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A Camino Lesson, A Life Lesson: Loving and Letting Go

January 17, 2016

Harry looked at me from across the table. He wore round glasses with thick frames and a scarf was still draped around his neck. “I’m sure you’ve already answered this a lot today, but do you have plans for another Camino?”

There were about 12 of us seated around a long table, at a restaurant in Chestnut Hill. I was with the Philadelphia Area Camino group and we’d just been on a 5-mile walk, and now we were putting up our feet and grabbing a bite to eat, just like we’d do on the Camino.

I stabbed my fork through a tomato and looked back at Harry. “Honestly, I’m not sure yet.”

There had been a lot of travel talk that day, about past Caminos and future Caminos, about other places in the world we wanted to go, the things we wanted to do. These are things I think about a lot: the next place on my list, the next trail to walk.

In some ways- in many ways- it would be so easy to walk a third Camino this summer, and indeed, I might. But there are a few other things I want to do as well, one thing in particular that has been ‘on my list’ for nearly as long as I can remember: drive across the United States.

It was something my best friend and I talked about in high school. “When we graduate, lets do a cross-country trip!” We were serious about it, but not serious enough, and in any case, things changed and the plan never happened. But I’ve wanted to do it ever since. Sometimes I worry that my vision of the trip is too different, that it can no longer be the young, carefree, wide-eyed adventurous sort of trip that I’d always envisioned it would be. And of course, it can’t be, because I’m not 18 anymore, I’m not in my mid-twenties anymore either.

But the thing is, I still haven’t been to Nebraska. I still haven’t seen the Grand Canyon or followed in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s footsteps. Those were the things I wanted to do all those years ago, and I still want to do them. But now? I want so much more, because I know so much more. I want to hike and to camp and to spend time in as many National Parks as possible. And I want to drive far and wide to reach as many family and friends as I possibly can. When I was 18, nearly everyone that I knew lived in my town. Now, I have friends and family spread across the country.

(Just so you know, this is going to be a topsy-turvy, disjointed kind of post.)

I still hesitate about doing this cross-country trip for one reason: my car. I have an old car with a lot of miles on it and every single time I get inside to drive somewhere (even just a mile down the road to buy some groceries), I feel slightly stressed. I’m so alert and aware of every shudder and jerk, every creak or whirr from the engine. I’m sure it’s because I’ve recently had to have the car towed, twice in less than a month, and now I almost expect that it won’t start, or that it might stall.

Soon, it will be time for a new car. And if I’m being honest with myself, it was probably time for a new car two years ago, but for me, this is nothing new: it feels like I’ve always driven an old, slightly unreliable car.

I love the idea of taking this car (if it makes it to the summer), on this epic cross-country trip, and basically driving it until it dies on me. But that’s probably the worst idea in the world, given that I want to actually enjoy a trip like this and not be constantly stressed over the fact that the car might leave me stranded in the middle of nowhere.

The answer is, of course, to buy a new car. I started thinking about this last night, why it feels so difficult for me to say, “Okay, that’s enough, it’s time to buy something new.” My thoughts started going deeper and deeper and finally I came up with this, a statement so simple and true that I’m amazed it’s never occurred to me before:

I love things to pieces.

I’m sure I’ve known this about myself- I DO know this about myself. And yet, last night, it all seemed so remarkably clear, in a way that it never has before.

I’ve always been like this. When I was a toddler, I had this teddy bear and I loved her so much. She was already with me in my very earliest memories, I see her glued to my side in photos that I can’t remember. I carried her with me and slept with her for much, much longer than kids normally do. Her fur became matted and mangled, her nose fell off, she began to resemble something more similar to E.T. than a teddy bear. But she was so much a part of me, that she became something very real to me.

It’s not just stuffed bears, it’s other stuff too, everything: a scuffed pair of Doc Martens that I wore every day in high school and are- at this very moment- sitting underneath my bed. It’s the jobs I’ve held, the friendships and relationships I’ve had, the cars I’ve driven. I’ve watched things break down and fall apart and crumble around me, and that is how I finally walk away, because I have to. Just after I graduated high school I drove out to the parking lot across from the vacant movie theater where I used to work and watched as a wrecking ball smashed into its brick walls. I drove to a bridge just outside of Philly and parked my car and watched from a distance as The Vet- the stadium where I’d spent years watching Phillies games- imploded. I’ve owned two cars in my life and drove the first one into the ground. My mechanic handed me five twenty dollar bills. “This is how much the parts are worth.”

