El Camino: Part 7

It’s 8:15am and I stroll through the dewy streets. The multiple bridges of the stately and pretty town span gushing rivers and brooks. They carry the water from the effervescent countryside to the sea.

The sun isn’t risen yet, being almost mid-morning, which is quite odd as I’ve mentioned previously. But as I stretch my legs outside the village and into the burgeoning countryside it creates this mystical tone of light enveloping the gentile and idyllic surroundings.

Family wineries and winding roads, old farm houses tucked into the sides of hills enshrouded by protective woods towering behind them. It is truly a magical landscape.

This land has been settled for almost seven thousand years by modern humans. They were tribes that cultivated the land. They eventually evolved into the Celtic culture that would spread to Ireland, the modern UK and areas of France.

Walking through these enchanted woods at dawn, it’s easy to see how this countryside would be able to support human civilization for thousands of years. The area receives ample rain and the climate is temperate. The vegetation explodes from every direction. With our ingenious capacity as a species to bend nature to our benefit, this is a ripe garden to do so.

The woods are also visibly very old. Time has worked on the noble trees that guard the paths by which I wind my way. Father time (Cronus to the ancient Greeks) has bent and twisted their trunks and wrapped them in moss to shelter them against wind and rain.

It is this feature of the trail that harkens my memory back to the misty past of the Celts. Pre-Roman times when Druids, in their own separate mystical society, would negotiate with forest spirits, the various natural deities, mediating for their human comrades to assuage supernatural maladies and ensure bountiful harvests.

It is amazing to me how simply putting oneself in these environments allows these impressions to waft into my consciousness, like long ago forgotten dreams.

This has always been a strong, private feature of my life. On long car rides as a kid, I could always occupy my attention with the various strange and new houses, buildings or objects of interest outside the car window that spoke to me. They would elicit a weaving story.

That house has a family that lives in it. The father does this. The mother that. The kids this. And so on. Always strange, and fascinating in a palpable sense that others out there could be living parallel lives to my own.

And so too, in the mountains and woods of upstate New York, especially when I would go on a hike on my own, I always had this intense yet familiar sense of longing and knowing about those woods. That somehow, I was meant to be here, as if I knew these woods as if for a very long time. And like the life size recreations of Iroquois longhouse in the New York state museum, I could sense myself running through these woods on moccasins and pelts, with a bow whilst following dears track.

I felt this same sense of knowing and belonging to the land one time in Aix-en-Provence as we toured the canyons around the area of Beau Villages near Roussillon. Our tour bus wound it’s way up steep switch backs. We could peer down into the chasm as we gained elevation. And it became so apparent to me, like a memory of yesterday.

I could see the cohorts of Roman legionnaires marching in tight formation up these very same winding roads. On their way to put down some sort of rebellion or to make for farther flung parts of the empire to extend it’s borders.

Now, I certainly have a fertile imagination. That is beyond doubt. But it is quite curious that we have these experiences in our lives.

I don’t believe they should be taken on beyond any measure of their own significance. Past live regression or other such new-age quasi-therapeutic wish fulfillment fantasy making seems to me a waste of time at best, and dangerously deluding at worst.

But the fact that we are all the product of many millions of years of evolutionary experience recomposed in modernity, where so much of our lives do not resemble the conditions through which the vast majority of that evolution took place, it seems plausible that we would have the ‘information’ of our ancestral experiences readily available to us.

What the significance that amounts to beyond interesting food for thought is not something I can answer now. Nor would I hazard a guess. But it does feel satisfying, at least personally speaking, to feel connected in the grand arc to these fundamental human experiences.

I know that these people lived mostly like me. They experienced love, loss, joy, sorrow, adventure, boredom and all the rest. They may have done so in many different ways, within the confines of world views that are perhaps quite different than mine. But the fundamental human hardware is still the same. And that, to me, is truly amazing.

We are all apart of an immense drama that we are often only barely aware of. And it is times like these that put me in touch with that feeling. And I feel carried along. And it seems good.

I made it a good two hours outside of Caldas de Reis, through a magical stretch of forest, meeting herds of cattle in peaceful misty glens along the way. I began to climb out of the forest up the crest of a small ridge and emerged from the woods into the fields of a small village. Now the sunshine burst forth in earnest over the quiet land. It was approximately 10:30am.

This village had playing children and barking dogs. It also had a lovely little pilgrimage café. And I had my first human to human interaction of the day.

I ordered a hearty ‘English’ breakfast of toast, eggs, sausage and bacon with an espresso and mineral water. The café had a lovely backyard covered in the aqua-green vegetation of Galicia. I took my coffee, read a short story of Chekhov on my phone and waited for my meal in the morning sun.

Suddenly, amidst this peace, I was overcome with tears. I was filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude to be alive, to be truly living this mystery called life.

And simultaneously, my friend (who’s now passed away) came to mind. This is the second time this has happened in the last six months. Where I experience some sort of wonderfully meaningful milestone, and then I will feel the heartache and loss of the memory of friends that have already passed away and will never know these feelings.

And tears streamed down my face in this beautiful little village in Galicia. I realized from the conversation with Gabriel yesterday that the memory of my friend is something I need to take on in all seriousness. My friend, Zach, died of a ‘drug-induced seizure’ at the age of eighteen in his parents garage, not long after he had gotten out of rehab.

I have also known several young men over the past ten years of my life who have struggled with opioid and/or hard drug addiction. I have known three who have succumbed to them or died of suicide. I have known other acquaintances who have passed on in the same way. Unfortunately, national statistics for the leading causes of death for men under the age of 40 confirm that my experiences aren’t rare.

And I realized this morning that now at 28, I can no longer run from this problem. Like I’ve written about dealing with the trauma from my brothers mental illness, delving into the understanding of addiction and suicide of my friends and peers provoked all manner of reactions in me. At times I have felt tremendously guilty, depressed, angry, resentful, hopeless and powerless to do anything about this problem.

To try to fathom why some people, willingly or not, destroy their own lives, is a bleak and twisted problem. It is also a bear to fathom the wounds that are left in the wake for the families’ of those individuals. And in a society that seemingly doesn’t care at best, and actively denies the problem at other times, it has made me feel very avoidant of this issue over the years.

But this morning, after the conversation with Gabriel and Isabel, it began to really sink in that there’s nothing that I need to run from with this issue now. This is simply where my path leads. It is immensely sad, but it is a place where I can offer, I believe, a significant amount of good.

And after thinking, talking and internally wrestling with this issue for so long, it’s simply time for me to show up and do the work. Or like I do on the Camino, shoulder my pack and walk the path. Through beautiful countryside, dark forest, busy streets or bustling cities. Feeling fresh and new at the beginning of the day, or haggard and sore at the end of the day.

I spent the rest of the day in gorgeous countryside and made it to Padron in early afternoon. I saw an Austrian mother and son whom I’d met the previous day at a café. I chatted with them for a minute and then found a hostel. Padron was a industrial farming town that was probably the most unwelcoming that I experienced on my portion of the Camino overall.

There were good people, but it was deserted and felt the most like it was the off-season. I got my hostel and had a low key night, though I did meet some fellow Pelegrinos from Galicia.

With that, I’ll leave you there. Thanks for reading and much love, as always.