcony so I could wear it the next morning to sit in hotel lobbies again.

Then those go-to-hell black velvety heels that nearly split my feet as I tried to stride over coblestones to the church on that last evening, then gave up and just ran barefoot up the steps, then slipped them back on in the pews to look tall. And how hours later, my cousin's new sister-in-law danced flamenco in heels twice as high as mine and then my cousin pulled her long white dress over one arm and the two of them dragged everyone out onto the floor and the music changed and suddenly we were all doing the electric slide to Friends in Low Places.

And getting off a bus hours later: my aunt, mother of the bride, still stunning as she took my uncle's arm as the sky over the streetlamps exploded in streaks of pink as he took off his cowboy hat. My other cousin held the bouquet; her boyfriend loosened his bright pink bowtie and I walked in front of all of them down the street, walking backwards, looking at them and thinking this was just like Christmas dinner when we were kids, except better and in Spain, and I was carrying my heels in one hand and a fluttering red fan in the other hand...

I flicked the fan shut.

In Manapouri it was beautiful, starry winter night - you look at the sky here and you just think lonesome. I dropped the fan in the pack and drew it closed; put my gloves back on and pulled my hat down almost to my eyes. I headed towards the pub to check the weather report on the news even though I knew it was going to be gloomy.

But that fan. It was like a love letter you keep finding and stashing away somewhere weird to surprise yourself when you're lonely.
There is no comfort for the cold and endless darkness here now except hot water bottles.

But there was this one time? In Malaga?...

A traveller's blessing: From a bleak, cold place, I wish everyone a hot-blooded, wild red Spanish fan falling out of your garbage-juiced, half-frozen hiking pack this winter.

Chocolate milk. Buttermilk donuts. R Country Store

Every time I come back to my hometown I bring a list.

I'm a geek, lists relax me, so when I come back to Los Olivos, California there is a scrap of paper I've written on feverishly while sitting in an airport terminal.

Next to each bullet points are direct orders to myself about favourite roads to run on at dusk, pieces of outdoor furniture I plan to sit all day in with Lompoc tortilla chips and Cowboy Caviar from El Rancho; there are Midland School fencelines with No Tresspassing signs I need to squirrel through, highways up the coast that Cristi Silva and I will be driving in her husband's pickup truck, and MP3 playlists for jumping on the trampoline at night in my parents' backyard under walnut trees.

The list is amended and re-prioritized every few years; new strategies are sometimes called for (i.e. Fess Parker's Wine Country Inn & Spa has put a door-sized board across it's gated pool entrance. Lame. But not impossible.) and as Los Olivos has grown wealthier and lost some its grime and soul, there are now winecountry restaurants to spend a whole paycheck at and vineyards to explore and sometimes I'll read or hear about these places and add them in.

But there one item on the hometown list that is always at the top, unmoved, and marked in stars.

Chocolate milk. Buttermilk donuts. R Country Store.

I used to love running errands with Dad on Saturday mornings. It was my first experience of having 'time to yourself' with someone else and it was where I got my love of jumping into a car and driving away with the radio on. Morning errands were an escape, a reward for completed yardwork (if you rake enough leaves, they fill up the back of a truck, and then that truck has to be taken to the landfill). Easy logic. The quicker you get it done, the quicker you can hit the road, roll down the windows, pass a Capri Sun juice back and forth and tune into the Padres game.

Some Saturday mornings we'd cross the highway and drive down Foxen Canyon Road, past the dusty corrals and oak trees on the hillsides, the mist rising off them as the heat of the day began to burn through; past the cattle on the bare, brown hills and up the winding road to the landfill entrance.

Some years it was weekend softball games and I would ride shotgun with the glove in my lap down Refugio Road to Santa Ynez, then be really scared to get out of the car and be a team player. I wanted to stay in the car with Dad and his John Fogerty cassette tapes.

When I had horses we'd take the blue tarp in the backyard by the walnuts, and cover the floor of the minivan and drive down to the end of Baseline and pick up bales of alfalfa then take the long road back to Los Olivos. I remember rolling down the window and resting my chin on my arms, pushing the flyaway hair from my ponytail out of my nose and eyes and looking hard at the rearview mirror, trying to figure out if I liked my face.

