Day 30: Paradise to Tineo, via my twenties, Julio Cortazar’s back catalogue and the doctor’s office
- Frida Stavenow
- Oct 8, 2022
- 4 min read
Day 30! My Camino is all grown up.
So yesterday’s notations were:
Space – the holding of it, the taking up of it
Art is everything
Wear leg jewellery!
We had a very nice time. The sun was out – “also, riding the wind and friend of the cats” – sorry, can’t not quote Julio Cortazar when I start a phrase like that – anyway I was saying the sun was out but the clouds also, a soupy haze that kept us shielded where we sat on our literal mountaintop looking out at lush green hills and roaring half-built motorways, but mostly not looking out at all, but in, or for that matter down, into the endless worlds in the grass where blue bugs and snails and spiders fought for their lives.
And this is the kind of sentences we write when we let poetry back into our life.
I’m cool with that.
Grass can be so soft. And yet so cutting. Ants eat spiders, apparently.
And there was no preexisting condition of purity, like Kierkegaard said, nor is there always a thick juicy trauma at the heart of every neurosis that, once unearthed, will cause absolution to echo through the generations.
Rather, sometimes, there is an obsession, a preoccupation, a longing for this imaginary state of purity that prevents us from appreciating the state we’re in.
Like that Instagram quote. Learn to let go of the life you expected and love the one you were given. Something like that. It’s Ram Dass saying be here now, it’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, it’s the end of an era as Arthur Miller defined it “when its basic illusions have been exhausted.”
Can this be that, for me?
Here’s a photo of the Kierkegaard quote well in line with the aesthetic of my twenties, which was militantly anti-rational, anti-SEO, anti-structural, anti-sense:
Which, now that I look at it from the other side of all that ayahuasca, feels very Divine Feminine of me. I was so obsessed with Julio Cortazar, with his concept of the cronopios, his conviction that most things could be understood “sin necesidad de la razón.”
No reasoning, no logic. Nothing made sense but I had full faith that, if I played around for long enough and kept an open heart, eventually a new, glorious and much bigger sense would grow out of it all.
Lucy Rees often said about the way humans treat horses, that the little girls at the riding schools when they arrive know it all already. They know the horse is an individual, they know how to talk to it, they know they need to build a relationship if they are ever to understand their pony.
And then the riding instructors barge in and tell you to dominate the poor animal, to “show it who’s boss,” to “be the lead mare.”
Life does this, too. Why? Why do we teach each other to dominate, to impose structures, to streamline things so we’re never confused, mystified, bored?
There is something of magic in not doing that. Or at least that’s what I believed in my twenties.
And seen like that, maybe I was like the little girls at the riding school, like the world before patriarchy, unspoilt rather than deluded. Seen like that, this recent flirtation with “growing up,” with cutting my hair and getting a job, with making a neat little line of sensible choices – well, it’s nothing but a final (bear with me) test. It’s the “face down in the mud moment” that usually comes around twenty minutes from the end of a (patriarchally structured, yes) Hollywood blockbuster, where our hero/ine must decide whether to give up or keep fighting.
Or, of course, whether to change. Whether to grow or stay the same.
So becoming sensible could be growth. Or it could be defeat.
Gut says defeat. Of course, gut can also be social conditioning.
For now, I’m going to honour my twenties by walking 23k through mist and wet spiderwebs with a bunch of uncertainties, vague dreams and unruly feels bouncing around my racing, caffeinated, post-psychedelic little heart. Maybe by Tineo it will all have been revealed?
In Tineo. I’m so tired. I had to go to the doctor! During yesterday’s dreamy mountaintop barefoot walking I got a splinter and though Wafflamatazz helped me get it out today after coffee suddenly I couldn’t walk. And walking is kind of the point here so I went to the village clinic not to be dramatic but the doctor and nurse dug it out with plenty of tools and my lord it hurt. But afterwards I was fine so I walked all these kilometres, uphill the whole way, and now I’m struggling not to fall asleep at 20:26. I think I will. I had lunch by a magical waterfall and thought of how our shaman in Ecuador went there to find his arutam, his immortal soul, but how his tradition said if he found one he could never talk about it or it would leave and/or kill him. Tineo looks like a model village built by a kid. Here’s a photo of yesterday’s breakfast which I forgot to post, plus the most beautiful animal in the world. You’re welcome.
Comments