Part the First, where John learns to take Episcopalians seriously.

I am going to out myself with this blog, and tell you something about my wife that I have not told her.

She had been talking about walking the Camino de Santiago for years. It’s a 800 or so kilometer long pilgrimage trail that starts in the Pyrenees mountains and ends near the Atlantic coast of Spain. And yeah, you read that right, you walk it. The whole way, carrying all your stuff with you. Which also means you are staying in a different place every night, and each place you stay is of student hostel quality . . .you hope.

Now, my wife has faced down church boards, Chicago blizzards, accusations of heresy from grad students, mansplaining of cosmic proportions and two of the most teen-agery teenagers that have ever slammed a bedroom door.

But walking eight hundred kilometers? Or so? Under the Spanish sun?

My wife hates stairs, will cross the street to avoid two minutes of Illinois sun, resents her body’s need to sweat and loves to sit in dark rooms for long periods of time reading books and then resting in her comfortable bed. The sum total of all that, is the exact opposite of everything the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail is about.

So, I admit, I didn’t think it would happen. When she brought it up for the first time to me, I didn’t actually believe she would follow through with it.  We talk about a lot of stuff, she and I, and we understand that both of us need to talk out loud about possibilities, to see if the ideas will survive the exposure to reality, as most ideas do not.  Hers did.  In fact the damn thing survived and flourished.  But even as she started making plans to clear her schedule, I assumed she would put it aside and go to St Brigid’s cathedral in Ireland, or Cuba, or even Kalamazoo…

But walking eight hundred kilometers?

So then she got the tickets, which sent me into a two day long personal soliliquization about myself, my world, my religion, my faith, my sex life and a particular phrase my wife said to me during an argument not too long ago. “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be in a relationship?”

My rational mind was genuinely concerned about her ability to make such an arduous journey due to certain health concerns she has had over the years, concerns that would be exacerbated by a daily hiking schedule.

My beer-and-a-bump mind was saying, “What the Smurfy smurf is she thinking!?? She hates the heat! Her feet get all weird when she walks too much! Trump’s an asshole (that’s always there in beer-and-a-bump-mind)! And it’s all Catholic and stuff, and she’s not even Catholic! She’s gonna be oppressed by some jerk, and I’ll have to punch out some old Spanish priest and then fight off a whole Convent full of killer Nuns who chase us into Portugal!”

But try explaining that to a spouse.

And there were two other things.

The first was….to my shock…..I didn’t want to go.

My concerns for my wife aside….I didn’t want to go on a pilgrimage. I didn’t want to go on a long hike.  I didn’t want to go to Spain.  I didn’t want to go anywhere.  I had been to a lot of anywhere’s already and I had seen and tasted and smelt the world enough to know the difference between exotic and racist, familiar and foreign, and ‘cultural difference’ and ‘asshole’.  And I now lived in Chicago, a place where you’re always a train ride away from places where you never hear a word of English.  I don’t need to leave home to feel foreign, I’m an American, dammit!  And American foreigners are better than foreign foreigners any day of the week!  

I don’t mean that. Of course foreign foreigners are more foreign, and genuinely more so than American foreigners.  I was in a state of shock, which is often the birthplace of the ridiculous and sublime.  And my shock was born of the completely unexpected opinion and the connected confusion I felt about not wanting to go on a six week 800k hike through Northern Spain following the traditional pilgrim’s path to the resting place of the bones of St. James, an Apostle of Jesus Christ at Santiago de Compestella, in Spain.  I loved to travel.  I loved to see new things. I’ve always been smugly proud of saying my favorite food is something I’ve never had before.  Bring it on new stuff!!!  Huzzah for the shiny and unseen!   

But, to my surprise, no longer. And there was no way in hell I could tell her that.

And, the last thing ( of course there’s three )….

A Buddhist atheist who is studying how not to give into exotic feelings and to be content in the NOW, is about to travel for two months on a Catholic pilgrimage trail through formerly Fascist Spain with a companion who’s Hiking style makes him insane.

The view from the Lakeshore Trail, our Practice Camino

I hate walking slowly for long periods of time. And I never knew that about myself until…when? Can you guess? Yup! Until my wife and I started training for the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage.   Which was a horrible thing to feel, because I love walking hand in hand with my wife. She’s the perfect height for my hand, and strolling down any street in the world with her is one of my favorite things to do in this world. But as we started walking the Lake Shore trail to train, we discovered than when one is a hiking with 20 pounds of stuff on your back, it slows you down a bit, and ain’t nobody holding anybody’s hand. And as for Stacy, it slowed her down a lot. As for me, oh my faithful reader, I was in the Boy Scouts, raised in a place where walking five miles a day under a South Texas sun is how you get to the swimming hole, I use our elliptical regularly and I actually like to sweat. I like to walk. I choose the stairs over elevator every time. I like to hike, and I like to hike fast. Not slow. I want to go! Huzzah! My wife was not going to be a Huzzah! kind of hiker. She was slow, and for me, very slow. Now, I do have to tell you that as we trained she did get stronger, and she got wiser, she also got swollen, but then she got solutions for the swollen and kept on training. Watching her fight through the pain and increased ankle mass should have made me proud of her. But I wasn’t. I was terrified. Because she was going to go through with this. We were going to go through this. I was going to go through with this.

It was everything I didn’t want to do.

Which means, it was exactly what I needed to do.

By going to foreign places aware of how they can intoxicate, I will practice not being intoxicated. By sharing space with cultures and religion I have found disagreeable, I will practice Mindfulness and seek to understand that which I once thought I should hate. By doing something I do well with another who doesn’t, I will learn how strength is nothing when not shared.

Doesn’t that sound so enlightened and grown up and Buddha and smart and wise and shit? That’s because I just wrote it, right now. There’s a fine line between enlightened and multiple rewrites. My wife would call the above a reframing, which is a word I mistrust, as I have seen Reframing used as a framework for falsehood. And it’s important to know that Buddhism isn’t a reframing, even in the positive sense of seeing something from a different perspective. It’s more of a re-sculpting, where we chip way at all delusions and all perspectives, not refusing to see other perspectives, but ridding ourselves of the concept of Other.

But I wasn’t quite there back in Sept of 2023, when we started the Camino. But we had new shoes, new backpacks, bags of lambs wool for some reason, hiking poles and two tickets to Madrid, Spain. If nothing else, we would get to have some of that wonderful Spanish cuisine!

Buddha and Brigid were about to go on a walk.

MORE TO COME AS BRIGID AND BUDDHA WALK THE CAMINO-“NO HAY CAMINO…” PT 2!! THE SPANIARDS HAVE NO SALT!!!