Day 30: Paradise to Tineo, via my twenties, Julio Cortazar’s back catalogue and the doctor’s office

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.

#soulsearching #ArthurMiller #LucyRees #psychedelics #RamDass #domination #divinefeminine #CaminodelNorte #ayahuasca #travel #cronopionism #poetry #patriarchy #horses #antisense #Asturias #Kierkegaard #hiking #CaminodeSantiago #JulioCortazar

Day 29: Paradise to Paradise, via the sky (3,8k)

“Art is everything. Wear leg jewellery!”

That’s about it from today.

#soulsearching #psychedelics #CaminodelNorte #travel #plantmedicines #Asturias #hiking #CaminodeSantiago #plantwisdom

Day 28: Grado to Paradise, inside and out (24,1k)

The next day I walk with Waffles for the first twelve kilometers to a cafe, where we have the standard tortilla and cafe con leche plus a positively nonstandard walnut-aniseed pastry that tastes like an artisanal McDonalds pie. Then we split up to do our due solitary diligence and I try my best to create a sense of isolation on a route that turns out to be extremely saturated. There’s pilgrims everywhere! Carajo, this is supposed to be the primitive route! Not the Santiago Highway! I pass everyone then get exhausted with myself and sit down at a spring in the shade of some eucalyptus trees and let everyone pass me again. This works out better and I get some time with my thoughts.

I think about how everyone we meet are mirrors to us and how some mirrors show you more than others. At the moment, Waffles is making me think a lot about what I used to be like at 25. And though some of it, like I said earlier, I’m happy to have outgrown… there are some things that I start to feel like maybe I abandoned a little too hastily.

Like my idealism. My purity of heart. My faith in love and music (to quote The Libertines, my teenage favs that Fake Vegan and I have been singing since Llanes).

I feel like the world did a bit of a number on me between 25 and 35, resulting in the loss of these qualities. In fact, I felt like I should lose them. Especially the relationship I had in my early thirties made me question what the hell was wrong with me that I could mistake something so “dysfunctional” for love. And I still feel like the end of that was a tragedy. We were so in love. It felt so much like home. And living with it was absolutely, one hundred percent, positively impossible.

He did have addiction issues. Mental health stuff. Diagnoses. A constantly changing regime of medication, never slept through a whole night, broke things in anger. I thought we could make it anyway. We couldn’t.

Maybe these are circumstances that fuck people up. That twist everything. I don’t know.

But I came out of that relationship with a whole new way of looking at what, previously, I’d thought of as love. Instead of ideas like soulmate and destiny and meant to be I was talking about trauma bonds, gaslighting, anxious-avoidant dances of death.

It sucked. I mean that’s an understatement. It broke my heart, fully. It made me wonder if what I’d previously thought of as just a funny meme wasn’t the truth:

But I found no other way of explaining how our love could have imploded like that. Or why nobody wanted to publish my books. Everything I’d believed in so passionately suddenly seemed like it was just… madness.

Flaws of character. Stupidity. Delusion.

So I tried to correct for these faults in my personality. I felt like the world was telling me: you’re too naive, you’re too poetic, not structured enough, too passionate, too unrealistic.

I felt like I had to grow up. So I did. Or I tried to.

But walking with Waffles has reminded me of what it was like to be those things. Because I see them in him.

And they don’t feel like flaws. They feel like virtues. Worth protecting, if anything. Certainly not like something that has to be beaten out of him, like I beat them out of myself.

Maybe I was never too anything. Maybe I just didn’t have the luck. Maybe I didn’t need to change.

Maybe I still don’t.

Anyway. After this we find Heaven. We’re meant to reunite at a hippie albergue (communal vegetarian dinners, meditation room) in Salas, but a few kilometres before I find him under a bridge, where he’s recovering from having seen a snake. So we walk together again and before we know it we’re in paradise.

It’s hard to explain how I know this. There’s a green valley on the left with a river and mountains behind it. Around us a small village of those ridiculous stilt houses (hórreos, we are later told) and endless rows of voluptuous, almost vulgar pink flowers that I remember my mother telling me were called “Lejongap” (Lion’s Mouth) but which PictureThis tell me are called Hummingbird Fuchsia. Appropriate for paradise. The hairs on my arms stand up in all the right ways, I slow down my steps and before I know it, I’m at a sign saying albergue. According to my guide, there shouldn’t be one. But here it is. We see just bushes, a path leading up into the green grass.

“Let’s enquire,” I say to Waffles. “We can always leave if we don’t like it.”

Well. The path leads to Eden. A sheltered garden full of figs and walnuts and roses and old stone buildings. A fluffy cat luxuriates on a chair in the sun. Next to it, a curly-haired dog snoozes calmly. There are even those knitted chairs hanging from the ceiling that you see in fancy hippie resorts the world over.

Almost in a trance, we enter the stone house in the middle. “Camino magic,” I whisper into the silence, when suddenly, two wooden half-doors fling open and a smiling Spanish woman appears. Claudia. It’s €16 a night for a dorm. I paid €15 to get bed bugs and watch people get robbed in a mouldy basement in Santander. We’re in.

It’s still only two in the afternoon so we spend the next few hours lazing about in the sunny garden, playing with the cat, writing letters, talking shit. Around four, we go on a reconnaissance mission of the surrounding area for potentially taking a little break from our Camino the next day. To, um, trip. We find a green field sheltered by hazelnut trees, a river where the clear water runs fast over mossy stones and fallen trees give the space an already trippy magic.

It’s been decided. We shall stay, and we shall drop.

In the evening, we have dinner with a charming Italian gentleman whom we passed around nine in the morning just outside Grado. I’d liked him already as we walked past, and am delighted he’s our only company in this house of Asturias dreams.

And sure enough, he turns out to have lived a life of great adventure, mysterious business and many women. “An ageing Don Juan,” Waffles describes him, which is entirely apt. Neither of us can believe it when he tells us he’s 72, but then, of course he is. Thirteen years into his second marriage (“She used to work for me,” he answers my nosy question about how they met; “And now you work for her,” Waffles insightfully remarks.), he’s here to walk off the beer weight (“alright, beer and gin and tonic weight”) he’s amassed from enjoying la dolce vita a little too much with his big international family in Madrid.

We drink wine and talk about our wild and unwieldy lives over delicious, home-cooked cream of pumpkin soup and (I’m sorry!) beef stew. I feel bad for the cows but there was no vegetarian option. Ok, there was tortilla. But come on.

Other than this impromptu cow murder support, it’s the best kind of Camino night. Don Juan goes to bed after dinner, and me and Waffles go out onto the magical terrace to play chess but instead end up talking about how we’ve helped each other like ourselves better (me for him) and remember the yearning, irrational little heart inside (him for me, but you already know that).

“You haven’t actually lost your faith in love, though, have you?” he says after I finish.

“No,” I have to reply, after looking inside for real. “I guess I just came very close to feeling like I should.”

I mean. What else do I want from the Camino? Faith in love and – not music, because I am not, after all, Pete Doherty – but writing. Art. For its own sake.

I had lost that, or at least come very close to. And now I feel that I have it again.

I think tomorrow will be a good trip.

#whatislovebabydon039thurtme #soulsearching #traumabonds #psychedelics #avoidantattachment #anxiousattachment #CaminodelNorte #Nostalgia #travel #PictureThis #anxiousavoidantdanceofdeath #attachment #Asturias #hiking #CaminodeSantiago #artanxiety