Then I got older and got a license and inherited a car and pretty soon I had my own errands to run, and places of my own I would drive to listening to my favourite mixed tapes.

At some point in my early years as an errand sidekick, Dad and I would stop at R Country Store on a corner of Grand Ave. He'd grab a chocolate milk and the weekend paper and I'd get a buttermilk donut.

Dad would hold open the door and I'd walk under his arm and there was a great feeling of a Saturday morning just beginning, with the Lone Ranger on at noon on channel 32 and then my horse to ride all afternoon and then maybe a sleepover at Jenny Anderson's (Jenny had the best sleepovers) and Xanadu to watch and a lot of interpretive dancing on rollerskates in her driveway until it got dark and her mom called us in.

Whenever I come back, Dad is always ready to take a car out and get his chocolate milk and the Saturday paper. And in all of my wanderings I have just never found a better place to get a buttermilk donut. We'll drive up in his Austin Mini Cooper and get the mail. You can't really talk because the engine is so loud. So he and I will just shake our head and mouth 'tourists' when we can't get a park in town.

We'll pull in at R Country and the tri tip will be smoking on the grill outside and all the neighbors will be sitting outside in plastic chairs with coffee in to go cups and Jim with his baseball hat pulled low will always say 'well I always know your daughter's home when I hear the trampoline at night'. And I'll head for the donuts and dad, the chocolate milk and we'll meet at the counter with the weekend paper and fight over who's paying.

Driving with my father somewhere really normal and familiar is one of my favourite things about coming home. I feel young and taken care of and loved for who I am no matter what I do because I'm his kid.

And when Dad opens the door of R Country and I duck under his arm with my buttermilk donut I feel like life is one long Saturday morning that's just beginning.

I will miss these small, simple drives down the road, for nothing in particular, more than anything.

Love you so much Dad. Happy Father's Day.

After the camino: why I'm on a diet.

Camino de Santiago: Goodnight for Life

Three Friday nights ago I was rolling out a bedroll by the glow of a Coke vending machine and planning out how I could crawl into my sleeping bag, put on my freshly charged MP3 player and read more of the James Patterson novel I had found that morning in a public restroom, without having to get into some big, profound conversation about life and the universe with the guy who had already claimed the spot under the lights of a Fanta bottle.

If sleeping in the vending machine shelter sounds strange, that´s because it was. This wasn't a place I would usually wander around looking for somewhere to stay the night, especially on my own, in this open, square, doorless shack somewhere outside of Sarria, in a cluster of houses and barns, one Alburgue and no bar. As an apology maybe, this had been built to house about ten vending machines - Coke, Fanta, Milka bars, coffee, chips, first aid kits and batteries - and maybe now and then a couple of pilgrims who didn't get to the Alburgue before 23 Spanish cyclists.

Just to set the scene, if I was writing a stage play about big conversations about life and the universe and was trying to come up with a backdrop for two opposing characters where conflict and angst could unfold over one night, a vending machine shelter in Spain wasn't bad.

And as characters, again, almost too filmic. A 19-year-old art history student from Paris, drinks water out of a crushed plastic container for dinner, while watching a Californian carefully take out gold sandals, a makeup bag and three different dress options for a wedding in the south of Spain the next week, and laying them all folded on a metal table, before yes, finally finding what she was looking for, that leopard-print eye mask she had bought in the Barcelona train station for two Euros.

His name was Franz and he had this tall, polished wooden staff by his bedroll. Everyone seemed to buying or making one along the route. I refolded my dresses and put them back in a plastic bag in my pack. I know it was how original pilgrims travelled, and they were handy for protection 300 years ago, but now, to me, wooden staffs were stupid.

So we chose our corners, made it clear in body language that neither of us felt like talking, and went to sleep.

It was dark when I woke up to a sound. Across the room I heard Franz stir. I pulled up my Audrey Hepburn eye mask. In the reflection of the Coke machine I could see the half moon above the trees. I could hear the cows moving around in the barn next door. And then I heard what had woken me again.

