Walking. THAT miracle.
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.
When I was five, my mother married an Air Force officer and did her duty by me and her parents. She took me from the mountains of North Carolina, where I had lived with my grandparents from my infancy, to Biloxi, Mississippi, near Keesler Air Force Base. Leaving my first home broke my heart, and it can’t have done much for my mom and her new husband, though perhaps it liberated some tired grandparents. Before a year had passed I was in a tiny cell at Keesler Air Force Base hospital, diagnosed with rheumatic fever. My heart was skipping beats and murmuring, the cartilage in my knees failed, and I could no longer walk. I got the idea, whether from doctors, nurses, or my imagination, that I would never walk again. It was 1952; the Korean war was raging; Eisenhower and Stevenson were running for election on the little radio next to my bed, and despite all the “I Like Ike” buttons on hospital workers’ lapels, I was adamantly for Stevenson, and I began to write stories to amuse myself. That election and the availability of writing paper kept me from going insane. No one had yet done studies of sensory deprivation. I remained in a tiny, barren hospital room for nine months, was kept in bed at home for a year after that, and then gradually (what miracle!) I began to learn to walk again, maybe thanks to all the corticosteroids they gave me in the military hospital. I was on “restricted activity” till I was seventeen (no running, no jumping, no swimming, no bike riding—basically all I could do was read, write, and mind my mother’s burgeoning brood of children). As a result, my bones are like loofas; my spine meanders east and west; my heart sounds like a Moog synthesizer; my ribs crack if I cough too hard; and I get migraines about four times a week. I’ve done all I can to support this body: regular power walking, occasional gym memberships, yoga, Tai Chi, meditation for many years, acupuncture, acupressure, Alexander and Feldenkrais, chakra clearing, crystals, homeopathy, wild dancing and sexual acrobatics in my hippie years, and whatever else I could think of. In the course of all that positive activity and positive thinking, I forgot, for some years, that being able to walk at all was little short of miraculous. Then in 1989 my friend Margaret, a poet, had a massive stroke and lost the use of her left arm and leg. She wrote:
There’s no way back to the woman I was.
From this distance she looks so young.
She could never understand me.
Perhaps, in time, I can understand her.
Her with her pockets full of stones, her
standing on the beach.
Standing.
That miracle.
Visiting her in the rehab hospital, I regained my sense of wonder at being temporarily able to walk. “Walking,” I thought: “that miracle.”
So what made me think I could set out alone and walk 150 miles, up and down hills and through mountains and marshes, in a country where I don’t speak the language, in the heat of July and August? Blind desire? I do love to walk. I want to be intimate with Portugal: to smell Portuguese earth, get Portuguese sand in my ears, listen to Portuguese birds sing at dawn over Portuguese villages with crenellated walls around them. I want to leave my peaceful footprints on pathways through vineyards, on Roman bridges, on medieval stones, on a road worn rich by pilgrims’ feet since sometime around 800 when people started walking from all parts of the European world toward Santiago. I got derailed (in every sense) by the popularity of the Camino Santiago. I’ve been reading hundreds of posts to the email group for people who walk the Camino. People in their eighties do it; people on crutches do it; people who are dying do it. I got Joyce Rupp’s book, Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino and followed every inch of her journey, begun when she was my age, albeit with a walking companion and a sturdy body. It was Blind Greed, I suppose. That’s the name of my son Chris’s band, and it is pretty much my MO: greed for adventure, for beauty, for books, for projects, for activism, for music, for oceans—not for a simple nimbus in the clouds but for a rainbow nimbus, for what Walter Anderson’s mother called “the one mad thing too many.” I knew there was some possibility I would have to adjust the plan. But now, today, thirty days from lift-off, I am a little disoriented.
