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Articles Tagged ‘Portugal’

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Symphonic blog

Monday, November 20th, 2006

As blogging becomes increasingly central to the way I live, I am looking around at other people’s blogs, wondering about other bloggers’ intentions, and realizing that the blogosphere offers me the opportunity to do what I have wanted to do all my life: peer into thousands of people’s living spaces. Sadly, these living spaces are only those of the privileged 1% of humanity who have computers and the time to fool around on them, and most of the blogs of that 1% are not even remotely interesting to me, but access is the first subject I thought about when I opened this blog, so there’s no need to belabor that further. I write today in celebration of an extraordinary blog called Contemplating Sintra, written by a man named Stephen Brody, who has lived in Sintra, Portugal for the past twenty or so years and writes about the town (which my dear readers may recall was my least favorite town in all of Portugal) with love, wit, and often-ascerbic intelligence. If I had read his blog before I went to Portugal, I would have had a completely different (and far more pleasurable) experience in Sintra; but more importantly, reading his blog expands my notion of what a blog can be, and I want to pass that expanded notion on to the four or five people who read this one. [read on]

Posted in Blogs and Blogging | 1 Comment »

Lisbon, Leiria, God, and a Shower Knob

Friday, July 14th, 2006

I´m here. Yesterday was jet lag, heat, and Lisbon. I was disoriented, but I took refuge at the end of the day in a sweet little attic room with a bath, where I lay in a tub of cool water for about an hour, pouring water over my head. It took half an hour to bring down the temperature of my hair. Sign on the back of the door: “All values left in the room, are the entire responsability of the costumer.” Wonderful. A Portuguese person could look at the sign on the back of the door in any American hotel and wait a long time to get a message in Portuguese. I brought the Texas heat with me. It was 41C (around 104 F) today as I was stumbling around a castle in the blazing sun here in Leiria (pronounced lay-REE-uh). The pilgrimage actually began at five minutes after 1 p.m. when I staggered into the Cathedral to get out of the sun. It was cool, and the light was muted. I sat down in a pew, noted there were only two other people in the whole place, both women, praying. I took a couple of deep breaths and suddenly a great wave of sound, followed by more and more, filled the vast darkness. It must have been the organist´s practice time. The echoes bounced off the stone walls and resonated in my veins. I have never heard such pure waves of sound. I could feel the sound as if it were water, washing through my bones. The pilgrimage had begun. [read on]

Posted in Portugal | 1 Comment »

Nomads, misfits, travelers

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

Five days before I leave for Portugal, I reflect on the nomadic life, its treasures and its costs. Travel shapes us. Travel gives us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves. It also makes us outcasts, exiles, misfits, wanderers and nomads, the family of Cain. In the Judaic creation myth, Cain was cursed to be a vagabond because he killed his brother. Cain traveled from Eden to the land of Nod, married a Nod-woman, and begat tent-dwellers, musicians, and artificers. Where did the people of Nod come from? I feel my ancestral relation to Cain and the Nod-people, and I know in my blood the hunger Cain had to belong, but the people of Nod never did belong, even to themselves. They were outsiders. My tribe. [read on]

Posted in Preparation | 2 Comments »

Walking. THAT miracle.

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006

Suddenly the landscape of the dream is shifting. I saw a physical therapist yesterday, part of my plan to get in shape for the journey. I put on my hiking boots and the clothes I plan to wear on the plane, took my backpack, fully loaded for the month’s journey (only 14 pounds, plus five pounds for the frontpack with water). The physical therapist had a form to fill out, labeled “Goal for Treatment.” I said the optimal goal would be for me to walk, over the course of a month, the Portuguese Camino to Santiago, 150 miles, with a number of side trips (by bus) to places like Bom Jesus do Monte, near Braga, with its stairway of over 1000 steps; to Sintra with its magical gardens; to Alcobaca and Batalha, every inch of which I hope to explore on foot while, somehow magically, achieving that stillness Jon Kabat-Zinn describes: leaving July 12. After measuring my range of motion and examining my medical records, she gently explained, “That might be a bit overly ambitious for you; one might even say unrealistic.” It is a pattern of my life that I need frequent reality checks. [read on]

Posted in Buddhism, Preparation | 1 Comment »

To blog or not to blog?

Sunday, June 11th, 2006

As I prepare to leave for my pilgrimage in Portugal and Galicia, a couple of people have asked if I’m going to start a travel blog. I have mixed feelings about blogs. When they first crept into my awareness, I found blogs exhibitionistic. Why, I thought, would people put the intimate details of their lives on the internet for any stranger to peer at. What’s that urge about? And then who reads blogs? I’m still trying to integrate my experience of living in Lesotho, where most people have no electricity and are nursing family members with AIDS by candle light, with living in Sugar Land, Texas, where most people live in mansions and still support Tom Delay: “He’s done so much for our community.” So I think about access, about the cyber-gap, about who lives in the global village, who cuts the grass for whom. About 166,000 people are in prison in Texas. I visited Guillermo today. He’s been incarcerated since 1992. He’s working on his three-minute speech for the graduation ceremony at the end of the Gang Renunciation program he’s in. He asked me whether I thought it better to quote Sun Tzu or Gandhi. He reads. The first book he asked me for, back when he was still in solitary, was Thucydides. He has never used a cell phone, a computer, or an ipod. Portable CD players were the hot new thing when he got locked up. His mom died this past March. He’s working on his soul. He said the change has come gradually, “Not like no lightbulb moment. More like a very slow sunrise, like a ten-year sunrise.” He says he used to want to find the people who pressed charges against him and beat the shit out of them. Now he wants to find them to make amends. He said, “I hurt them, and they didn’t have nothing to do with the pain I was in. I feel so bad about that.” I told him I’m going to light candles for him in chapels, churches, and cathedrals all over Portugal, and his eyes filled with tears. He’s never sent or received an email. Guys like him don’t read blogs. So I think about audience. [read on]

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, What does it mean? | 3 Comments »