Category — Taking on challenges

My previous body of poetry consists of the following, penned when I was eight:

Once there was a pickle
Who rode on a bicycle
With tired feet he headed
To the pickle jar which he dreaded

No Mary Oliver in the making, needless to say.

And so it is with trepidation that I offer the poem below, which did not start as a poem, which was not intended as such. But when I wrote the prose sentences, which were meant to set out and examine the contrasts and contradictions I feel (and I am betting most of us do), it felt as if the phrases and clauses needed separation, so I began placing them on different lines. And this happened. Which is a poem? Oh gee, be kind, my friends.

Suppose you crave both adventure and domesticity,
the call of the dirt path
and the gravitational pull of the garden,
the magic of awakening in a tent
and the delight of luxuriating between soft linen?

Suppose you spark to spontaneity
but love making lists?
Suppose you love to go-go-go
but are drawn to stop and wonder?

Suppose you want to lose yourself
but also find yourself,
go out into the world without a backstory
but excavate your own past?

Suppose you want to be visible and invisible?

Suppose you want to be loved but left alone?

If I work hard enough I can control any situation.

I am worthy as long as I am successful

When is the other shoe gonna drop?

No one understands me.

Ah yes, those voices inside our heads. Okay, my head. You too? Maybe not these voices but others? That voice that tells you have to be perfect. That voice that tells you to avoid conflict and therefore mask your feelings. That voice that tells you receiving help means being helpless.

Do not worry, my friends., I have not morphed into a spouter of self-help gobbledegook. I am not about to (gasp) write a book about any of this. The shelves are groaning with books like this.

But I am interested in this take on those sabotaging voices inside our heads by the “positive intelligence” training guru and, yes, best-selling author, Shirzad Chamine, a Stanford lecturer and Fortune 500 corporate coach. By the way, you might consider not buying his book. He does not need your money.

Speaking Fee:
Live Event Fee: $30,000 – $50,000
Virtual Event Fee: $10,000 – $20,000

But you can take his “Saboteur Assessment” test  for free—and you might learn something about yourself. Or, like me, nod your head in agreement about what you already know about yourself. Because those (potentially) sabotaging voices are so very familiar.

Can I (we) just stop listening? I doubt it. (Oh no, is that one of my saboteurs talking to me?) I do think that by naming these voices—Charmine identifies 10—we can at least recognize what they are doing, or the dark and unproductive places they “illuminate” for us. And then…Reason with them? Shout them down? Stuff a sock in their mouth?

Here are the nasty little beings making noise inside your (my) head. Tell them to shut the fuck up. (That’s probably not the advice what Shirzad Charmine charges $50,000 for.) Mine is free!

1. Judge
2. Controller
3. Hyper-achiever
4. Restless
5. Stickler
6. Pleaser
7. Hyper-vigilant
8. Avoider
9. Victim
10. Hyper-rational

“It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.”
— Mary Oliver, Invitation

We all go someplace to work things out: a favorite chair next to a window, the arms of a loved one, the kitchen, the garden, the ocean, some exotic somewhere with frangipani-scented air.

Me? I go to the woods. Or the mountains. Near or far. I go for hard hikes that make me sweat. I pound whatever needs to be pounded into the earth, Mother Earth, Pachamama. You know, the Stuff of Life: grief, hurt, anger, fear. She takes it and remakes it. And almost always this works. I return lighter, sometimes even (if only temporarily) enlightened. I return with this Mary Oliver line in my head.

And also, of course, and predictably, Wendell Berry: “For a time/ I rest in the grace of the world and I am free.”

Today I am tired from a hard day of mountain hiking in the snow at 6,000 feet. It’s the good kind of tired. I am scoured clean of dark thoughts. Of all thoughts. Thus I offer these images I made (as photographers are supposed to say, not “pictures I took”) of places–near and far– that have both challenged me and offered me solace, places where I have felt free and joyful.

It was the day before The Day, “the day” being my arrival in Santiago de Compostela. I had been on the road—the dirt path mostly, the rocky trail sometimes, the paved road occasionally—since September 23. It was now October 25.

I could barely remember not being on the Camino, not waking before dawn and walking, my back to the sunrise, into the dark western horizon. Tomorrow it would come to an end. I was relieved. I wanted to sleep in a big bed in a room all by myself. I wanted to wear a pair of pants I had not worn every day for more than a month. I wanted to eat an enormous salad.

But I was also saddened. Tomorrow this tough but sublimely uncomplicated life, this single-focused, time-out-of-time, would end.

I had learned, I had delighted in, the fact that the monotony of the Camino was interrupted by surprises every single day. Some surprises were small, like coming upon the extravagantly feathered pheasants in the courtyard of little restaurant in Hospital de Orbigo. Some were big surprises, like today, the day before The Day.

