Whispers from the Camino—Day 18
September 22 Fromista to Carrion de los Condes 18.9 km.
Getting a sunrise start.
Lots of time and room to just think today. The terrain definitely facilitates that—endless kilometers of sunflower fields amid an essentially flat landscape called the Meseta. Some areas had no trees at all and others a few trees near small ponds and streams. But the kind of terrain that pitches the mind more toward what is going on inside rather than outside.
I only had one real thing to attend to. Basia, a woman I had met through an online group during COVID ran a retreat center on the route with her husband. We had agreed that I would stop at Flores del Camino and visit with them, maybe have a meal and even stay overnight if we could get our schedules linked up. I emailed her and waited for a reply.
Lots of kilometers of sunflowers and flat terrain—the Meseta
I began to monitor my feet a little more. It felt like I might have been feeling the first signs of a blister on my right foot. It wouldn’t have been surprising as the day before I was walking in completely soggy shoes and socks. That kind of moisture is not good for the skin. Plus I had a thick callus forming on one of my toes. As long as it stayed as a callus and not a blister I wasn’t too worried about that.
It was sort of fun that I was getting be known on the trail as the “Ukelele Guy.” It sort of surprised me as I wasn’t playing the ukelele all that much. But most every day I went off by myself after arriving at my albergue, getting a hot shower, washing my clothes and setting them out to dry, and played my little instrument for 30-45 minutes. But the music carried in these small villages and soon when people came up on me from behind and saw my ukelele strapped to my pack they would say, “You must be the ukelele guy.”
Tombs inside the Catholic church
This day I was at a little bar getting an early afternoon snack when a group of pilgrims asked me to play. I don’t tend to like to play my stuff until it is actually “performance ready,” but I swallowed my pride and said, “I’m kind of working on a song, but I don’t really have verses yet. I suppose I could give you what I have.” With that I ran through the chord progressions I had put together, attempted a couple of verses and then said, “Well, that’s what I have so far.” They clapped and encouraged me to keep at it.
I was proud of myself. It was definitely a stretch for me to share publicly a half-finished product..
Not a bad metaphor for a pilgrimage.
As the day ended, I was left with a small phrase that kept coming back to me: “Go deep, Brian, not big.” I didn’t know what it meant, but I did know that I have a whole history of setting monumental expectations for myself and then charging toward them. In the 1980’s I trained for the Olympics in cycling, cycled 4,000 miles through the West in 2011, cycled to Everest Base Camp in 2017 and set a goal to reform a whole presbytery of 96 churches into something that better fit our modern context around religion and spirituality. But with such outsized expectations also came disappointments and grief—something that was creeping up on me as I have gotten older. I kept hearing in my mind, “Go deep, Brian, not big.”
I didn’t know what it meant, but it was worth paying attention to.