I turned my head slowly, telling myself it was only a nightmare, just enough to see Franz and he was looking at me, eyes like wall clocks, as the low, velvet growl in the doorway grew in intensity. His hand moved to his side. He brought the staff up to his chest, the sound of it dragging across the cement floor and gripped it with both hands, warrior-style.

The dog was stunning, wolf-like. I couldn´t have sketched a more beautiful non-animated dog to battle over my life with; I watched him come fully into the reflection on the Coke machine, joining the moon and the trees. He was turned away from us. Across the courtyard a stray dog slinked away from the barn and the cows. The dog in the doorway watched him leave, his head low, showing teeth, the silver hair along his back still up like razors. Then he circled a spot in one direction, then the other, and then went back to sleep in our doorway where he had probably been for hours. In the morning he was gone.

I thought about this moment the next Monday, when I saw Franz again in a crowd, his staff leaning against a wall in the cathedral, and how I was all about pilgrim staffs now. In fact, get two; be double fisted on the Camino. We did a funny wave across the room - the kind of awkward movement you make when you've shared a moment in a vending machine recepticle with someone, and this moment will become one of many tales you will tell of this time of walking through Spain in search of something that is unique and real to each person and in need of finding.

Then Franz nodded and I nodded and we put our hands down and our eyes roamed over the pews of the cathedral in Santiago, searching for more people with whom we've shared something with in the last month.

I had sworn to myself that I wasn't going to start sobbing, or lie prostrate or do something weird and emotional when I got to the final destination, the noon mass at Santiago. But sitting on the cool tiles, my back against marble, and seeing people across the room, scattered everywhere, people I had had these strange moments with - moments where you take shelter from a hailstorm in a bar and go halves on a pitcher of sangria that leaves you breathless and laughing and declaring you could never be with a guy who was passionate about golf or Braveheart; hours when you walk together in silence along a highway, trucks blowing past you; or late afternoons when you lay stretched out in the sun, each of you with one earphone plugged into one ipod in the grass, eyes closed behind sunglasses, both of you nodding to the beat of a favourite song the other person has to hear because it is all about what you have spent the whole morning talking about - its hard not to feel something gathering up in your chest.

Some of these people have names, and get friended as soon as you get to a computer - like Eva who only knew me for hours before she marched into the bunkroom and dragged me out of my bed and into the bar at Rabonal del Camino (You can't lie here and READ, they are serving BAILEYS in the BIG GLASSES for TWO EUROS) - and others who you tell to go on, you'll catch up with them at the alburgue in the next town, and there end up being six alburgues in the next town, and all you know is their first name and that they had a baby when they were 15 and that they're not talking to their sister.

At some point I started taking pictures of signs that people had left for someone - Nadine Where are you? Send me your number and I'll call. Oliver. March 26, 2006 - and wondered if Nadine saw the sign, if she sent Oliver her number. Did Oliver call Nadine, or did he decide that maybe wasn't such a good idea after all.

That Monday at noon in the cathedral we all did different gestures of intimacy to each other - hand clasps, bear hugs, the cupping of faces and kisses on both cheeks - saying stupidly, over and over, congratulations. We left the cathedral in small packs of people, our little mishmashed cliches, and stood in the sun of the square. We took pictures of each other and ourselves, our arms outstretched, the cathedral behind us, making jokes about finally securing salvation. I didn't want it to end. We wandered back into the city, climbing the steps, past tourists who snapped pictures of us with our packs and dangling sea shells and worn out boots, past the accordian player with his drum and bass machine who seemed to be everywhere we were, past the woman in the same down vest I had in my closet at home, kneeling, her hands out before her with a bowl of change, head bowed. I felt like I was being dragged past all of this, stumbling, trying to inhale it. In four hours I was taking a night bus to Madrid to get to the wedding in Malaga, to put to use the dresses and scarves and gold sandals that I had unloaded every night for a month to get to my sleeping bag and blister kit at the bottom.

