David Whyte’s Poem : Santiago
Click on link:
https://vimeo.com/251995359
How to Be a Pilgrim
Air travel is like
ancient pilgrims walking on their
knees, flight delays and narrow seats
offer their own kind of penance.
You jettison excess baggage,
leaving behind the heavy makeup case,
knowing the rain will
wash you free of artifice.
Books you wanted to carry left too,
no more outside words needed,
then go old beliefs which keep
you taut and twisted inside.
Blistered feet stumble over rocky
fields covered with wildflowers and you
realize this is your life,
full of sharp stones and color.
Red-breasted robins call forth
the song already inside,
a hundred griefs break open under
dark clouds and downpour.
Rise and fall of elation and exhaustion,
the tides a calendar of unfolding,
a bright star rises and you remember
a loved one waiting miles away.
A new hunger is kindled by the sight of
cows nursing calves in a field,
spying a spotted pony, you forget
the weight and seriousness of things.
Salmon swim across the Atlantic,
up the River Corrib’s rapids to the
wide lake, and you wonder if you have
also been called here for death and birth.
This is why we journey:
to retrieve our lost intimacy with the world,
every creature a herald of poems
that sleep in streams and stones.
“Missing you” scrawled on a postcard sent home,
but you don’t follow with
“wish you were here.”
This is a voyage best made alone.
Poem by:
—Christine Valters Paintner
Photograph by:
–Andrea on the Camino.
Wizened Feet.
The Irish writer Aidan Matthews asks that he might keep close to his heart “the image of my children’s feet when they were born. The soles of them were wizened with lines as if they had walked a great distance to come here.” … The writer(s) struggle to express the feeling of wonder and awe which marks birth as a liminal experience for observer as well as subject. Aidan Matthews with that magical image of the “wizened feet” captures the idea of a pilgrimage which started a long way back. The child has something to teach us, a wisdom we have lost. It is interesting too that it is never enough to simply look at the child, we want to touch her and the touch brings us back to something deep and powerful, vulnerable and hidden in ourselves: “People were bringing even infants to Him that He might touch them.”
Page 41.
“Because of Her Testimony. The Word in Female Experience.”
Anne Thurston. 1995.
Maps.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of map: the grid and the story. The grid map places an abstract geometric meshwork upon a space, within which any item or individual can be coordinated… Then power of grid maps is that they make it possible for any individual or object to be located within an abstract totality of space. But their virtue is also their danger: that they reduce the world to only data, that they record space independent of being. Story maps, by contract, represent a place as it is perceived by an individual or by a culture. They are records of specific journeys, rather than describing place within which innumerable journeys might take place. They are organised around the passage of the traveler, and their perimeters are the perimeters of the sight or experience of the traveler. Event and place are not fully distinguished, for they are often of the same substance.
– Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places.
St Declan’s Way Ireland.
Map:
http://www.galteewalkingclub.ie/stdeclansway/index.html
Book:
Castles, Follies and Four-Leaf Clovers
Rosaland Burton
http://www.rosamundburton.com/index.html
http://www.rosamundburton.com/good_reading_july_2011.pdf
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.
– Mary Oliver
The Nakasendo Way.
Book:
“Walking the Kiso Road.A Modern – Day Exploration of Old Japan.”
William Scott Wilson.
