Being Here, Now

John Brierley, the author of the guide book, has a section on what not to bring: camera, watch, cell phone. He wants you to be here now.

He says, don’t bring your camera because you cannot photograph an inner experience. Really? Any picture worth making is a picture of an inner experience. But any picture worth making  takes effort and time and I have only forty days on the Camino. At seventy-two I don’t need new memories. I need new experiences. So, I leave the camera home, but bring the watch and cell phone.

In St. Jean, packing in the pre-dawn dark, I lose my 5 year old $9 watch. Little harm done, except sunburn to my white skin where the watch had been. In fact, it seems right not to be wearing the hours and minutes on my body.

Now the cell phone is gone too, left behind in some bar in Najera. I’ve done my due diligence to recover it, so now I’m ready to let it go, too. I am here, now.  Or I would be, if not for the tablet I brought before leaving, without which I could not do this blog. Starting with the previous post, the pictures will not be mine.

Anybody in reasonable health can do the Camino. There is a little town every four or five miles along the way, and a bar, and you can just sit, and drink cortadas, and eat pintxos, and make friends all day long, if you like. Not a difficult thing. Last year somebody did it in a wheelchair.

Not everybody will want to do it in August, however.  It has been consistently in the upper 90s every afternoon since I arrived, and above.  Twice fellow walkers noted that the thermometer had reached 40 degrees. I did not do the arithmetic until later: 104 Fahrenheit. Fortunately I’m phototropic. And thermophilic.

Which is a good thing, because I’m just entering the Meseta, Spain’s breadbasket, a high plateau famed for its heat, lack of shade, and days of unchanging landscape. Tonight I am in Hontanas, about 470 kilometers from Santiago.

Traditionally the Camino is divided into three parts — physical, mental and spiritual. Having come 320 kilometers through Navarre and La Rioja, I have finished the physical part, and feel stronger and healthier than I have in years. With the Meseta begins the mental part. I wonder how can the Meseta change me? Is this trip an adventure, a distraction for me?  Or is it a rite of passage into my widowhood, my viduity? And what will that be?