The will to keep saying goodbye to people - and say it like it was the last time, not like we might bump into each other in Leon or Samos sometime before next Tuesday - was emptying out of me. I saw a beautiful girl in sneakers, massive headphones on her tiny head, writing in a journal on the steps of the church and I stopped to take a picture while she was absorbed. When I looked up, my friends had disappeared into the crowds.

I realised that's what I had intended to happen, so easily and completely and without any emotional effort. I put my camera in my bag and took a breath. This was the right way. I will send out a group email explain I stopped to take a picture and lost them. But no, there was Eva on the steps, face flushed, a hand on her hip, really annoyed I had made her run back to find me. And suddenly I was really really happy she had. And I realised that I am almost 34 and I need to grow up and stop being such a brat about saying goodbye to people.

The thing is, I need a line.

Walking behind Eva, absorbed with my boots, I heard my name. I looked up and there was Antonio and Leah, a couple I met in a backpackers' kitchen the week before. Antonio was learning English and while we had been waiting in line to use the one pot and sieve available, he practiced on me. Everything he had on me was answers to phrasebook questions. I was 33. I was from Los Olivos, California. I had one brother, no children, unmarried. They grasped my hand and kissed my cheek. It was more congratulations and talking about what was waiting for us in our homes then Antonio asked if I wanted to join them for dinner.

'I wish I could,' I said, placing my hand over my heart, my new gesture I had pulled from some Spanish soap opera maybe, to indicate regret, sympathy or a deep feeling about something. My eyes darted up the street to where everyone was lingering.

He put is hands up like whataya do? then grasped my hand one more time.

'Goodnight'... he said, and he lifted his eyes up to the sky, searching for the correct wording in English that he needed... 'for life.'

I started laughing a little. Harsh.

But I said it back to him. Then we continued on in different directions, and I was walking and laughing still and thinking, I've got to get a pen to write that down, because I think I've found my line.

So Camino de Santiago - time of solitude, sangria, long afternoon naps, warm crossiants in the morning, crippling blisters, nights spent in vending machine shelters, and the companions who hang out with you as you sort yourself out... it's been grand.

Goodnight for life.

Camino de Santiago: Tapas with mom

Three weeks ago, a conversation with my mom about the California education system - a conversation that began in the kitchen I grew up in a week before - continued in a tapas bar in Pamplona.

Dad was trying to find a parking space; it was a Sunday night, busy in a way that was fresh and kind of wild for all three of us, and while he searched the streets for somewhere to wedge the rental, Mom sat on a barstool next to me, a glass of wine and a plate of jamon and bread, olives, marinated mushrooms between us, and she continued talking like we were still sitting at the kitchen counter in bathrobes, our hands around coffee mugs, the morning news on mute above the refridgerator, and the cat at our feet.

In the bar, Mom talked with passion about her work, but for a moment I just watched her face, her hand, beside my hand by the wine glass, crazy noise around us and outside on the streets that was just warming up for the night, and I´m thinking, I´m sitting here with my mom, talking about education, in a bar, in Spain.

My mom, by the way, came to Spain on just about two week´s notice. When it became unavoidable that she wouldn´t be able to make it to my cousin´s wedding this next week because it clashed with finals and graduation, I mentioned, extremely casually at the end of an email, that she should think about coming over and walking a piece of the Camino with me on her Easter break.

My mother is a such a sucker for adventure.

When I was young, Mom used to take me to Hendry´s Beach during the summer and on weekends; sometimes in a minivan carload of my friends and our boogy boards, sometimes just her and I. In the morning, or if it was June, it would be completely fogged out. She grew up in a house on the Mesa and Hendry´s was where she grew up swimming with her sisters. The fog didn´t bother either of us. She would get a cup of coffee from the restaurant, wrap herself in jackets and a hat and sit at a picnic table with her journal and write.

I would be leaping and diving - my first taste of feeling beautiful and powerful at something - I would yell out to her and wave, and she would wave back and I would feel appreciated and then find someone else to show off for and she would go back to writing and staring at the ocean.

