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----Original Message Follows---- From: Al Buscemi---------
SO many people come home and want to write a book about it. Shirley MacLaine wrote a very strange and New Agey book which i read during the walk, and of course Paulo Coelho's book was the reason I walked it. although there is some debate as to whether he actually walked it or just wrote about it.
i walked because i was searching... i wanted to find a reason behind the madness... i don't know that i found ALL the answers, that i found what i sought... mostly because i wasn't sure what i was looking for. things seem more vivid, more obvious on the Camino. it's said that the energies from the Milky way, and this supposed fault line under the Camino create these energies which make for clearer thinking. that your senses are more awake, more aware...
the bad part is when people get too comfortable on the Camino. when people find their set group of friends and walk with the same people everyday and think only of walking and forget to think about life. they get so enthralled by this social life, by the fact that everyone is so happy, so open, so understanding, so loving, that they never want the Camino to end. they're so happy to have made friends that they don't want to go home.
i couldn't wait to be finished. right to the very end i was coming to realizations, inescapably, but they weren't always happy realizations, or if they were, i couldn't wait to share them with my friends, to live them in my life, but my REAL life, not this Camino life. maybe it was because I hadn't been running away from anything.
Some of these people had really dropped everything, they'd left their spouse, been fired or quit their job, someone had died... it was these people I wished I could shake awake, these people who KNEW they had a lot of painful realizations to come to, but they got too comfortable in the Camino life.
My life before I left for Spain was great! I had good friends, a nice apartment, a high paying job... it was mostly the job driving me insane, with this interior knowledge that i could be doing something more.
There were some days that even these people couldn't avoid thinking. Walking in the rain or walking alone... there were some days when nobody was in the mood to talk, you'd see everyone in the hostel kind of keeping to themselves, going to bed early to write or pray or meditate or listen to music...
I was walking to prove to myself that I could do something. Something I knew nothing about, something no one else had done, that I knew of. Something I had only read about. To finish what I started. I can't say it was easy.
It was easy in the sense that everyday I knew where I was going, the path was clear, I just had to follow the arrows. At night, I was assured a place to sleep, I had a list of where the hostels were, people discussed which ones were open, which ones were closed, which ones were better... The books tell you what the terrain will be like but...
There were days when I was so tired of walking I would cry. My legs would stop functioning, I was dragging myself along with my walking stick, stopping every 10 steps to say to myself, only 2 kilometers to go, only 2 kilometers to go, stop crying and just WALK!! These moments of utter despair, when everyone has walked ahead and you're alone on a road in a small Spanish village, limping to the next hostel wishing God would just smite you and get it over with.
There is no better satisfaction that walking into that hostel, putting your backpack down, slipping off your shoes, taking a shower, and giving your feet a nice loooong massage. People would ask, "Are your feet hurting?" and you'd say, "a little."
What I was looking for was the strength to carry on. The driving force to be able to do what needs to be done. It's now and when I get home that we shall see if I've learned anything, if I've found anything. We shall see.
m.
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