Day 33: Berducedo to Castro, plus the birth of Coffee Like Giraffes (28,5k)

Frida Stavenow
Oct 9, 2022
5 min read

Two things, amigos.

One, we are now a WordPress! I guess it was totally time I left the lands of totally teenage aesthetics anyway. But I’d be lying if I said I wanted to go – I didn’t, but tumblr gave me no choice by keeping me banned for “mature content.” I mean, I wish. No mature content on this Camino, I can tell you that much. But hey. Maybe this is how growth happens.

Incredibly slowly, and only as a last resort.

Two, we are now “Coffee Like Giraffes.” Yes, this blog is about the Camino, and it’s about choosing to be an artist instead of dying of the past, and it is about learning to pack for the inner Asturias. All those previous incarnations of this blog are still alive and well within it, like the layers of sedimentary rock on the epic mountain I walked down today while having all these thoughts.

But they all had one big flaw in common.

They were all trying to make sense. Of things. Of writing. Of why I am here, right now, going on this walk, writing this blog.

It is possible that sense may one day come of all this. I mean it remains a hope. We are sense-making beings, supposedly: it’s why we see faces in trees, need Apple to create an algorithm for shuffle because true shuffle feels to us too planned, too structured, as if it does, contrary to our desire, follow some preexisting logic. Even chaos appears to us to have a pattern.

So I probably do want sense, deep down in my inescapably human bones. But I don’t want it now, and I certainly don’t want it prematurely.

Cheryl Strayed writes on the last page of Wild:

After he drove away, I leaned my head back and closed my eyes against the sun as the tears I’d expected earlier at the bridge began to seep from my eyes. Thank you, I thought over and over again. Thank you. Not just for the long walk, but for everything I could feel finally gathered up inside of me; for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn’t yet know, though I felt it somehow already contained within me. How I’d never see the man in the BMW again, but how in four years I’d cross the Bridge of the Gods with another man and marry him in a spot almost visible from where I now sat. How in nine years that man and I would have a son named Carver, and a year and a half after that, a daughter named Bobbi. How in fifteen years I’d bring my family to this same white bench and the four of us would eat ice-cream cones while I told them the story of the time I’d been here once before, when I’d finished walking a long way on something called the Pacific Crest Trail. And how it would be only then that the meaning of my hike would unfold inside of me, the secret I’d always told myself finally revealed.

I’ve been talking a lot about Lucy Rees lately, and this quote, these thoughts, again bring her to mind. Especially her way of looking at horses, and trying to teach the people on her courses to do the same. To just look. Not impose a preexisting idea of what one ought to be seeing. It’s very hard.

She will start most courses by sitting her students down in the middle of the vast natural reserve where her wild Pottoka ponies roam, and ask them to just write down what they see.

They won’t. They can’t. They’ll try, but very soon they’ll be made aware by Lucy that what they’ve written isn’t an observation. It’s an interpretation. “The foal tries to drink milk from the mother.” “The yearling fights with the stallion.”

No, she’ll have to say, again and again. That’s not what you see. What you see is: “The foal puts his head underneath the stomach of a bigger female horse.” “The yearling kicks the stallion.” But are his ears pinned back, or not? Is he angry? Or is he playing?

Just looking is hard. But necessary, if we are to stop perpetuating the view we’ve always had. We suffer the consequences of confirmation bias every day. And this is a problem, if there are some ideas we have – say, about ourselves; say, “people don’t want to be with me,” or “I am too much” – that we’d rather let go of.

So. Coffee Like Giraffes. It’s obvious, no? No?

Okay. It’s the title of a story I wrote once, when I was twenty-six years old and an MFA Creative Writing student at San Francisco State University. It was a difficult time in many ways, but the university was incredible, and my creativity was flourishing. A teacher asked us to write a story in the form of a list, and without mentioning what the story was about. I wrote about coffee, and in one of the paragraphs I said it looked like giraffes, because I think it does, the oily layer on top of a black coffee from a French press that has perhaps not been cleaned entirely as it should have been. The way that layer will break up if you leave the coffee a few minutes, start separating into little clean-cut islands of oil that look like the spots on a giraffe.

Nobody in my class knew what I meant by this. Which is why it works. It’s a beautiful string of words that’s all mine, that is what I saw, and that doesn’t even have flasher connotations! What’s not to like?

These are all thoughts I had as I walked down a beautiful mountainside yesterday. I ought to write so much about the walk but really, these photos do it better. It was transcendental. Especially when I got to the dam. I felt so small. I felt so free.

Walking through the forest leading to the dam, I felt like I had just woken up. Like I had been blinded by this desire – this compulsion – to impose upon a world a form of sense that it did not want. And that, having let go of that, I could finally be present. I felt fully there, fully attuned to every mossy rock, decaying leaf, plump chestnut, rotting tree. It was like making love to the mountain. Like I was always meant to be right there, right then.

And it made me think. I talked earlier about how Waffles made me feel like I hadn’t been wrong by being all those poetic, dramatic, irrational things. That maybe I’d just not had the luck. But on Day 33 a different option materializes to my mind: maybe it all happened just the way it was meant to happen. Just the way the universe wanted it. Just right.

Doubts, dejection, depressions all included.

And so here we are. Walking out of our chains and seeing giraffes in our coffee. I love ridiculous metaphors like these. She’s got a mind like an ingrown toenail. Hills like blue elephants. See. Even the ultra-masculine master of “lean, muscular prose” knew their magic.

Coffee Like Giraffes is my call to arms to write what I see. Not what I want to see, or what I think I should see. But what I actually see. As senseless as it may seem at the time. It’s a pledge to have faith, that if I just pay attention, sense will go and make itself.

As for the rest of the day, I basically walked with God. But I’ll leave y’all to just look.