"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Milan Kundera
The Kundera quote is mighty in scope, sublime in application. For me, today, in the place inside where I am traveling, the idea of 'the struggle of memory against forgetting' becomes set against a phrase that perhaps is something like,'The struggle of the weary hearted against relationship.' I remember swearing off marriage after my marriage to the mother of my two boys. That was, of course, before the more recent seven year marriage that I am now stepping out of. Funny how that works, memory against forgetting indeed. And in the end, maybe the tendency to forget is, of itself, an aide; for in forgetting, in forgetting the pain of betrayal and of dishonesty, or of whichever flavor of unhappiness one may have suffered, neglect, physical abuse, one may again be able to bolster one's courage to the point where one is willing to once again consider trusting another human with the most precious and vulnerable of possessions, our soft and unprotected regions, our heart. Yes, maybe even someday I shall reach a place where I will be able to forget the hundreds of outrageous events that have ended my marriage, which plague the nether spaces of my night time realms.
We limped the nineteen klicks into Trabadelo today. Kinda funny shit. But we are pretty much Darth Vadering this thing now-no messing around, no joking, full speed ahead (but minus the whole choke you from a distance thing...!) Got a bit of rain, a female rain, as the Navajo say. Drizzle. Walked some thousand feet up into, literally, the clouds.
It is an amazing thing to walk with your adult child across five hundred miles of land. He is a man, and it is difficult to rearrange one's brain to drop an adult into the place of your child. In my brain he is still my little guy. In the real world he is about three inches taller than I am, outweighs me, is smart and worldly, good looking, a catch. And me, aging, broken ankle, tired. But how I love that boy, that man. Sure we knock heads a bit, but I back down, not wanting to draw any line in the sand between us. He has a temper. His ma is of Irish descent. 'Nuff said.
All in all I feel Ike the luckiest mutha f#%ka alive. We relate, we laugh an awful lot. But mostly, we walk. And we walk. We plan, we agree on logistics, where we stop, where we eat, how we do our day. Like a corporate team building exercise. Like a summer camp experience. If you are lucky enough to know him, you know what I'm talking about.
And here we are, sitting outside, under an umbrella, in the rain, outside of the bar attached to our albergue. Shortly we will head upstairs for our rest. Will be up early, seven, maybe eight (not early for any Germans reading this-and you know who you are!), and will get a good twenty ks in on the morrow. Got about twenty percent of this trek to go. We will finish.
And here things go well inside. I am healing. I am finding what I need to find. My inner peace meter is moving up, maybe at eighty percent. I have not the need to get my strokes from she who shall not be named, get it now from me, from the world around me, the sun, the grasses, the people I meet. Or not, or maybe I am fooling myself. Can't quite tell.
Mostly I feel as though my heart is getting lighter. My mind is expanding. My soul is finding solace from the pummeling it has taken. Life I think is good. My son is healthy, except perhaps for his lower legs! I can not ask for more. Well, I can, but...!
I am such a clown. Hopeless. A guy, me, who carries a tattoo on his left arm of a rose with a drop of blood. Have for thirty years. Reminding me of my subservience to the pain of love. The tragic, Romeo and Juliette scenario, love unrequited. Grrr...! Someone has to set me right, tell me to knock my sorry shit off. But, alas, so it must be, and so it is playing out. I get it, sort of. It is just that looking into a woman's eyes, seeing only potential, only exploration, seeing only the merging, the dropping away of ego, the culmination of intimacy, I break, I fall away.
On the topic of where the attentions of my heart drift, my beloved Tió Lloyd, the oldest of my maternal Uncles, wrote me the following.
"Congrats. Sounds like the camino is doing what it's best known for.
Word of caution: Just 'cause you jumped out of a leaky, full of rocks, boat without paddles, doesn't mean that the best thing to do is jump into another boat just 'cause it's dry and there. Sometimes it's best to swim to shore through those turbulent, cold waters, build a fire, dry out, eat a good meal, and let some time pass. After all, there are likely to be other boats soon enough. Remember the old Bull.
Meanwhile, keep on swimming."
Gracias por tu palabras, Tió. Bueno, vale, vale.
Maybe the power lies in the pursuit of defining my own self to me through some form of a dialectic process which occurs when I look deeply enough into the eyes and the emotional, personal center of a woman with whom I feel safe and connected; the back and forth, the winnowing down, honing in, whittling away that takes place as two connected and brave beings work together to aide each other in the so very complicated and often harrowing process of self discovery through relationship. In my life it is this magic that holds sway over every other phenomenon. It is the bleeding rose, the desire for connection, the drive to leave here and to become, to manifest in the other place.
So I strive, in this place of separateness following too much time spent swimming against the deluge of disappointment that my marriage had become, to achieve some balance. It took me years, about four or five of them, to even date a woman after the end of my first marriage. The feelings of loss, of failure, of busted dreams-the horrible feelings of grief and of self loathing, self blame-hung on me like an ill fitting, shabby, black suit. The most sad aspect of that is that I was pretty much as aware then as I am now looking back on it of the fact that I put that crappy suit on each morning, wore it every day, all day long, like a hopelessly broken widow who pines for her lost sailor, planted day after day in her rocking chair, on her front porch, staring out at the marble gray waves for her drowned man to return.
Today, lo these many years later, I am no longer that broken shell. Yet neither am I at peace in my breast. The black birds of winter flutter and caw, wanting me to open and release them. Perhaps that process can happen, or is happening. Maybe it has happened. My experience in these murky, far too opaque areas, shows me that the only manner of finding certainty with regards to ascertaining one's own emotional, mental balance and health is to look back from some point further on down the road. That right now my goal, as it pertains to my own ability to move forward, to heal, is to just breathe, to just walk, each one step a microcosm, a huge accomplishment, or really a small nothing, a universe unto itself. If I can keep doing this, keep making these accomplishments, these universes, these microcosms, these small nothings, then I can find myself at long last in my own internal Santiago, my own Cathedrál, my own serene, tranquil plane and me sitting on the sand in the very middle of it, the sun, orange and warm now, breaking the horizon, with nothing inside my being other than wonder, other than clarity, other than light.
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Location:Pedrafita do Cebreiro,Spain
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