The surprisingly tiny town of Lago was next on the Path, and once again the oppressive smells & vile sightings of of systemic bovine cruelty made stopping for any time or reason at Albergue Monte Aro fully infeasible. And so I ambled steadily onward, eventually into & through the hamlets Cruceiro de Corzon & Ponte Olveira, the latter of which being the place where the owner of the town’s only hostel told me to head on to a donativo “in the next village”; a donativo – it later turned out – that all locals knew had long since been shut down. I soon made it to said village – the hamlet of Olveiroa – and was met there with a shocking & steady display of coldness; from the shockingly unsympathetic hospitalera in the town’s municipal albergue to the shockingly dismissive owners of several private albergues nearby to the shockingly invisible assistance unprovided by the local Catholic church to the shockingly rude interactions from the gaggle of young pilgrims sitting wayside to the shockingly unkind attitude of essentially every adult townsperson I encountered (!!!) … And yet as is so often the case in life, it was the children who came to the rescue – not literally in this case, as they did not succeed in inspiring any of their elders to open their hearts to yours truly and his Mission for Peace. And yet the kindness they showed me – specifically the two young men pictured below – did “rescue” the reputation of humanity as a whole. It turns out that they had overheard me asking one of their parents if there was anywhere in town for a weary peace pilgrim to lay his head for the night, and that they had also overheard the adults of their town repeatedly prevent me from receiving the same. This latter dismissal upset them all quite profoundly, and it was a joy – after repeatedly reassuring them that I was in no dire need and that all was well no matter what – to sit back and watch them scour the neighborhood trying to scrounge up food & lodging for me from any & all nearby. As previously mentioned, their earnest pleas fell essentially on equally deaf ears, and yet they did find a large measure of solace while watching me gratefully eat the pieces of bread & the apple they had procured for me (the latter of which they purchased with their own allowance money!) … This interaction “saved the day” for them, which was a fine thing indeed, and yet in the end this town proved to be just as equally lost, and even though almost 55km had already been walked that now-dreary day, I bid my small friends a warmhearted adieu and headed onward into the early evening’s gathering gloom …

“Young children still see the innate brotherhood of every stranger because they still know nothing else. Their hearts remain untainted and are alive with simple truth that God resides in full & equal measure in the hearts of every person met along the way … And so it is that we adults must come to remember what is still obvious to a child – namely, that life is nothing but a vast collection of smaller lives, each of equal worth and each lived equally one moment at a time. Children still know that each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and talking to the animals and being kind to all we meet. They still know that a day spent in awe of radiant sunsets and communing with strangers and dancing with the trees swaying in cool breezes and bringing a smile to those in need cannot be bettered.” ~ inspired by Christopher Moore, Rabindranath Tagore & Nicholas Sparks

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