Others leave, I stay. I stay and I stay and I stay, and it’s because I have a deep connection to the people and places and things that I’ve learned to love. I don’t want to leave them, I don’t want to leave any of them.

And often, this quality of mine- my respect for tradition and ritual, my appreciation for the things I love, my commitment- it’s a wonderful thing. I have decades-long friendships that I cherish, an old apartment that I find beautiful and comfortable and so uniquely me, a connection to the students I work with that I recognize is very rare and special.

But there’s a problem here, too. Lately, I’ve been wanting to change some things in my life. I’m still working on what and how, but I’ve opened myself up to new opportunities and now I want more. I want to explore more, I want to do more, I want to learn more and see more. But change often requires that we let go of something, that we give up something that we’ve learned to love, and that really scares me.

I started practicing this on my first Camino- loving and letting go, loving and letting go- but I didn’t quite get the hang of it. It’s probably one reason that I went back for a second Camino, I just wanted more practice. Walking through a place and to a place and then packing up and leaving. Over and over again. Meeting people and getting to know people and feeling connected to people and leaving. Over and over again.

I got good at it on the Camino- it took me 1,000 miles, but I finally got the hang of it. But now I’m at home, and don’t they say- don’t I say- that the real journey starts when the walking ends? In the last year I’ve recognized that I am going to need to change a few things in my life if I want to ever try and go after some of my dreams. Eventually, I’ll have to leave this apartment. Eventually, I’ll have to quit my job. Eventually, I’ll have to buy a new car.

And I wonder if I could start there. If, rather than letting the car die on me a dozen more times, I could say, “I’m walking away from this now. It’s time for something new.” It’s something so small, so obvious to most people, but it feels really big to me.

I mean, maybe I’ll go back to Europe this summer and do another Camino and spend some time in France and hold onto my little clunker of a car for another year. It’s a fine option. But this weekend I spent a lot of time thinking about a different option, one where I let go of something I love in order to go after something new. I think it could be good for me.

Thanks for bearing with me, through this long, rambly post. This is one reason I love to write, even if the things I say don’t really come together well or are all about teddy bears and old cars. It just helps to get stuff out on the page, to make sense of my self and my thoughts- it helps to organize life, in a way. 🙂

Me and my car

The things we can’t leave behind: the story of my walking stick

July 31, 2015

My walking stick was my constant companion on the Camino. I thought about this a lot as I moved through my walk: the cities and towns would always change, the scenery would change, the people would change- nothing on this Camino seemed to stay the same. Nothing except my stick.

It might seem a little ridiculous- and probably is- my attachment to a piece of a large branch that I found in the woods several kilometers past Deba on my fourth day of walking the Norte. But after I spent the first hour with that stick in my hand, it felt unnatural to walk without it. And it was my companion, it was this thing that helped me, day in and day out, the thing that was always by my side, the thing that I would never, ever, leave behind. (Some people might describe an actual person in this way- a real companion- but for a solo-walker like myself, I think a walking stick takes on a pretty significant role on a long distance journey).

I didn’t actually find the stick, it was Richard, back at the beginning of the Camino when he was part of my first (but brief) Camino family. Have I already written about this? I had told the others about wanting to find a walking stick, and had spent a good part of the morning’s walk looking off to the side of the trail as we passed through wooded areas, hoping to find the perfect fallen branch. And Richard found one, cut it to my exact specifications, shaved off the ends with his pocket knife and even put a ring around the top.

The stick became so perfect to me during my walk- the oils from where my hand grasped the stick caused the wood to become smooth and shiny. The stick was straight and strong, and more than once, people mistook it for something I bought in a shop, rather than something I found in the woods.

Others on the Camino named their sticks, but I never did. Or, rather, I just called it ‘Stick’ (clever, I know). A few times it got stuck in between large rocks and it would tug me backwards. I’d feel a quick shot of panic, that the end might snap off, that my stick could get hurt in some way. “Stick!” I would exclaim, before extracting it from the rocks and moving on.

