An anniversary of sorts

 St. Jean Pied de Port in southern France

I get a bit sentimental at this time of year. Three years ago today, after going down the wormhole of the Camino de Santiago Compostela for several months, I set off from a WV Friends Gathering near Huttonsville in a rental car, dropping it off in Baltimore and catching a ride from a friend to the BWI airport.

Then followed a night flight with a brief stopover in Iceland, a morning landing at Charles DeGaulle airport near Paris and two more flights to Biarritz.  From there, it was an hour or so in a shuttle car to St. Jean Pied de Port in the Pyrenees, where my pilgrimage would begin. It was the beginning of 37 days of walking across northern Spain along the medieval pilgrimage route walked by millions since the 9th century (full disclosure: I took one day off from hiking after 33 straight days in the beach town of Finisterre on the Atlantic). 

Including getting lost and other meanderings, I think it was around 640 miles across mountains and plains to the ocean, through rural Spain, small towns and a few major cities, sleeping at whatever place I could find at the end of the day, usually in unisex dorms called albergues operated by monasteries, churches, cities or individuals. It was a time of just bare living, with walking and seeing the only job at hand, punctuated by conversation, solitude, laundry, rough food, and Spanish wine.

Looking back I am reminded of my reasons for going, which were best expressed by Thoreau in Walden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had never lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience ,and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Well, it was sometimes sublime and sometimes mean. There was a lot of  heat, pain, discomfort and fatigue. And a lot of beauty and wonder. And I must confess I spent an undue amount of time daydreaming about a no-holds-barred fight to the finish with the evil genius that designed the backpack I was carrying. But it did, at least for a little while, front the essential facts of life and drive it into a corner.

Looking back, it seems like a miraculous dream.

In the forest of the night

Spider, spider burning bright...

Last night, I took the dog on a walk in the woods while wearing a headlamp. It had been raining, so there was water on the grass. As we trudged up and down the hill, I saw what looked like a skyfil  of little diamonds moving on the ground. A closer look revealed, a closer look revealed a multitude of spiders busy going about their nocturnal business. There had to be thousands of them.

I guess I knew that there were spiders on the hill. And I guess I didn't expect them to go to be at sundown. Still, there was all this activity going on all around me that I'd never been aware of before.

I think that's a pretty good metaphor for life. There's stuff we don't have a hint about going on all around us all the time. Thoreau said "Only that day dawns to which we are awake" I guess something like that is true of the night as well.

By their fruits

A few weeks back, I scored a major find at a local library. It was, and, yes, this does show what a geek I am, a 24 part lecture series on Transcendentalism and I was totally jazzed. I was all over it and regretted when it came to an end.

I'm not sure still what to make of Transcendentalism, that name for a diverse and fractious movement of writers, poets, dreamers, cranks and crazies that came spinning out of New England in the mid 1800s. And what a mixed lot they were, ranging from brilliant to batty.

But still, for all the amorphous verbosity, this was a movement or a trend in American thought that spread far beyond this continent and it had a largely beneficial influence, as its ripples were felt in the anti-slavery movement, support for the Union cause and abolition in the Civil War, the early women's movement, environmentalism, the utopian community movement,spiritual egalitarianism and other social reforms.

You could make a good case that one of these guys (Thoreau) accidentally laid the foundations for the theory of nonviolent action, which did great things during the Civil Rights movement and in many other circumstances..

People like Emerson and Thoreau were also among the earliest cultural bridges, promoting respect for other religions. No history of Buddhism's migration to the West or of the dawning appreciation in this country of such Indian classics as the Bhagavad Gita would be complete without a nod to this movement.

Jesus said "by their fruits shall you know them" and I try to make it a point to avoid sharp disagreements with him. By that standard, as loopy as some of the Transcendentalists were, they did pretty good.

Much more on Ralphie to come.

LATEST RANT. Here's my call for WV Governor Tomblin to expand Medicaid coverage to working West Virginians.

HUMAN EVOLUTION. Game on.

IT HAS BEEN WAY TOO LONG since I ran something about zombies.

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