“Only yesterday I was no different than them, and yet I was somehow saved. I am explaining to you the way of life of a people who say every sort of wicked thing about me because I sacrificed their company to reawaken my own Soul. I left the darker paths of their greed & duplicity […]
And then it was that I came across the Olive Gardzen, an oasis of peace seemingly in the middle of nowhere – an refuge for pilgrims that was built for their mobile community and mosttly maintained by the same … “Perhaps the second most important thing we can ever bring to another person is the […]
“If I have found my journey to be a maddening tangle of wandering ‘rabbit-trails,’ a labyrinth of incessantly circular passages leading ever to nowhere and back and a plethora of assorted ‘dead-ends’ fraudulently disguised as paths of great promise, it can only be because I have mindlessly exchanged God’s compass of loving service for my […]
I flowed steadily onward, all the way into the town of Lorca, where the snugly town square offered not only deliciously refreshing fountain of cool water, but an equally revitalizing effusion of camaraderie from fellow pilgrims Mate (from Hungary, with whom if would walk a sizable portion of my Spanish Camino), Julio (from Paraguay, who […]
“Perhaps the itinerant monks were especially responsible for promoting the view of the human condition being like eternal strangers. For they journeyed ceaselessly from monastery to monastery, with no fixed abode, and they haven’t quite disappeared, even to this day. They walk for their entire lives – on narrow mountain paths and broad city streets, […]
I then entered the town of Villatuerta and once more found both respite & solace in the open church I found there … “There is no hope for the man who hopes to obtain a virtue in the abstract, just as there can be no salvation for the man who prays for the same for […]
The town of Estella was only 5 kilometers further up The Road, and yet it was a particularly hot & dusty day, and I was most thankful for the cool refuge that the town’s Church of San Miguel offered me that day … “Out beyond all accepted & popular ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there […]
Thereafter I flowed along the Camino’s primary path through the city and came across a most majestic entrance to another church (San Pedro de la Rua), a church I remembered bot vividly & positively from my Walk through this same city those eleven year’s prior. Drawn almost without alternative up the stairs to its primary […]
I thought I was going to be walking alone once again as I departed from Estella, and yet I very soon met back up with Mate on the far outskirts of town and we decide to walk together a ways, with one of our more memorable stops soon arriving in the form of the Camino’s […]
“Every walker is a pilgrim, and every pilgrim is nothing less than a guard on patrol to protect the sanctity of the surrounding ineffable … Trails & walkways enable us all to better see the world; to notice fine aspects that are invisible from a car or a bus or an airplane. Walking allows for […]
If we allow ourselves to humbly embrace all our serendipitous encounters and honor all our seemingly random happenstances, we will find ourselves journeying into &/or through wondrous portions of life we never would have experienced otherwise. So it was for me today, walking with Mate to the lovely town of Azqueta – a town I […]
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