Kiki and I had decided to walk all the way to Lavacolla, a very long day, because that would mean a short walk into Santiago the next morning. Morning was magic time. I wanted that for the arrival. Lavacolla, said Kiki (who knew everything—both her strength and her weakness), was where pilgrims of old stopped to cleanse themselves before entering the holiness of Santiago. Lavacolla could be translated as washing the colon. Or rectum. Or so she said.

We walked. Oh lordy, did we walk. The weather was unforgiving. Sheeting rain. Poncho–drenching rain. We arrived at the village in the late afternoon, soaked and starving, only to discover that the accommodation we had so carefully booked was not, in fact, located in the village of Lavacolla. We would need to walk another—really, I no longer remember—4, 5 kilometers. Uphill. Did I mention the rain?

When we finally crested the last hill and neared where the place supposedly was, it was dark. We saw nothing. No lights. No streets. No settlement. We were drenched. Am I belaboring the point? Perhaps. We finally happened upon the place, hidden down a dark path, unpromising, and presented our pitiful selves to the innkeeper.

The room was warm. The shower was hot. Miraculously, the hostel had a lovely restaurant, which Kiki later quite correctly called “needlessly amazing.” We splurged, ordering a huge pan of paella to share. And we bravely asked if the kitchen could make us pimientos de padrón for a starter (a dish both of us loved with a passion not normally associated with food). Yes, said our needlessly handsome waiter. We washed it all down with two glasses of very good vino tinto.

It was by far the best meal of the entire journey.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along..

I awoke on this chilly first day of February thinking of the Marge Piercy poem “To Be of Use” and my 36 time-out-of-time days on the Camino this past fall. I was thinking about the people I met along The Way and how they were all seekers, highly privileged seekers. I don’t mean that as an insult. It is a fact: They—and I—had the privilege of moving out of our separate worlds, our separate lives, to explore and ponder what we were doing and where we would go from here. We were in a position to choose this journey, this challenge, unlike so many whose daily life is challenge enough.

I was thinking about my fellow pilgrims, the ones I walked with for minutes or hours or days: the Israeli men fresh from their military service, the Korean girls with their TikTok accounts, the burned-out political fundraiser from Massachusetts, the nurse from Colorado, the new widow from the Netherlands, the tough/tender bear of a man from Sweden, the Irish guy with his bunions, the beautiful young French woman with the sad eyes. They were walking to take a deep dive into who they were. They were walking to understand their lives, to make a change, to find meaning.

And then, because today is my regular shift at Food for Lane County’s Dining Room, where I help to serve hearty sit-down meals to those in need, I was thinking about my fellow volunteers: the nurse, the former middle school teacher, the retired magazine editor, the community college guidance counselor, the store owner, the yoga instructor. They are not out walking the Camino searching for connection and meaning. They have found it. At the Dining Room, helping to nourish and support the community they love, they are living a life (or at least a few hours) of purpose and meaning.

I admire the spirit and heart of those I met along the Camino who search for meaning. But I celebrate and deeply respect those who have found it, who submerge/in the task, who go into the fields to harvest/and work in a row and pass the bags along.

Day 3 of the Camino was supposed to be easy. I had walked 25 kilometers over the Pyrenees on my first day, starting at dawn, fueled by anxiety and wonder. On the second day, I walked 27.4—6 kilometers longer than the recommended stop—because I wanted to avoid replicating the prescribed “sections” in Camino guidebook everyone was using. I walked past Zubiri into Larrasoña, to the albergue where, that night, Tom appeared in my dream. And now day 3.

Piece of cake, I thought. Only 16.5 kilometers to Pamplona. And I would be meeting up with a new friend there, the “Kiki” you have read about in past essays. We had (kis)met in the afternoon of day 1, found each other unexpectedly on the path in the morning of day 2 (one of those “camino magic” moments), then separated as I walked on, but not before making a plan to meet up in Pamplona.

A short day. A stress-free day. I knew where I was going and where I was staying. A friendly face would be waiting.

Alas.

