How I spent my summer or Camino Synthesis, etc.
Summer is over already. Blackberries have ripened on the vine, hand picked, and turned into jam. I’ve replaced two aging toilets in the house, re-planked the front and back decks, designed and built a curtain drain that winds itself under the front deck, down one side of the building and under a purpose built rock wall across one end of the lower patio. The recently cleared area behind the house is beginning to take shape (but it will be years before it is “landscaped”). Summer is done and I’m switching to an autumn state of mind.
Camino Cargo Pants
I have a pair of cargo pants with zip off legs that are sun bleached above the knee. I drag them out of my closet and put them on every once in awhile. Memories of hot sweaty days, noisy alburgues and Clara con Limón come flooding back.
It seems like ages since early June when I slogged thru the suburbs of Santiago de Compostela Spain straining at every intersection, hoping to glimpse the spires of the cathedral marking the terminus of my walk along the Camino Frances.
How did I get to the point in my life where I felt a need to abandon all of the comforts of my routine life, toss my fears and risk averse attitudes aside and board a plane to Europe for two months?
After the conversations with Kathy, the tickets and reservations made months in advance, the shopping, researching, and scheming of how it would be. After all of that, I began the mental preparation.
The physical training of long walks with weighted backpack were more than just endurance building. This routine initiated me, slightly, to a new level of hardship, tiredness, and frustration.
My motivation was a felt need for less harmony and melody in my life and more cognitive dissonance. I listened to KING Classic Second Inversions online radio channel a lot during these days. I sought out things out of my control.
I didn’t fully understand exactly what I was looking for but I knew it would be contentious with my current state of mind. I yearned for paths that were divergent, outdated, unmarked.
Several literary references resonate here.
- In Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”, protagonist Howard Roark takes a laborer’s job in a granite quarry to escape the confining conditions of his career as an architect. While working with his hands in the base material of his trade, he is finally able to reconstruct his career going forward from first principles, free of popular social constraints.
- Burke defines the sublime as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger… Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror.”
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(literary)#Burke
- “In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion that ever madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honor as for the service of his country, that he should make a knight-errant of himself, roaming the world over in full armor and on horse back in quest of adventures, ”
— Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra - Kim Stanley Robinson describes particular surface features of Mars as:
“…the completely flat areas are the purest view. Much of Vastitas Borealis is so flat that only millions of years of existence as the floor of an ocean can explain it. And parts of Argyre Planitia are equally flat. We cannot lose these places. In these regions one stands confronted by a radically simplified landscape. It is a surreal experience to look around oneself—surreal in the literal sense of the word, in that one seems to stand in a place “over-real,” or “more than real”—a higher state than reality; or reality revealed in its barest, most heraldic simplicity. The world says then, This is what the cosmos consists of; rock, sky, sun, life (that’s you). What a massive aesthetic impact is conveyed by this so-simplified landscape! It forces you to pay attention to it; it is so remarkable you keep looking at it, you cannot do or think anything else—as if living in a perpetual total eclipse, or within any other physical miracle. Which of course is always the case. Remember.”
— Excerpt From: Kim Stanley Robinson. “Mars Trilogy 00 – The Martians.” iBooks.
Practically speaking, I aspired to and attained novel experiences which provoked introspection and improvisation.
My earliest digital detritus regarding Camino aspirations includes an Amazon order for Jack Hitt’s “Off the Road” dated 6/29/2012 and an email inquiring about another pilgrim’s experience on 5/12/2013. The path from inspiration to arrival in Santiago was deliberate and required a level of commitment that I have difficulty mustering. Thus, I don’t foresee another 500 mile trek in Spain or anywhere else in my immediate future. But every once in awhile, I drag out those old worn out cargo pants…
-jgp