If I’m not going to walk the Camino, and I’m not yet sure whether I am or not–but if instead I’m going to take buses from point to point and then walk in smaller circles, through cities, towns, monasteries, parks, and a little bit of wild space: maybe I ought not to bother with my just-broken-in hiking boots and five pounds of water. Maybe all I need is my old Birkenstocks and one simple, refillable water bottle. Maybe I really will get to embrace, as Jon Kabat-Zinn says, stillness. Completely.
An image from a cheesy movie comes to mind. I saw Damage in Durban, South Africa, while I was editing videos of the AIDS drama my students in Lesotho had created. I took a break from logging and rescripting my storyboards one night and walked into a cinema near the beach. The movie had a sadomasochistic edge and wasn’t important, but the final frames have haunted me since the moment I saw them. Jeremy Irons ends up alone in a cobblestone village (Portugal? France? Greece? some tiny, ancient, exquisite hilly village) in baggy sweatpants, espadrille sandals, a black turtleneck, and a battered tweed jacket, carrying a string bag with a few groceries to his little bed-sitter on a side street from nowhere. He lays out his new purchases, a single slice of cheese and a single apple, and opens the shutters, letting in the light. Perfection. That, since 1994, has been a recurring fantasy: that I will live a nun’s life of solitude and introspection, alone in some incredibly beautiful little town, obscure and off the tourist circuit. I will buy one slice of cheese at a time. I will wear a saggy tweed jacket. I will speak to no one. I will make an end of attempts to save the world, and I will be very, very still. When I do that, I imagine, I will learn something that I don’t know now.
Yes. Perhaps instead of walking the Camino, I will find one perfect little town: Vila do Conde, by the sea; or Ponte de Lima, with its perfect river; or maybe Braganca with its crenellated walls; maybe some little town by the ocean that doesn’t appear in any guidebook and isn’t even on the map. Maybe I will find one perfect little town with one tiny, perfect chapel where I can light a candle every day, and I will be very, very still there for a week or two, with explorations of other parts of Portugal before and after. Maybe this is a retreat pilgrimage, not a moving pilgrimage.
I know what the question of the pilgrimage is—and Pam is right. The question shapes the quest. The question comes from a Mary Oliver poem: What is it I want to do with what is left of my one wild and precious life? Will Manko be able to take care of herself in another year? Will I become a proper, ordained Buddhist nun? Or will I simply live the life of a wandering nun, like Basho, for whom my cat is named. Cousineau: “For the wandering poet like Basho, pilgrimage was a journey that embodied the essentials of Zen, a simple journey in which the path was the goal, yet also a metaphor for the well-lived life.” That is deeply appealing. Will I be a kind of Peace Pilgrim, a mendicant witness for peace? (She hiked the Appalachian Trail when she was in her twenties and was always a long-distance hiker. I have never walked further than three miles at a go. Bear this in mind.) I had thought the answer to my question, my quest, would come to me in the rhythm of walking, finding food to eat and a place to sleep, putting my head down in a different place each night, moving with the flow of many pilgrims over roads that pilgrims have walked for more than a thousand years. In 2003, which is the last year I can find statistics for, 1,627 pilgrims walked the Portuguese route to Santiago, most of them walking in July and August. Joyce Rupp writes, “Something happens in the heart as one walks along the Camino. As a pilgrim, life gets simpler and the mind becomes clearer. The heart loses its hold on what is left behind and resonates more and more with the beauty of what is” (41). That’s what I thought I would find. But I am willing to be surprised. If I’m not training for a 150-mile walk, what am I doing? I am teaching this summer school class and feeling the wonder and the thrill of not knowing. Don’t know. So much is possible. I still have 29 days and 5 physical therapy appointments before I have to decide which shoes to wear.
Tags: Buddhism, Camino, Portugal, Preparation, Walking
Kendall
Pilgrim, a wonder awaits you on the road,
the road to dreamt of Compostela:
a flax and lilac mountain in a plain
with incandescent poplars…..
Plan to arrive when, in the evening chill,
a window shines in the deserted square…
(ANTONIO MACHADO)