El Burgo Ranero to Mansilla de las Mulas
When I arrived at the hostel, I once again ran into many familiar faces, people who were now becoming my Camino friends. There was Linda, who had started her Camino in Le Puy, France, and had been walking for three months now. There was Petra from Holland, and Hans and his friend Peter from Germany, and Clint and his new Camino partner Dean, a 40-year-old pilgrim from England whom he had met a few days earlier. The one I most appreciated seeing, however, was my gentle Canadian friend Colum, from Vancouver. Alan, his traveling mate for a time, had gone ahead and so Colum was now on his own, and nearing the end of his Camino journey. He would finish when he arrived in León in two days.
We sat at the bar in our hostel and had a few beers and talked about his life. He told me he had run away from home in Ireland when he was 16 and hadn’t been back or looked back since. He said he left because his mother was such a gloomy, negative woman that he felt she was killing his spirit. He came to America and became a citizen, but then got drafted, so he married a Canadian woman and moved to Canada to avoid Vietnam. He had two daughters and three grandchildren, one of whom he loved dearly. He said he had no connection to the other two and thought the “lights of their spirits” were out, and he couldn’t relate to their “dim” world.
I felt so enchanted by his company. I talked to him a little about Patrick and he said to beware of the Irish. “There are certain Irish people who dwell in misery and can’t see or feel the wonder of the world. Dreary folks, they are. Good to get away from them.”
I told him Patrick’s birthday was coming up in a week and I was wondering if I should contact him to wish him a happy birthday.
“No,” he said, without missing a beat. “He doesn’t sound like he would be able to receive the gift of your blessing, so don’t bother. Those Irish like to suffer and hold grudges and be wounded forever. Leave it. Move on.”
I appreciated his perspective even if I didn’t necessarily agree with it or feel it was the right advice for me. There was, however, truth to the wisdom of letting go of those who didn’t want to open their hearts and receive your love. I certainly know you can’t make people do this. I tried and failed. He was right about not wasting time on vain efforts, as well. Colum was a special soul. He had the poetic spirit of the Irish in him, and that I loved. He said he read a poem and wrote a poem every day. I asked him if he would share one of those poems with me, and he laughed and shook his head.
What I appreciated most about Colum was his clear and unapologetic spirit. He said what he felt and didn’t beat around the bush. He didn’t qualify his feelings or tone them down. He just put himself out there, as if to say, “Take it or leave it.” He truly didn’t care what anyone thought about him.
I asked him if he had always been this way. He thought for a minute and then said, “I learned early on that I might as well be dead rather than live for the approval of someone else. So yes, I have always been like this. Why not? No one else takes care of me, so why should I care what anyone thinks? I’m a good man. I know myself and I like myself. I love life, and if I ask for approval, I give a bit of my life away. And I don’t want to give any of it away, ever. My life belongs to me.”
I asked Colum how old he was. He said, “I’m 73 and going strong.” That was for sure. I admired his calm sense of self. I wanted to feel that as well.
“You know, Colum, I’d like to be more like you.” He laughed and said, “Good luck with that. Now I’m off to take a nap.” That sounded like a good idea to me as well, as dinner wasn’t served until eight and it was only three, so I followed right behind him.
The hostel was simple, but my room was surprisingly large and had a tiny bathtub, so I was able to open up Cheater and wash some clothes, which I sorely needed to do. Then I took a long tub bath and had a nap myself.
Later I went back down for dinner but wasn’t feeling very hungry. My fever had broken, but I still felt lousy and had an extremely sore throat. I saw Colum sitting and drinking a beer with some other pilgrims, but I wasn’t feeling social, so I kept to myself, eating a bowl of soup then retiring for the night.
The next morning I looked around for Colum, but he was already gone. I would miss him. I decided to once again take my time leaving town and sat down to breakfast. It was fantastic. I had an egg and potato omelet and two large glasses of fresh orange juice, several fresh-baked croissants, and a large café con leche. I felt as though I were in a five-star hotel, even though it was really the simplest little lodge. It’s just that all was made and served with such love that it left me feeling so pampered. I left with my pilgrim’s stamp and a thoroughly refreshed sense of myself.
Holy Mother God,
Thank you for the good company of Colum. And the delicious breakfast I was served this morning.
I am grateful.
Amen.
The walk today was short enough, only 19 kilometers, and the entire length of the path was relatively flat again. As I started out, I was drawn into a peaceful reverie, free of thoughts, free of revelations, and fully centered in the present. The birds were singing so loudly that I felt, at times, as though I were being personally serenaded. I didn’t know birds could sing that loud.