That was the day my oh-so-carefully enlightened (speaking of weight not spirituality) backpack began to dig into my unusually bony clavicle, the start of a painful bone bruise. That was the day I discovered my “international plan” from Verizon did not work in Spain (thus, map-less). That was the day I realized, upon entering Pamplona, that it was a feast day, that the Spaniards took their feast days mighty seriously, that the winding streets would be impassable, that I would spend three hours ass-to-elbow, backpack feeling like I was carrying rocks, lost and wandering, interrupting various raucous revelers to ask in broken Spanish if they knew the way to this little hotel, the name of which I had misremembered. That was the day I thought: Maybe I’m not as invincible as I thought I was. (Happily, that thought passed, as it is impossible to continue this journey without the shield of invulnerability)

When I finally found the hotel—okay I didn’t really find it…an extraordinarily kindly, gnarled, cane-wielding old lady walked me there—I discovered that the reservation I thought I had made I had not made. The place was full up. But the woman behind the desk took pity on me–I did, in fact, present as pitiful—and found me a windowless room the size of a prison cell, with a twin bed wedged against the wall. But the bed had two pillows. Two! And sheets. Real sheets made of fabric not paper. And a telephone-booth-sized private bathroom. With towels. It felt like a palace.

I dropped my backpack, unlaced my walking shoes, flopped on the bed, and vowed never to take the luxury and comfort of my life for granted ever again, a vow I kept for maybe 4 days after I returned to the luxury and comfort of my life.

Later I climbed the stairs to Kiki’s room where we got drunk on cheap wine sloshed into plastic cups.

(Out and about, mixing it up with Papa, post-wine)

“I feel comfortable in the world in a way I have never felt before. Never in my younger life. Never in the life I just recently left to be here. I am in a foreign country, among strangers, where I know too little of the language, finding (and sometimes not finding) my way, often clueless. Yet there is this peace.”

I wrote this in a blue spiral notebook I bought on day six of the Camino in a shop in Estella that I happened upon while lost on winding streets trying to find my way to my albergue. I was lost a lot. That late afternoon, I was really lost. I happened upon the shop by pure accident and enjoyed a moment of feeling like I knew what I was doing. I needed a notebook. And I actually remembered the word for notebook in Spanish. So I asked the man behind the wooden counter for a cuaderno. I also asked him donde esta mi albergue…and he laughed and pointed across the street.

A week later I was sitting in a little café in Burgos taking a rest day and transcribing the voice memos I had made while walking. This, the one about feeling comfortable and at peace, was one of them. I listened to my own slightly breathless voice with the crunchy sounds of my footfalls in the background. And I wrote in the blue notebook.

I remember everything about this café, how I found a little corner table upstairs and had the space to myself, how I teared up when I  heard Ray Charles singing “Georgia on my Mind” over the sound system, how I felt bone-tired and overflowing with energy at the same time, and oh, the creaminess of the café con leche. I had to order another. But as I transcribed, I didn’t remember what prompted me to record this note to myself. Was it a particular moment? A conversation I had with a fellow pilgrim? The mountain views that felt like home but weren’t?

It is three months to the day I wrote this in the blue cuaderno. And only now do I think I know what I meant back then:

When you leave everything behind, you encounter the essential you. Boy does that sounds cheesy. Or bumperstickery. But bear with me, friends. I mean you have the opportunity to encounter, to be, that person who is not attached to things or people, who, for the moment, has no home. You are without portfolio. No one knows your backstory. You are not who you were. You are who you are. Who you forgot you were. And truly, there is peace in that.

Kiki and I had decided to go for it. It was day 26 on the Camino. We would walk almost 30 kilometers from Villafranca to the tiny village of O Cebreiro, the last 12K of which would be a climb of 600 meters. That is an almost 2000 feet ascent. At the top, up at about 4500 feet, the views were supposed to be spectacular. Many pilgrims split this section in half. Not us.

Before I continue this story, you should know a few things: First, apparently when the ancient path that is the Camino Francés was created, no one had ever heard of switchbacks. When you go up, you go straight up. More harrowing, however, are the descents, especially down very narrow, rocky trails that are more like slot canyons than paths. Both would be part of that day’s hike.

The second thing you should know is that there were five kinds of rain that day: spitting rain, heavy rain, downpours, horizontal rain, and wind-gusted torrents.

And thirdly, to put these two together, there would be five kinds of mountain ascents and descents that day: muddy with slippery leaves, muddy with rocks, muddy and rocky with cow pies, and ludicrous.

We hiked, tromped, trudged, slogged—and peregrinated (we were, after all, peregrinas) for 10 hours. Yes, 10 hours. What did we talk about? The Wife of Bath, the glories of cheap Spanish wine, how we both knew and used the word “peckish,” Joan Didion, Roz Chast, snappy comebacks we could have made to that bitch M but didn’t think of in time, lame jokes about our emergency stashes of almonds which we persisted in referring to as “nut sacks.” Also, much silence. And more than a lot of cursing.

By then Kiki and I were soul (I am so tempted to be cheesy here and write “sole” as in, you know, shoes) sisters. We had crossed paths during the first third of the journey, coming in and out of each other’s hiking lives until it was obvious to both of us that we belonged together.

