Wake up the final morning, aiming to hit the trail by eight thirty so that we can get to the plaza in front of the Cathedrál, meet Rob by the middle of the three Christmas trees, by three thirty. Sitting on terrace of the albergue, our LAST albergue, having a smoke, sucking down my instant coffee swill, finishing waking up. Hardly know how to feel as we finish this thing up. Think back to what my Uncle José said to me when we met him for dinner way, way back six weeks hence at the Cervezeria Alemana. Said that God is whatever you feel right now. If you feel hungry, that is God. If you feel angry, horny, sad-that is God. Have thought a lot about that in the intervening days. I mean, if that is true, and frankly it sounds as good an idea as any I've come up with, then what does it mean if I do not know how I feel right now? Or what to feel right now.
Does that mean that God is confused? Does it mean simply that, as Ram Dass says, it is just an 'I don't know moment'? That the 'I don't know mind' is a good place to be? Like the Rumi quote from yesterday's blog, just another visitor to my house, another guest to great cheerily at the door, to usher in, to welcome until he should feel it is time to leave? Is God then an awareness, an opening to and of the universe that I can perceive? Perhaps my highest state is one in which I work on my awareness, allow what transpires around me to come in through my five senses, allow it to just be, to not resist, not resent, but just to recognize, greet, welcome, allow, give a warm hug to it when it leaves, await the next coming phenomenon, event, utterance, emotion.
I joke with Teo, "What the hell are we gonna do every day from nine in the morning until five in the evening?" Told him that we will have to inform my buddy, Rob, whom we are meeting for three days here in Santiago that we have planned a twenty kilometer walk around the city each day! It will be interesting to see just how easily we will return to a much more sedentary and more 'regular' life.
They say that it is hard to see the forest whilst amongst the trees. Right now it feels difficult to extract great feelings, inspired words about what all of this walking, this trek across a country, means. The journey has been, is, and I feel sure that it shall always remain, a perfect metaphor of itself. A passage. The traveling of a long, arduous, beautiful path. So it is that with my son I have passed over a five hundred mile slice of this earth, and with him also we have moved through and across miles of internal spaces, perhaps thousands of them. Both together and certainly each of us individually. While I can not yet say what inside of me has changed or how, I believe that there are now many, many places inside that have transformed into new versions of themselves. What existed before as grey, unmoving chrysalis is now tangerine winged butterfly, gossamer wings still wet, unfolding. Understandings yet rising behind the silhouette of horizon, the shape and kind still as yet undechipherble. More deep knowledge than known fact. More emotional tone than moment defined.
My internal compass has rotated. My true north having on its axis shifted, triangulating, re calibrating onto the new placement of the magnetic points of interest, of intuition, of desire. With these awakenings come the necessity for action in my external world, a mandate from my internal self to fundamentally alter the course and direction of my physical body. I believe most fully that now, having been, to borrow the metaphor of a great man, to the mountain top, that I can not return to the lower regions of the valleys below. And so forward now I must go, onward to a new and different future, the future that has, previously unbeknownst to me, been waiting for me, smiling, at peace, sitting patiently just out of sight around the bend.
Sort of hard to not feel somewhat anticlimactic, like the end of a terrifically good weekend, or a carnival ride. Does one line up again, get in the queue of pilgrims, do the ride again? Does one incorporate the time spent walking, thinking, doing, being, into the manner in which one moves forward? Does one just continue to breathe? In all cases, for all of us who have shared this time together, there are no certainties, no 'must be's, no shared mandates. As surely as we are all now changed, so surely this experience has affected each and every one of us differently. As the lines on the back of the scallop shell all converge into one point, the symbol of the many different pilgrimage routes into Santiago de Compostela, so now we shall all move from this one important moment in our lives outward towards the many different places where our lives and our hearts will take us.
