The day begins grey, clouds low, evidence of recent hours of rain everywhere. Done with part one of my morning routine. Now outside, still coming to full awareness, out of sleep, snippets, portions of dreams scrapping for my attention. One or two are having their way. My horizontal time in bed each night is usually spent alternating between conscious processing and immersion below the level of the surface of the great, dark pool of the subconscious, where reality, the day's happenings, memories, images, merge, mix with other beings, with embodied fears, lusts, frustrations, creatures, often and mostly in human form, straight out of the id. Perhaps it is not so much a matter of alternating between the two as it is maybe more of a range, a continuum, you know? A sliding scale, like mixing music, some bit more conscious input, a spoonful of deeply buried paranoia, a quarter cup of childhood, the smell of the skin on the back of her arm.
Outside in my spot, this small metal table set off to one side of the mall. Teasing apart my inner world, leafing through the emotional detritus of another night spent on this voyage, as they say, of discovery. I have discovered a few things, I can say, and not all speak of the bright warmth of a sunlit hillside. Discovered that I can do this trip, despite many fears beforehand. Remember sobbing, freaked out, asking her to hold me, "What the fuck am I doing?" Afraid like a small child, irrationally, unable to see any balance or any maybes, only the certainty that my world, upon returning, would be forever changed. My inability to see over the edge of that cliff of what will be signaled to me the atavistic, archetypal and basic fear of the unknown. For me, as I readied for this trip, it meant the possible loss of my best friend, it meant coming to terms with the fact that my two boys are no longer boys, with my soon to be moving overseas for some number of years, with the leaving behind of who and what I know, what I am comfortable with, where I know how I fit into the social and geographical and emotional cogs and gears that I whir and click inside of.
"I have to do this," and she did such a good job of holding me. "I have to do this thing, this walk." She told me that it would be good, that I would find answers, that what I needed to keep in the world would still be here when I returned. "But I'm gonna miss you so much," I would say, crying in that way that you rarely do when another person is present, the way that contorts and re shapes not just your face, but your body, your hands. She said, yes, yes and I will miss you too. But still, it's gonna be okay."
It is one of the most difficult experiences in this incarnation, that pulling and pushing away, that desperate, unreasonably strong urge to go away and to come back all at the same time. I can't be here. I can not be anywhere else. The immovable object struck by the irresistible force. And so a chapter ends and another begins. I can say that I have often used that metaphor, you know the one, a door closes and another one opens. I believe that sitting here at this table in Burgos, this overcast Wednesday morning, that I have a modification to that metaphor. A friend has said many times that some doors, once opened, never close again (thank you, JV). Thusly so. In my head now, in my way of seeing my own life, of keeping track of where I have been, of what and who I am in relation to others, to myself, that yes, new doors are opening in my world, but the other doors, the ones that I have walked out of, they are no longer closed, they are all now open. I have not been pushed into this space, a darkened hallway, maybe, between doors. No. No that's not it. I walk along this well lit corridor with all the doors to all the places, people, emotions, pleasant and painful alike, and I choose which room to enter, and I choose to continue to try the door knobs on those that have yet to be opened.
For helping me to get to this place, for being the splint when my anxieties and my fears suffered compound fractures, I must now and forever thank my best friend. Thank you, K. Thank you for helping me to walk out my front door, get my emotionally crippled ass onto that plane, walk onto this new land, walk this Way.
Teo will walk out of our hotel and he will join me here soon. Our inertia has been frozen here in Burgos. Today we will start it up again, strike out for Santiago, Finnesterre, the Atlantic Ocean, once again. We figure that we sit about forty percent, perhaps a hair less, from our goal. Today we hope that we can get in about a half of a normal day, so, maybe we can do twelve klicks today. Need to see how my ankle, how my new WALKING shoes, hold up. For me it is just a reality of not being in great shape, of having many broken parts over the years, a surgically repaired left ankle in this case. For my guardian angel, Mr. T, it will be a test of his ability to moderate his impatience, his youthful urges to go forth and to conquer, to demonstrate to himself and to those watching, that he is powerful beyond measure. It shall most assuredly be an interesting day!
Yesterday afternoon we walked up the hill that overlooks the downtown, the older part of the city where we stay. In 884 Count Diego Porcero built a bastion on the hill as a means of protecting the small community hat gathered here as a means of servicing the pilgrims who walked the Camino. In the tenth century it was fortified to a greater degree and was a strong, northern position used to repel the Moors as their tide rose up from Africa and met here in the Land of Castles, their most northern shore. I had hoped to enter the castle, to explore its outer walls, its stonework, steep myself in its presence and it's history. Alas it was not open, is only open on weekends this time of year.
We had brought our Bloodbowl set-up with us, hoping to find an out of the wind, sunny spot inside of or near to the castle. This we did. Our first league match in the La Liga de Competitión de Sangre España 2013, a game between the Burgos Bereavers, my Undead team, and ........, T's Lizardmen. T got out to an early start, sending one of my two defensive greats, Mummy #11, out on a stretcher, dead and lost for the season, well, forever! My star player, Hack Enslash, out for two games with a leg fracture. Teo scored, well his Saurus #1 did, the scaly bastard, he went up one to nil. But the second half, well folks, the second half was all mine! Sent a few of his Skinks and Saurons to the sidelines, scored a touchdown, run in by Wight #9, tied it up. The last two turns of the game I had him pinned at my goal line, forced a fumble that rolled into the end zone and I pounced on it with barely any time left on the clock. But damn if my agility score combined with my agility roll was not enough to secure that slippery little pigskin. The game ended tied, each team securing one point in the quest to make the playoffs. Lizardmen 1-Undead 1.
