Aire sur l’Adour was easy enough to access, and yet it was very late in the afternoon when I arrived, and I was literally at my wits end (with fatigue and primal fear being an especially difficult team to transcend). Fortunately a sweet resident noted my obvious state of more-than-mild distress and helped to orient me towards my previously promised bed. I ambled was quite a ways through the center of town and up a long hill to the hostel in question, and yet to my overt dismay Jean Marc’s friend (Allesandro) dispassionately informed me that his hostel was full for the night and that I would have ti find lodging elsewhere (!!!). Even my calm please to sleep on a bench in his courtyard were coolly rebuffed, and I loped with slumped shoulders (and, I will admit, a few mild & involuntarily released sobs) back down into town. Allesandro had told me to ask for assistance at the local Maison des Pelerins, and yet the proprietor of that establishment was even more condescending in his rejection, sending me onward to a local donativo “near the church down the road” – a donativo that I discovered did not exist at all …

“We are all so busy constructing zones of safety that keep breaking down that we hardly notice where all the suffering is coming from. We keep thinking that the problem is out there, in the things that scare us: the dark nights, the dark thoughts, the dark guests, the dark emotions. If we could just defend ourselves better against those things, we errantly think, then surely we would become more solid and secure. And yet of course we are wrong about that, as experience proves to us again & again & again. For the real problem has far less to do with what is really happening to us than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there. The suffering doesn’t come from the shadows; our suffering comes from our reluctance to carry our Light into the darkness.” ~ inspired by Pema Chodron

Filed under: Peace Pilgrimage #02: Walking HOME (2019) by Scaughdt