So, we walk today with earnestness and with a soft and certain pleasure, closing the final distance into the Plaza of the Cathedrál in SdC. Rob's plane lands at the airport in SdC at two o'clock. He should deplane, get a cab or bus, get to the plaza around three, perhaps we can even get there about the same time he does, not make him wait. And so we have a good final day of walking, Dwayne, Teo and I. Ankles are hurting again, drop an ibuprofen, take some breaks, the sun actually warmer, brighter than any other day this week; crazy enough, as we have progressed into the 'marine climate' of Galicia and deeper into the wet part of the year, our days have become, inexplicably (to all but Dwayne, his hotline to The Lord firmly in place...and by this point a heretic of my nature begins to have small doubts....), warmer, less windy, brighter, more cloudless.
Our smiles become broader as we take a final ten minute break, some six klicks from city center, SdC still out of sight behind the last hill, then take the final plunge in. Hit the outskirts, joking, I am singing the song "Stumbling In," our spirits high. It is about one forty-five now, Rob's plane does not even touch down for another fifteen minutes and we are about forty minutes, maybe thirty, from our meeting spot. Stop to photograph a statue of a Templar Knight in as all park, keep walking, up the sidewalk along a decently busy street, heading straight for the Cathedrál some two and a half klicks before us.
Suddenly, in one of those strange, disorienting moments in life where your brain sees and hears but doesn't quite know how to make sense of that which it takes on, I hear someone up ahead yell, "Hey, Ellensburg!" Simultaneously I look about a block and a half in front of us, see a figure standing on the sidewalk, arms stretched out crucifix style, walking slowly towards us. My very first thoughts are, it is a caminero, of course, but which one? The Martins? Then my brain tells me, they don't know about Ellensburg, none of them do....klick, klick whir klick...Rob! It must be Rob...whose plane has not yet landed?
And so it is. Mi amigo buenissimo, Robert Lynam, his plane a half hour early, having spotted Dwayne's 'bright orange coat' that he both read about and saw a pic of in my blog, the three of us, our backs turned to the street, taking a pic of the statue, he on a bus to the center of town. Said he saw the coat, something about it seemed familiar, remembered what he saw and read, turned his head and thought he saw me, asked the bus driver to stop at the next stop, and viola!
A grand and magical reunion it became, even in retrospect, even as we embraced and laughed, all of us, at the odd and singular happening that brought us together here in this place that marks the end of the Camino. We walked the rest of the way together, checked into the wonderful hotel adjacent to the Cathedrál from where we shall spend three nights revelling in our friendship and in the warm bath feeling of having completed our overland journey across the Iberian Peninsula.
Not a terrible night, no. Went out on the town with good friends. Rob. Teo. The Martins. Dwayne. Had dinner at a döner kebab joint. With the boys. It was grande. Hummus, fries, beer, salad, a calzone sort of thing. Get this, dear reader, and I s*#t you not, what is served when I ask for pita to accompany the hummus is, drum roll please, tortilla. No, not am omelette of egg and potato, which is what the Spanish call tortilla, but, and this is the only time in two months in Spain that I have seen them at all, Mexican, flour tortillas, warmed, folded into quarters! We had good conversations, much laughter. Dropped some euros and then went out for a few hours of carousing the bars. Dwayne, not a drinking man headed back after dinner. Teo, Rob, the Martins, and I found a small taverna to throw down a couple of rounds of tequila chupitos, chased by a couple botellas de cerveza. Met a nice German fellow of about my age, named Klaus. Having lived in the US a few times as well as Australia, Klaus has impeccable English, and is a warm, sensible, genuine guy.
