I started to follow the posted signs up a thin & winding pathway up towards the hostel on the hill when a passing cyclist yelled loudly for me to stop and head up a neighboring roadway instead. I wasn’t “in the middle of nowhere” here, and yet this particular part of the Way was unusually […]
We had been encouraged by Pedro & Carmin to later partake of the abbey’s church tour that was offered to all pilgrims each afternoon, and the conversation shared amongst the few other pilgrims who had arrived and were waiting for the same (Helena from France & Yen from Taiwan) was calm and amicable, though noticeably […]
Dinner was served in the hostel thereafter and the vibe had somehow clearly shifted in a “love dampened” direction, with my fellow pilgrims being overtly disinterested in either the nature or the purpose of my Walk and with Pedro openly downplaying (even denigrating) the same … I shrugged it all off easily enough, of course, […]
As was the case far more often than not on this pilgrimage, I woke shortly after going to bed in the hostel’s designated sleeping quarters and headed – this time downstairs – to find a place more secluded in which to rest; in small part to provide more subconscious solace for self, yes, and yet […]
“As I make my steady pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery gathers all around me and grows up from within … My childhood home drove me into the wilderness, where few look for me and fewer still hear my words. And yet I am never even remotely alone here … To […]
The walking was smoothly fluid this morning, and it didn’t take long for me to enter the surprisingly large Pamplona subdivision of Burlada, where benches offered me respite, where swallows serenaded my Journey, where the sunrise lightly caressed church steeples, and where lush trees gave my Way a cool & peaceful canopy for what felt […]
And then I once more crossed the (now much larger) River Arga – this time over the 12th century Magdalena Bridge, I believe – and approached the city of Pamplona proper … “Speaking foreign languages and studying other cultures can build sturdy bridges between people, of this there can be little doubt – allowing us […]
And so it was that I walked alongside the ramparts of Pamplona’s age-old defenses on this still-early morn, and smoothly sauntered along her still-mostly-vacant streets … “Obedient to no man, dependent not even on weather or season, without any fixed goal before them or any solid roof above their heads; owning nothing, and open to […]
I had blissfully forgotten that Pamplona is one of the world’s many hubs of culture-excused cruelty, and yet this Running of the Bulls swag-shop sadly reminded me of the same … 🙁 “Courage and grace are a formidable mixture, and the very last place you will see either is in a bullring … I went […]
I don’t know who decided to embed these Camino markers into Pamplona’s streets, and yet I was very thankful for them, whoever they were … “Walkers are in a not-quite indirect way ‘practitioners of the city,’ for each and every city – to the degree it has been properly planned & organized – is made […]
It is no small understatement when I say that I do not find larger city’s in any way pleasurable to visit, and so it was that my gratitude knew little bounds when I serendipitously walked into Pamplona’s Parroquia De Nuestra Señora De La Paz – the truly lovely (and fully solace-laden) “Parish of Our Lady […]
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