Whenever I am back in California, I try to get to Hendry´s. I´ll usually do it on a day when I have something I need clarity on. I bring blankets or a down jacket in case its foggy. I´ll bring my journal and a coffee and I´ll go sit at Mom´s picnic table and write. There have been years when I have stared at the waves from there and remembered myself in them, and then picturing mom, probably younger than I am now, sitting in the same place, writing about her own life.

But mostly I don´t think about that. It´s my picnic table now, my beach, my life.

One of the most precious things about my mom is the way she has been able to leave beautiful pieces of herself - a picnic table, a beach, a need for adventure - and leave it behind her in a way that I have been able to pick them up and make these things all my own.

This morning, on Mother´s Day, I know my mom will be looking up where I am on the map (Melide) from her bed, where Dad will have brought her a cup of tea. Dad will have printed this out for her and placed it on the tea tray. She will have Michener´s Iberria beside her for historical reference, so she´ll know more about the place I am in than I do.

Then I bet you anything, she and Dad are going to the beach this afternoon and she´ll get a coffee and bring her journal and write her heart out.

Happy Mother´s Day mom...I am a very, very blessed daughter. It was so, so wonderful to see you and Dad in Spain...

The next vino is on me.

Camino de Santiago: Tranquilo

´Middle age´ on the Camino ended on Monday.

The verdent but monotonous farmland, roads that stretched straight out along a highway for hours; stark suburbia, with nothing rising up to break the boredom, was moving slowly, painfully behind me, giving way to Galacia.


In the distance was this landscape reminiscent of my first week, the Camino´s ´youth´- the first sighting of Spain from the French Pyrenees, the first tiny dark coffee at a counter, surrounded by weird, intimidating pastries meant to commemorate a communion; the first sip of real sangria, the first taste of cheese and strawberries together, the mustard seed and lavender blanketing the hillsides, the fear of saying anything in Spanish at all, then the desperate need to say absolutely everything in Spanish.

This previous week was as bad as I had heard it could be sometimes. My Spanish was crap. I was falling out of love with my mind, winged in the beginning, free to fly from one pleasant concept of myself to another, inhaling its sweetness; now clawed and vicious, digging up the carpet to get to the source of the stench. My feet, young and true, overnight suddenly went disfigured. My heels looked like small animals had been gnawing at them. I was disheartened. I was slowing down. So this was really it. This was the Camino. Woohoo.

I watched a cyclist park his bike outside the cafe. Already I was unbuckling my pack. I had become a follower of ´signs´- signs of wear to stop for the night, which supermercado to buy at, who to sit next to at communal meals in the Albergues. A cyclist in the rain was sort of a sign.

A woman was bringing out fresh loaves of a new bread I hadn´t seen. It was round, full of raisins and walnuts, íntegral´, not white, and the smell filled the tiny shop. I don´t know where the Italian went. I bought a loaf, then stood in the alley outside the shop, my pack leaning against the bricks, just barely out of the rain. I tore a chunk off and the steam rose . I bit through the crust to a still doughy centre. It stayed warm in my hands as I tore and chewed. I made that bread last for 20 minutes in the alleyway, thinking that I will remember this bread, on this rainy day in an alley for many, many years.

It rained and it rained and it rained. I shouldered my way through a fiesta, the tents, the octopus lifted out of boiling water, snipped up, piled on a bread board and doused with olive oil, sea salt and paprika. I walked in mud through vineyards, with creepy, beautiful old homes that had stood there for centuries on the hills, watching over their bounty. The rain paused. I was soaked. The rest of my bread I was saving for dinner was soaked. I hadn´t seen anyone on the trail for hours.

The first sight of a town cathedral appeared as the sun was going down. I was so late, and I was getting terrified that I was going to get stuck without a bed for the night - it had happened in Formista - and I didn´t even know what town I was entering and the clouds were gathering again.

I saw the Albergue ´Felix´ as I heard the thunder. My hood was up still, protecting me from wind and cold, as I entered, my big pack barely fitting through the door. I pulled off my hood, then froze. Wasn´t this the reception?

I had walked into the kitchen maybe? No, a man, looking a little like Charles Manson, was lifting off my pack and saying a word I have come to love here, repeatedly, as I stared at the huge bowl of Paella, filled with saffroned rice, prawns, fish, capsicum in front of me.