But it remained perfect, all through my Camino, all the way until the end. It pulled me forward up that last hill in Muxia, when I was tired and exhausted and finished. That stick was part of my Camino.

At some point, I knew I would take it home with me. I’d had a walking stick last year, too, one that I bought in a shop in St Jean Pied de Port, one that look remarkably like a stick you might find in the woods. I loved it, and it was incredibly hard to leave it behind in Santiago at the end of my Camino. I’d considered trying to bring it home with me, but somehow it felt right that I leave it behind.

I’m not sure what was different this year (I suspect one reason is that I walked a more difficult Camino, and the walking stick aided me so much more); in any case, I was determined to bring it home. I strategized with others, I talked with a post office employee in Santiago, I got a list of companies that could ship things throughout the world. In the end, it seemed that the easiest way to get my stick back to the US was to simply check it as a piece of luggage on my flights.

So at the airport in Santiago, I walked over to a stand that wraps and secures luggage. I presented my stick to the man working there, and he laughed. He pulled large sheets of fluorescent green cellophane from a giant roll and carefully wrapped my stick in multiple layers. I’d payed extra for a checked bag, and dropped the stick off at the check-in counter. And when I arrived in Paris, there was my stick, sitting with a few other pieces of over-sized luggage, in the corner of the baggage claim area.

It was easy, and I was delighted that I’d found a simple way to bring my stick home. So I didn’t think twice about checking it on my flight home to the US- but this time, it wasn’t quite as easy. When I made it up to the check-in counter in Paris, the man looked at my stick and said, “You want to check that?” He seemed doubtful, and then gestured over to a blue cart that was far, far across the crowded room. “Put it on there,” he said.

The cart was empty and after confirming several times with other employees that this was the over-sized luggage cart for American Airlines, I laid my stick across the cart and I walked away. I had a heavy feeling, and wondered if I would see the stick again.

So when I arrived in Philly and stood with the other passengers of my flight at the luggage carousel, I was not surprised when I didn’t see my stick. Everyone else got their luggage until it was just me, watching an empty conveyor belt circle around endlessly. A kind employee was helping me- someone who seemed genuinely concerned about my lost ‘luggage’- and he spent a lot of time checking all the possible places where my stick could have gotten held up. Finally he looked at me with sympathy. “It must still be in Paris,” he said. “You can go downstairs and file a claim.”

Arriving back home after being away for 5 weeks should have been exciting or, at the very least, a bit comforting. But instead I went home feeling like I’d left something important behind. “It’s just a stick,” I told myself. It’s one of the lessons of the Camino- that our possessions don’t actually matter that much, that we need far less than we think, it’s the experiences that count- blah blah blah (I do think all of that is important, but when you lose something that’s important to you, even if it is just a piece of wood, it’s okay to feel sad and to feel that our possessions do, in fact, matter a bit).

Things have been a whirlwind since I’ve been home. I stopped at my apartment briefly but then headed right back out for a long road trip to South Carolina, to go to a good friend’s wedding (and I just need to note: the distance I spent 9 hours driving in one day equaled the distance I spent walking for one month). It was when I was in SC that I got a flurry of emails and phone calls about my walking stick. It had been found, made it on a flight to Philly, and was now being delivered to my apartment by a driver named John. He left me a message to confirm that he would be dropping off my ‘luggage’ (when he said luggage he laughed); I called him back and he asked if he was delivering a walking stick to me. “Yes, it is a walking stick!” I told him. He said that all the guys were trying to guess what it was.

An hour later I received a text from him. “I dropped it off by the mailboxes.”

So I sent a text to my landlord, asking if they could look for it and bring it inside, keeping it safe until I made it back home.

I knew I wouldn’t feel completely settled about it all until I was back to my apartment and had that stick in my hand. I finally came home last night, and when my landlord saw me, waved me over so I could get the stick.

He handed it to me- it was definitely my stick, still wrapped in the bright green cellophane- but when I held it I instantly knew something was wrong. The stick wasn’t straight. Back in my apartment I began tearing off the wrapping, worried that I would discover that it had been snapped in two. But when I finally uncovered the stick I realized it wasn’t broken at all. It was just warped. Really, really warped.

