Mission Accomplished

Day 43 - Santiago de Compostela - Mission Accomplished - Five hundred miles walked.

Trust in Allah, but tie your camel. Muslim adage


Economists are famous for never agreeing with on another. A friend used to say that if you line up one hundred economists in a row, that not a one of them will agree with one another on any given question. That being said, studies which seek to answer the age old question regarding any positive correlation between making more money and increasing happiness are still regularly conducted. A recent study run by University of Warwick's Eugenio Proto and University of Minnesota's Aldo Rustichini, published in the journal PLOS ONE, has not only come up with a conclusion that indicates that there seems to not be a positive correlation between the two, but that, in fact, there is even a hard number for the salary which one should seek if one desires to be happy. The number is $36,000 US dollars (adjusted per country depending on local purchasing power) per year. Their research has discovered that satisfaction does continue to rise to a "bliss point" of $36,000, and then begins to decline, according to data drawn from the World Values Survey.


It is four-forty am. It is a fine time to write. Often it is between two-thirty and five in the morning that I write. Hard to find time during the day anymore. Need the better part of two hours to get a post done; where does that come in the day? Up in the morning usually a half hour before T, get some in before it is time to leave the albergue and start walking, something that is now changed since ending our walk. Then we have Ben walking until a check into an albergue, shower, wash clothes, find a store, ready for dinner. Often I have found some time around this transition. After dinner some time can be found, but we have found many friends along the path and have spent time with them.




Now we are visiting with Rob from breakfast in the dining room of the hotel in the morning to dinner and hanging out at night, talking until we are too tired to do so anymore, it is hard to yank time away, to say, now finally having the ability to interact with him after so many years.


So the night country is where there is quiet, undisturbed time to process, to write, to read. Oft times it is the only time when the rest of my world slows down, melts away enough, for peace to settle over me and thus to make a place where creativity and clarity can take up residence and get anything done. Try at times during the day to get off to the side, go outside, for example, to get time to write. Commonly, before my muse has yet to alight upon my shoulder, I am joined by another soul. I speak here not of ephemera but of true bodies of substance, people. My son knows fairly well to leave me to my traveling office space. Others, however, do not.


This tendency to be interrupted in my attempts to find a bubble of reverie has become greater, more or less proportionally, with each step that we have taken towards the final burial place of Saint James. Teo and I have tended to collect around us a fair sized complement of comrades as we have walked. This phenomenon is, ......, what we desire, has just about no drawbacks to it; one that does present itself, however, is this pattern of people seeing me sitting outside typing on my iPad, come on over to share consciousness, to hang, thus spilling away, unintentionally as it is, my accumulating bowl of creative juices. (As a side note, during my composition of this portion of this post about being interrupted, I wasm in fact, interrupted two times by two different people, for a total of about one hour-not that I did not enjoy their company)




Given that we carry everything that we have with us on our backs, the choices that we have when we decide what to put on in the evening is frightfully limited. Given that I have one set of walking clothes and one set of not walking clothes, I switch from the one, each day after we have finished walking, to the other. Day time wear is an olive green, fast drying, poly-something t-shirt and olive green, fast drying, zip off, cargo pants. Night time wear is a black, cotton, Gap t-shirt, black, stretchy, sweat pants/athletic wear pants. After taking a nap yesterday afternoon I was getting dressed again, joking with T about my choice of clothes. "Hmm, what to wear. What to wear?" We both cracked up as we suited up once more in the same exact top, pants, socks that we have every day for six and a half weeks now. It is practical, to be sure, but so audaciously, rhythmically monotonous as to be bizarre.


Spent some more time hanging with the Martins today. Nice guys. A funny episode. Das Martin says to us, as we are standing in the courtyard inside the interior four walls of the. Monasteries Martin Piniero, the twelfth century building in which we are currently housed (the courtyard concept being a Moorish innovation, keep the women inside and occupied, think TV!?). He says to us, "Sometimes the sun is in your eyes," raises his hand out straight, elbow locked, hand flattened, "and the wind is blowing in your eyes, and then you have an itch under your nose," he uses his free hand, two fingers, to scratch directly beneath his nose, suddenly we get it-heil Hitler! The four of us, Tdog, the Martins, and I, all bust out laughing. A candid moment to be sure.