We finished the most excellent of historic battles, and then we walked straight to The Book the Irish Pub/Taverna, for some tapas and Guiness! Watched a good match between Real Madrid and Juventus, drinker around on our teams, awarded new skills to those players who earned enough points for their play to merit them. On our way back to our room, we stopped by a bar and ordered sangria and patatas con rotas y morcillo, fried eggs with fried up morcillo on top of a platter of, essentially, fries. It was a really sumptuous, heavenly meal. We both felt that way, and anyone watching us could probably have guessed a t it given that we didn't really communicate with other, unless small grunts and moans of satisfaction count, until our plates and glasses were emptied.
Before we leave town today we will need to accomplish a few things. I need to change the remaining couple a hundred dollars into the paltry sum of euros that it will generate. Need to find a walking stick to help transfer five to fifteen pounds off of my left ankle and down through the right side of my body into the ground. Would like to re-up my now ended supply of instant coffee. Then there is the gift that I bought for a good friend back home. It weighs a fair bit and I don't want to carry it to Finnesterre, the Roman name, meaning the end of the earth, that marks continental Europe's westernmost point, located a bit over thirty miles due west of Santiago de Compostella. So I'm hoping to mail it home before leaving Burgos today. And I think it is wise to try to pick up a stretchy ankle sleeve/brace as well to aide in the not flexing and thus, hopefully, in keeping the inflammation in my tendons to a low rumble and not a roar!
Feel suddenly, as we begin to trek again, so very tired. As though maybe in a deep slumber could I shed the weight of the knowledge of the finiteness of things. To sleep, perchance to dream. And in that sleep perhaps to find some sign, a vision, something still out there, hovering just above, awaiting the proper time to alight upon my shoulder, share with me it's appointed knowledge, my way up and out. Yet, as the Inuit proverb above states, only one thing, the only thing, to wake to see the great day that dawns and the light that fills the world.
It is thoughts like that fill my head as we walk. It is something akin to sleepwalking at times, a disconnected sensation, the veil between me and the world fully in place. What I see though the gauzy wrap containing me is diluted heavily with the emotional fluids coursing though me. It is slowed down to about forty percent speed, the landscape around me bluing if tun my head too fast, as though the settings on the camera that is my eyes has the ASA and the shutter speed settings set at the incorrect settings. It becomes of no interest to me to adjust these mechanisms, preferring instead the isolation and uneasily that it provides.
Like this, in this place of fog, of muted sounds, of just walking, I proceed. T and I make about twelve kilometers today. Enough to test my leg, to ascertain, after we ae done for the day, the amount of stiffness and discomfort that exists, trying, and hoping for, a result that both allows me to continue walking towards Santiago, and that is allowing of the tendons in my left ankle to still be able to continue to heal. Back in the default world, the real world as some of you may prefer to name it, lacking the alienation and the slow intravenous drip of self-loathing and self-doubt that cue toy plagues me, I would tell you that a person with this injury needs to ice it three times a day, take 800 mg of ibuprofen every four hours, and do no strenuous activity, as little as possible actually, of two weeks. Here on the Camino, the sand tripping down though the hourglass, I must say that I feel different. Here it is clear hat two weeks spent in any one place ends my desire to walk the half a thousand miles from Roncesvalles to the Atlantic Ocean.
From my perch of low visibility, I watch myself walking, a stilted gait favoring the left leg, a manner of walking that tests and fatigues the right side. I coax the being I am watching to make a greater attempt to walk more naturally, to open his hips, allowing a more normal gait of the legs to occur. He doesn't much listen, set deeply, no, stuck inside of, the further recesses of his emotional mind. The irrational? The part responsible for letting the maudlin, the melancholic, reign supreme, disrupting and rerouting the healthy, functional thought processes in favor of the self-defeating scripts of days past. Taking the learned template of abandonment, of childhood traumas, and lay them, once again, over the otherwise unmarred schematics of the now; watch the dumb fuck, that, yes, is me, take the scarred outcomes of the past, the fucked up outcomes of the poor outcomes that he/I can not properly allow to float away, and to superimpose them on the beauty, on the grandeur of the now.
And so it goes, this battle royale between the correct and the deformed. At this point in the contest I believe that the malformed, clingy parts are still in control, leading, let's say, by about ten points entering the second half. But there exists a decent amount of hope. The oddsmakers have yet to concede the match. Certainly the diehard fans have yet to relinquish hope. And me, I'm pulling hard for this poor, misguided man to get his shit together and make a rousing, television audience ratings marvel, type of comeback. I still believe that this once fluid man can overcome the classical mess and rise up above the black, sticky mess of his emotional world and win the fray.
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Location:Calle Real,Hontanas,Spain
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