I have to laugh about it- all the care and worry about getting that stick home with me- and now that it’s here, it’s not the same, perfect stick that I walked my Camino with. It’s no longer straight at all, but bows out at the bottom half. It’s crooked, it’s changed. It’s my stick, but it’s different.

It’s propped against the wall now, in my living room. I like that I have it back, even though now it’s simply a souvenir, no longer a fully functioning walking stick. And I suppose it’s okay that it’s changed. Part of me wonders- was it meant to be left behind all along? Or, perhaps, maybe it served its purpose, and now it’s done. Finished, retired. “You weren’t meant to walk another Camino with me,” it’s saying. “Find another adventure, and then find another stick.”

Next Post: Crepes and Cathedrals

Returning to Paris, Returning to the Camino; (‘You Can’t Go Home Again’)

March 5, 2015

Have you ever gone back to a place that you loved and found that it had changed? Or that your experience of it was very different?

Two years ago I was planning my first return to France in over 10 years, and I was nervous about seeing Paris again. Paris had defined travel when I was in my early 20’s; it was the place I’d always wanted to go to, and the place I traveled to the most during my year abroad in college. I’d imagined that it was a beautiful, magical place, and my actual experience of it didn’t let me down: Paris did feel magical. Being there made me feel alive and so full of hope and possibility.

I was young, and I hadn’t traveled overseas before. I learned- in small doses- how to be brave in Paris, and it was something I didn’t even really think about because I was desperate to see as much of the city as I could. So I would set my alarm for 6am and wake up before the other students in my program. I’d wander through the streets with my camera in hand, then return to the hostel and join my friends for breakfast. I learned how to ride the metro, I learned how to find my way around cemeteries and museums, I learned how to drink coffee.

When I returned to Paris, on the eve of my 33rd birthday, the city felt different. The buildings still seemed to glow, Notre Dame was just as majestic as I’d always remembered, but something was off.

I still wandered through the streets, taking photos and drinking cafe cremes. Weaving through the tombstones of Pere Lachaise, I tracked down Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. I slept in the same hostel that I had when I was 20, I ate the same baguette breakfast. Climbing up the 400-odd stairs to the top of Notre Dame, I put my face up to the wire fence and looked out over the city.

This was still Paris: beautiful and enchanting and foreign.

The changes that I noticed? It wasn’t Paris that had changed, not really.

It was me.

Drinking my first cafe creme was probably the biggest tip-off. It’s difficult to explain how important cafe cremes were to my year in France, when I was a college student: I’d never really drank coffee regularly before, and I’d never made ‘sitting in a cafe and watching people and spending hours talking about life with my friends’ an everyday thing. As I moved through my twenties and looked back on my time in France, the cafe creme became symbolic. It was France, and it was travel, and it was me, at that time.

So when I returned to Paris and sat in the basement room of my hostel with my red breakfast tray spread out before me, a cup of creamy, hot coffee in my hands, I smiled before taking my first sip.

I took the first sip, and then I frowned. This was what I had been waiting for, all of these years? This was a cafe creme?

From 20 to 33, I’d changed. It wasn’t just about the coffee, although that was part of it. Back when I was 20, I didn’t know what a really good cup of coffee tasted like. And I suppose I didn’t know what the world tasted like, yet. I still haven’t traveled all that much, and there’s still so much more life I need to experience. But I’d grown in 13 years. I still have a somewhat childlike sense of wonder and innocence, but it’s very different than what I had at 20, when it defined so much of my life and how I saw the world.

Recognizing these changes, as I wandered through Paris, was a little unsettling. I walked through the city and wondered what I was looking for. I knew I wouldn’t be able to find the 20-year old girl who had been here that first time.

As the days passed I realized that these changes were okay. On my 33rd birthday I walked into a cafe that I’d remembered being in with my friends on that first trip to Paris. On that night, years ago, we’d crammed around a table on the terrace of the cafe, drinking hot chocolate and giggling about life.