Allow me to fast-forward as you do NOT want to slog along. When we finally got to the little village at the top. Kiki turned on Google maps to locate our lodging for the night. Google maps confidently informed us that the lodging did not in fact exist in this town but was, instead, located 4k away (that’s another 2.5 miles) in a town we never heard of. Various bad words were uttered. And then, on we hiked, at first hard by a busy highway, then up through a sketchy, unmarked forest path. Did I mention the rain?

We got to the aforementioned town. The colorful town map directed us to the hostel. Which was not there. Walked back to the map. Yes, on the map. No, not actually in the town. Maybe you want to know what we did then? But I do so like a cliff-hanger.

Besides, if you know my writing, you know that I employ the small story to illuminate the larger issue. Here’s the larger issue: It is about choosing challenges. How life throws shit at you, trials and tribulations, illnesses and deaths, unexpected, unwanted, unmooring. This day–the Camino itself–was about my power to choose the challenge. About the privilege of being able to choose what is hard and uncomfortable, risky, chancy. This is how you strengthen the resilience muscle before you need it. It is practice for the challenges that come unbidden.

Ultreia.

Almost every morning I walked in the dark, my head lamp illuminating the way ahead, but just barely. In Spain, even as early as late September when I started the 500-mile Camino Francés, dawn came later than I was used to. By the third week of October, as I was nearing the end, the sky didn’t lighten until close to 9 am.* And I was walking west, facing the darkest edge of the sky.

I am unaccustomed to walking without fear in the dark. What woman walks without fear in the dark? Some inky mornings I would walk for an uncomfortable distance without seeing the familiar waymarker, that bright yellow arrow announcing I was headed the right way. Some mornings, walking out of small villages into the black pre-dawn, I would see up ahead a dim light, the head lamp of a pilgrim in front of me. That sense of being alone but not alone was one of the core experiences of this journey. To be both solitary and connected, self-sufficient yet dependent. It’s hard to recapture that now, yet it was my everyday life then.

Occasionally, especially navigating through city streets I would get lost. Getting out of Burgos, I was spectacularly lost. I was without cell service, without maps, both a terrifying and a liberating experience. When I finally did come upon an embedded shell-marker in the pavement, my relief was so overpowering I believe I may have cried.

Sometimes I was so intent on looking ahead into the darkness, of navigating the uncertainty, of needing reassurance that I was on the right path, I forgot that the dawn was happening behind me. And then I turned, and there it was: a soft gray flannel rim to the sky, or lemon yellow streaks, or once the pale blue and pink of a baby’s room. And boom. If that is not a life lesson, my friends, I don’t know what the hell is.

It took some time to learn to embrace these mornings. But after a while, the pre-dawn hours were the most glorious, empowering moments of the long day.

I write about this today, Winter Solstice, the latest dawn, the longest night, reminding myself, reminding us all, about the coming of the light.

*Spain’s clocks have been set to Central European time since World War II, which means the sun rises considerably later compared to countries in its region.

“Because I still matter,” one older woman said.
“Because I need to figure out what matters,” said a young man.
“Because I need time to think.”
“Because I think too much.”

There were maybe 30 of us pilgrims sitting on wooden chairs, crowded together in the little interior courtyard of the Iglesia de Santa Maria in Carrión. It was the late afternoon of my sixteenth day walking the Camino Francés. One of the four Augustinian nuns who would be leading us in song had asked us to say why we were on this journey.

“I need to do something to separate the life I’ve been living from the life that is now in front of me,” is what I said. “It needed to be something big.” There are so many moments on the Camino that grab hold of you, that surprise you, that sandblast you. This was one of those moments: Saying those words aloud, admitting the enormity of this transition, the blank canvas of the future. Being in the presence—and oh man, was it a presence– of these nuns, one of whom was so beatific that it was easy to imagine she had been touched by God. Even if you didn’t believe there was a God. Sitting in the fading sun with people from around the world, people you didn’t know but in that moment you knew intimately. Turning my head to see Kiki, our white hot friendship still in its early days, crying as we sang “Amazing Grace.”

And then the final song, the refrain of which went like this:

Todo cambió todo. Everything changes everything.

The song was lovely. But as I sang the words, I thought yeah, sure, I know this. Change is the only constant. The times they are a’ changin’. To exist is to change. Yep, got it.

But then I walked some more, a lot more, and a lot more after that. And I got home and slept in my own bed and made my solo dinners and stood here in front of this computer and did what I do. Then one afternoon I ventured out for coffee. Todo cambió todo.

“When you come out of the storm,
you won’t be the same person who walked in.
That’s what this storm’s all about.” ― Haruki Murakami