Day 124f: The joviality of Jane … (August 31, 2019)
Thereafter I began walking through a loooooong stretch of “nothing” – no gas stations, no business, not even any residences; just horse farm after horse farm after horse farm. I knew I could go days without food and I had already proven that I could flow onward for days without any potent interaction with others, and yet it is very difficult for the human body go for long without water. And so I started pulling into the aforementioned horse farms in search of the latter, finally stumbling upon (after pseudo-stumbling up to) Jane of Stone Gate Stables – a truly kind woman who was both earnestly bewondered by and openly supportive of my Walk; giving me a small bag of bananas and carrots and breakfast biscuits and juice and telling me to sit in the shade there and enjoy the same before continuing on my Way …
“I remembered other encampments where I had slept, small tents on which I had happened in the desert and where I had spent the night. Gaunt men in rags and hungry-looking children had greeted me then, and bade me welcome with the sonorous phrases of the sands. Later they had set a great dish of seasoned rice before me, and when I protested their obviously sacrificial generosity, they responded by waving my concerns aside – saying ‘Enough! Enough!’ and making it clear that I was at least a hundred times welcome. The lavish hospitality of these poor people had always made me uncomfortable, for I had known that as a result of it they would quite possibly go hungry for days. And yet when I left them they had almost convinced me that I was the one who had done them a kindness by simply staying with them and allowing them to be of service.” ~ via Wilfred Thesiger
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