On this night, I walked into the cafe and I asked for a table. I was seated outside, with a view of the Seine and the spires of Notre Dame. After ordering a glass of wine, the waiter complimented my French. I’d made several mistakes- fumbling over the word ‘boisson’ (which means ‘drink’)- and we laughed. I wasn’t self-conscious in the way that I used to be; my French was more rusty than ever, and yet, I was more confident about speaking than when I was 20.

I’m thinking about changes and how we experience the same place in different ways because of my upcoming Camino. I’m nervous about returning for a 2nd time, even though only a year separates my two pilgrimages, whereas over 10 years separated my visits to Paris. I haven’t changed all that much in the past year, and yet, I know that my second Camino will be very different from my first. Will my return to the Camino be like my return to Paris?

Will I be more confident? Will I relax a bit about my fears? Will I use the knowledge that I gained on my first trip and hit the ground running on my second? Will I be able to work on the lessons that I feel I was just beginning to learn as I ended my first pilgrimage?

Will I still love the walking? Will I still avoid blisters and still make some friends? Will I still love the cafe con leches??

I’d love to hear about your experiences of a place or an experience that you returned to- whether it was the Camino or something (somewhere) else. Were you disappointed? Did the return exceed your expectations? Will you continue to return again and again?

Paris at 20

Paris at 33

Coming Home

August 15, 2014

I just took a shower in my apartment, and my hair feels clean- truly clean- for the first time in a month and a half.

Right now I’m marveling a bit at the normalcy of this: sitting on my couch with my porch door open, a breeze blowing through my living room, the sound of the fountain trickling outside. I woke up this morning and didn’t know where I was: I looked around my room and everything was familiar but my brain couldn’t figure it out. After a minute it came together; I was home.

For the past several weeks I’ve craved a morning like I just had- sitting on my couch with a cup of coffee and nowhere to go, nothing to do. (well, the first thing I had to do this morning was to put on my shoes and take a walk to the nearest food store to get supplies to make coffee. My car is at my parents house so I have limited options… but at least I just finished a pilgrimage across Spain so walking to find coffee wasn’t a big problem). In any case, I’ve loved this morning. I got very used to all the traveling, the packing and unpacking of bags, a different bed every night, but having some routine and comfort back is welcome.

And yet. One of the first things I did after I sat down with my coffee was to start thinking about how to get back to Europe, or how to do another Camino. It’s all just thoughts at the moment, because for now I need to be back (and I need to make some money). But my traveling this summer- and certainly the Camino- has had a profound impact on me.

There has been so much on this trip that I’ve wanted to write about, and a lot in the last few weeks (Finisterre! The Côte d’Azur! Provence! Paris! Iceland again!), and I’ll get to some of it. I also want to write more about my experience on the Camino, and my thoughts now that I’m back. So there will be more to come.

But for now, right now, I just want to appreciate that I’m back home. When I passed through customs as I was flying out of Iceland, the man working behind the counter asked how long I’d been in Europe.

“How long?” I paused, mentally doing the calculations. “Uhh, 7 weeks.”

His eyebrows immediately shot up and I laughed, saying, “7 weeks, I know. I’m lucky.”

7 weeks was a long time to be away and traveling, and I was, indeed, very lucky to take this trip, and I was very lucky while on the trip.

I think about what’s changed in that time, because mostly things look the same. I suppose that on the outside, I’m just a bit different: my hair is lighter and my skin is a bit darker (not to mention the crazy tan lines on the backs on my legs; I have a picture when they were at their worst, but I don’t know if the public will ever get to see that). I stepped on the scale this morning and I’m four pounds heavier than when I left. It figures that I can spend 5 weeks walking across Spain and gain weight: I blame the bread, cheese, and wine. And the ice cream/gelato.

So there are tiny changes on the outside. On the inside? I’m still very much the same person. But there are some changes. The light and the magic of the Camino got to me, spread through me, and started to shine out, and I think it’s going to take me to some great places.

But first, I’m going to sit here, drink more coffee, and appreciate being home.

A Camino Lesson, A Life Lesson: Loving and Letting Go

The things we can’t leave behind: the story of my walking stick

Returning to Paris, Returning to the Camino; (‘You Can’t Go Home Again’)

Coming Home

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