And so it was that a great Fellowship began to blossom and my Family began to swell – at first in the usual ways: inspiring stories told, words of encouragement offered, gifts of kindness donated, smiles of love beamed, and a wholesome meal shared. Then, towards the latter part of that evening – after all the aforementioned had been fully cherished, an even greater opportunity rose into view, and an even greater love rose to meet it. I had hunkered down on the hostel’s cozy living room sofa to do a little writing when a local woman (Vanessa) barged loudly into the hostel and drunkenly demanded to to sleep there that evening (!!!). She was, of course, rejected firmly by the hostel at the outset of her outburst, and broke down almost immediately into heaving sobs of despair. I will never know what role my presence might have played in what followed (admittedly, possibly none at all), and yet the hospitalero workers suddenly began to treat her with a kind and gentle warmth they had not displayed earlier in that same day. Moved by their bold kindness towards her, I suggested that she might be allowed to spend the night in a tent in the hostel’s garden, and I offered to stay there with her until she calmed down and fell asleep. What followed thereafter was a deeply beauty-full display of goodness by all – with the hostel staff agreeing with my suggestion and setting Vanessa’s tent up in the garden, with German pilgrim-couple Bernhard & Monika (pictured with Vanessa below) tenderly comforting her for hours while she cried about her troubles and laughed over the kindness being shown to her by all, and finally with the Spanish community in general moving her gently & respectfully in a government-sponsored ambulance to be cared for (for free) by a local medical facility … A potent night indeed; with a powerful Love in-deed!

“This pilgrimage has already brought me so far, and ultimately should bring me almost exactly half way around the world from where I started. Its adventures have been great fun, no doubt, and its encounters have showered me with wonderful insights into humanity’s multitude of different ideals and ways and languages and cultures. And yet tonight I realized that my walk really hasn’t taught me much about humanity that I didn’t already know, even though it has confirmed much of what I had already suspected. For starters, it has announced anew the truth that people everywhere and anywhere are a lot more similar than they are different, and that most of us really are trying to be decent and fair and good. Yes, it is true that there seem to be a small number of seriously self-centered jackasses, and yet even most of them are folks who are trying to harmlessly hunt happiness – albeit in their own warped fashion. I have learned in walking that nice people can be awfully cruel at times, and that cruel people can on occasion be astoundingly nice. I have learned that – even though no one gets out life alive – most folks forget their own mortality, and act as if death only happens to other people. And not only is there little consciousness of life’s tenuousness going on, there is actually precious little consciousness going on at all – and I think that is our primary problem. Folks seem to do a lot of living habitually and without any deep awareness of the impacts of their standard thoughts or routined actions. So few people realize how many choices they have in every single moment. So many people seem so busy strangling their life’s far grander opportunities with irrelevant fears and inaccurate misinformation – fears that keep them from being kind; misinformation that keep them from choosing to care. So many folks don’t realize that most of what they call patriotic pride or tradition or even ‘the truth’ turns out to be no more than recycled peer pressure from others already dead, and that the same not only lacks any value or substance, but that the same is often flat out wrong. They seem swept away by the current of life, like a body trapped in the current of a wide river; not realizing that there are banks of bold love & humble kindness on both sides of any & every river – banks that they can, at any moment of their choosing, quite easily swim to, climb, and find golden new possibilities for peace waiting patiently thereupon.” ~ inspired by Doug Ten Rose

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