In short order now I will return to my life in Washington state. Will fly from Madrid to Seattle one week from today. My feelings about returning are mixed. It seems that one of the best parts of going on vacation is coming home. True. But for fourteen years now being in Ellensburg has been not really what I have chosen; I live there because my kids have lived there. Sure it has been my choice, I could have lived elsewhere, could have been apart from them. But to me that was never an option. Today things are different. Today I am soon to be moving overseas.


It is August in my mind and it is hot and it is dusty as I walk the horizontal, undulating system of trails that cut into the side of the irrigation ditch along my father's property in the Kittitas Valley. My arms stretch out from my sides as though I am playing airplane, the soft lobes of the three toothed sagebrush flopping and caressing against my skin. The dust that fills the cow trails is an inch deep, more in places, and it is almost white, and fine as gypsum powder. From high on the side of the bank of the ditch the view across the valley extends for maybe twenty mile to the ridges of the foothills of the Cascade range on the northern rim. The brightness of the late summer sun bleaches the scene, everything I see, into the look of a twenty year old photograph exposed too long to the light, blanched, a bit faded. The colors all shift along the spectrum, turning whites a bit yellow, greens a strange orangish hue.


My job is to walk these trails, along the one until it branches into the one below, the sage in places as tall as my head, find the red brown heifers at the end of the ten acre field, count them and their young, account for them all, report back, the final chore of the day. The smell of the dust, poofing up in small clouds from my feet, mixes an acrid coating onto the pungent, ripe, sharpness of the sage, bruised and opened by the sides and the palms of my hands. In some ways the sensation is like flying underwater, moving as though lucid dreaming through the sea grass and the kelp beds, parting, swaying as I push forward through them.




So as I return to the states now it is with a mindset quite different from any that I have ever experienced before. I return now to tie up loose ends, to make some adjustments to my houses, my rentals, help my two boys to be properly set up for their futures, finalize my divorce, arrange for my job teaching across the ocean, say my goodbyes, head off to watch the sun rise and set from yet another corner of the globe. Much inside of me churns and courses, twists, clenches and releases. It is a bit like going to the dentist to get an aching tooth pulled. Hurts, need to get through it-then in a big whoosh things improve tremendously.


Things are not right, have not been right for a long time. My natural auras, energies have become jammed up some years back. Feel too much maligned by too many people, people I used to respect and admire wildly, people who clearly disapprove of how I prioritize my life, my values, but who, while whispering criticisms to others around me, refuse to speak to me, to honor my requests for connection and for explanation. No man is an island unto himself, and yet if others insulate you from them, what else really can you be? I have held on to my life, to who I feel like I have been supposed to be, for a number of years longer than I have wanted to. For others' sake. For my boys mostly. For my most recent wife. Like holding a too hot mug of tea out of the microwave; didn't know it would be so hard to hold, but having removed it from the oven, half way to the table, past the zero point, hurts too much, but dropping it is not an option, going forward now is the quickest, best option. I believe that now I can see how this plays out.




There is not much longer to go now. Haven't much in the ways of friends left in the states. On the outside of my family. My boys are men now, will be best served now if I set them up with cheap housing in some of my rental units, get out of their way. Can not really stand back, look at my life and say with any honesty or a straight face that I have good advice to give them about how a human progresses with their life in the proper, healthiest manner. No, my time in my hometown is over done. It is my time to attune my inner compass, close my eyes, and migrate. I think that I can keep a hold of the hot mug until I reach the table. Sure it hurts, but what did T.E. Lawrence say about the 'trick' of not making it hurt when he slowly closed his thumb and forefinger about the burning match, extinguishing the flame? "The trick," he said, "is not minding that it hurts."


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Location:Rúa Catalina Poniente,Fisterra,Spain