Standing in the doorway of the place having a smoke, Klaus, some other caminero whose name I never got, and a cute, red headed, Irish caminero by the name of Susan. She was fairly lit, cheeks a bright shade of vermillion, and she sort of locked into me with her eyes, then decided quite quickly that I looked exactly some a famous movie star. It was obvious from the start that the other men with her, especially the rather sycophantic, black troubadour hat wearing guy with the thin mustache, wispy chin beard, were her pack of hounds, having already caught her scent. She was asking them as she laughed, rocked back and forth in her alcohol stupor, 'C'mon, you know, the really famous guy...what's his name?" I believed already that I knew who she was thinking of, but let her do her thing, grinning at her, waiting. "A REALLY famous movie!" She blurted, throwing her long, strawberry colored, rather curly hair back over her head. The guys sort of look back and forth from her to me and back, a tennis match in full volley.
"I know!" Finally. "Iron Man. He's Iron Man!"
"Robert Downey, Jr." I inform her. "Yah, Robert Downey, Jr.," she emits in her darling Irish brogue. She smiles at me, takes two steps to me, kisses me, hugs me, kisses me some more, holds me, my face buried in the wildness of her hair. The solid feel of a woman's body, small, full, warm. And it felt good, both her complimenting me and her physical ministrations. She pulls her head back, smiles big, pecks me on the lips, then releases and moves back to her spot, the two men attending to her like personal aides to the Queen a bit aghast, believing, I suppose, that she had now demonstrated final proof of her drunkenness. Upon waltzing back inside on my cushion of air, each and every one of my compadres, having witnessed it all through the taverna's glass front, cheers me on, the Martins, having tease me earlier about being 'too old' to have any chances as they do, a bit in awe. Score one to nothing for Los Americanos.
Rob and Tdog split and went home after maybe four bars and three hours, while the Martins and I hit a couple more. They left for their place around one o'clock, and I wandered about a bit, finally settling into a bar that had Klaus, Susan, and the sycophantic duo that trailed and surrounded her closely. It is not my way to trail after women, preferring instead the hit and run technique. Come close enough to meet, engage in a brief, hopefully intriguing contact, and then move away. If they come around to follow up, they are usually hooked, if not, not. Drunk as she was, her attendants clinging just about literally to her clothing, I can't say what may have been. I hooked up with klaus, who bought me a probably very much not needed beer, went out front, got into one of the better conversations of my time here.
For an hour probably, we discussed American policies, how Germans, all eighteen million of them, are rooting for us to get our shit together, are very fearful of the damaging ripple effects of our continuing to implode; implored me to not flee my native land, but rather to stay and organize against the small minded, fearful politics of the right; what it means to have walked the Camino; his time spent studying and living in the US; the sad state of every attempt in the US to have what all the other countries have-healthcare-something that puzzles every foreigner, especially those who are not up to speed with the growing power of influence of the corporations in US domestic politics; the 'sixty year alliance' between the US and Germany and how the Germans could not understand Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, therefore declining to send troops; that while most Germans think of Americas as ego centric, arrogant people, I am a 'good guy,' and he really likes me.
Around three I pack it in. Give Klaus a strong handshake, look again to see if Susan is yet free of her hound dogs, see them huddled close around her, fawning. Call it a night, find my way home. In the Cathedrál now, awaiting the pilgrim mass to begin. The final step in our epic journey. They file in now, seat themselves around us. The priest taking his place at the altar. The retablo behind him huge, gilded, ornate beyond imagining. The small shuffles of feet, the muffled hush of voices lowered. My caminero posse around me, the Martins, Teo, Dwayne, Klaus, Rob. In the small now all are fitted inside themselves, digesting the size and the scope of what has been and of what now shall be. It is a moment that certainly no one here will forget.
Pilgrims stream behind the retablo, walking down a flight of stairs to the sepulcher of Santiago, Saint Iago, Saint James. They touch his grave, hug it, pay homage to the man in whose remembrance we have all walked these hundreds of miles. Soon now it will start. Not, as Churchill most famously said, the beginning of the end, but, rather, the end of the beginning.
At about eight-thirty this morning, at the buffet breakfast downstairs that comes with the room, Susan comes in, trailing her two attendants, joins Klaus, who has already joined us all at a long table. She looks at me, grins, says "Good morning, Robert."
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