I walked slowly because the electric shocks along the sides of my feet made it difficult to walk at all. I wondered why I’d had so much trouble with my feet since the beginning of the Camino, but no sooner did I start to question this than I knew it was a reflection of how little support I had felt under my feet for some time, and how little importance I had placed on having the kind of support I needed in my life. I trained myself to ignore what I needed and now it was catching up to me.
Nearly crawling along the Camino at this point, I realized how my feet were demanding I notice this lifelong self-sabotaging pattern and stop it once and for all. “I get it,” I said out loud to the Camino. “I hear you. I don’t want to be electrocuted with the message!” I was now getting irritable.
The longer I walked, the more evident it became that recognizing my need for support and knowing in what way I needed support would make a huge difference in bettering any future relationships. If I was not in touch with my needs, then how could anyone else meet them? No wonder I got so frustrated with Patrick. I was such an over-giving martyr. Yuck!
Up until now, my needs only became evident to anyone, including me, when I exploded after depleting myself completely. The more the sun beat relentlessly into the back of my head, the more clearly I could see how quickly I took on the role of superhero with others—giving, doing, rescuing, saving, solving, creating whatever they needed—and how I genuinely thought that I had to do that from the time I was a child growing up in my crazy, overcrowded home. I also saw how easily I became out of touch with myself, and especially my body. I overworked, over-traveled, over-consulted with others, and took on so many responsibilities for so many people without even stopping for a moment to consider whether I should be doing that, wanted to do that, or had the energy to do that. I just did it.
And to be honest, I liked how much I could accomplish at once. I was impressed with my superhero powers. But it always happened that just when I thought I was flying high, some very small thing would send me hurtling down to the ground.
That happened just before I left for the Camino. I was working way too many hours a day, as well as teaching every weekend and traveling from one end of the country to the other. While it seemed from the outside as though I were effortlessly flowing along with all of this, on the inside I was slowly being drained—and didn’t even know to what extent that was happening.
It became abundantly clear just how on empty I was when I got off a flight in Chicago and started to drive home from the airport one day. Stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the highway, I noticed that my car was nearly out of gas and there was no exit or gas station in sight. Rather than dealing with this stressful moment like a grown-up, I got really upset and started yelling at my car and the traffic and myself, reducing myself to tears because I was so depleted. By the time I coasted into the station on gas fumes, I was an emotional wreck. My only saving grace was that I was alone so no one witnessed me in such a sorry state.
I came back to the moment. The sun was intense and, save for the rare tree, there was no relief from it at all. I also found no relief from the memories of other occasions when I had run myself into the ground, or become so depleted from trying so hard and doing so much for others. This was an unrelenting pattern in me, and that realization made me all the more upset.
I wanted to enjoy the singing birds and go back to my peaceful reverie. Where did that go? When and why did I turn down this tunnel of emotional hell?
I was surprised at what was churning inside me, because some of the feelings and experiences rolling around in my body were so old I couldn’t believe it. I remembered feeling so drained and acting so self-denying clear back to when I was only five or six years old. “Really, Sonia?” I asked myself. “You need to dredge this shit up?”
I had thought I was done with the past. I had thought I was done with being angry and upset and yet here I was, all over again, feeling enraged. I was enraged with myself for becoming a martyr. I was enraged with every person in my life who allowed me to act like a martyr instead of insisting that I relax, by assuring me that I was not responsible for them. I was enraged that I felt the only person I could trust to be responsible for anything was me. And that upset me even more because that was such a martyr attitude and so clearly not true. Most of all, I was really enraged that I was so completely depleted right now, that my feet hurt so fucking much, and that in spite of all my efforts and all the damn money I had spent, I felt no relief from any of this at all! Finally, I was so overwhelmed that I just stopped and screamed out loud, at the top of my lungs, “AAWWWWWRRRGGGG!”
Fortunately, there was no one around to hear me, but I wouldn’t have cared if there were. Then, with the very next breath, a bone-deep inner calm swept through my entire body, as though these long-held trapped emotions had finally been jarred free. The next sound that escaped from me was a quiet, “Ahhhhh.”
My mind became silent after that, acutely aware of the newly freed-up space in my body, in my bones, in my lungs, in my cells now that I had let all that old, dead energy out. I now felt I had more room to breathe, more room inside me to be me.