Beyond the bowl, which took up the whole entryway, was a table full of people holding up water glasses of red wine and greeting me like I was their prodigal daughter.

Having put my pack just inside, out of the rain, Charles Manson began shovelling paella onto a plate and motioning me to sit down, repeating that word and making the up and down motion with his hands in case I didn´t understand.

´Tranquilo, mi amiga, tranquilo.´

I looked up the word for ´soul´that night. Alma.

Mi alma es tranquilo.

There is a next part to that quote by Rilke to the young poet, after he tells him to love the questions themselves:

¨Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer...¨

Buen Camino.

Camino de Santiago: from a bus station bar in Astorga

There is something about walking into a bar in another part of the world and everyone is looking up at a television on the wall. There is a rush of adrenaline and then you brace yourself. I heard someone say they were waiting for Carlos.

It had just cut to a commercial and all the men, spitting out peanut shells and tossing napkins on the floor, went back to their gambling machines and murmurings and I was left in the dark with my Seseme Street Spanish - what kind of catastrophe now. What more could really happen to the earth right now.

Another man said that he was only going to wait for Carlos as well and I am thinking, so who is Carlos? And then yes, there was an agreement, that after Carlos arrived they would have seen enough. Enough of what, I am thinking. And por favor, who is Carlos?

Carlos. You know. Carlos y Camilla.

I had to laugh.

So even though I was only in Astorga and not Rabanal del Camino, which meant I had about five hours of walking ahead of me and it was already noon, I put my pack under the bar, ordered a cafe con leche, and wedged myself into the crowd and looked up at the television on the wall and watched representatives from around the world gathering, smiling, and looking ridiculous in hats and pink ties, for an event that required no decision to be made about an invasion, a bomb, a tsunami, or an earthquake, or a dictator gone crazy.

I stayed for another hour in the bar, until Kate emerged from her car, waving, and I put my bag on my back, tightened the straps, paid for my three coffees and a wine and headed for the highways underpass.

The morning before I watched two little boys kick the top of tennis ball cannister from one end of the plaza in Leon to the other. I was sitting on a bench, after being ushered gently out of bed by Benedictine nuns at 6:30, and was waiting for Cafe Europa to open. I pulled my raincoat around me and watched the sun heat up the stones of the cathedral. I sat for two hours and watched these boys play.

I have a destination. And I have a time I have to be there by. But I´m finding that this journey so far has been more memorable because of its interruptions. I´ve gotten quite brilliant at sitting and staring for long periods of time at something like a plastic bag caught on a fence.

The thing is, I´m on a journey where there are a lot of people also staring at plastic bags on fences. We gather at the one cafe in small villages in the morning and order cafe con leche and tostadas and spread maps on the tables. We walk in clusters of the recently divorced, seperated, redundant, widowed and stir-crazy. We spend some time on the trails and under trees, sharing strawberries, strange sharp cheeses and olives, talking about these cross roads we are all at. Do we make the move, wait for our husbands to love us again, try for another child, not be a lawyer like the rest of the men in the family, fall in love, let love go, throw it all in and move to Africa.

In all of this, my mind is like a still pool of water in some days, and a class 4 rapid on others, destroying the hours. I´m in love with this time on my hands, I´m in love with limonada in the afternoons, the people, the words I am trying to place in correct order. But my mind, the beast, the wolf, the bandit. So very many hours to wrestle with it.

There are probably easier ways to explore a landscape. I understand why for hundreds of years, this pilgrimage to Santiago was something criminals were sentenced to.

I have a book written by Henri J.M. Nouwen, a Catholic priest who lives and works with people with mental disabilities at the L´Arche Daybreak Community in Toronto. I´m carrying it because I read a quote in the introduction, and it sets the theme for this book. It´s Rainer Maria Rilke responding to a young man who asks if he should pursue poetry: ¨I want to beg you as much as I can...to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try and love the questions themselves...¨

So I am learning to love the questions.

Ahhh....

Buen Camino for now