I spent the rest of the day walking to the monastery at Cenarruza. I was glad to be rid of the extra weight, but I had digressed from the trail and was walking only on highways and country roads, some of which had heavy traffic and no real shoulder to speak of. It was somewhat stressful to have to be dodging traffic.
I was six days into my pilgrimage, and the habits were beginning to form even though I didn't consider them to be habits. For one thing, I was still procrastinating some of my pilgrimage goals to a later date. But for the most part I figured that the first ten days or so were not to be regarded as typical, as they would be the time in which I would be finding out what it means to be a pilgrim.
But there was one thing that I was already noticing. A few days into a new schedule, a schedule that consists mostly of walking and solitude, I was realizing that my thoughts were trying to materialize. There was a lot of murky seaweed in my mind that was trying to come to the surface and solidify into a recognizable shape. I was only getting vague hints, but I was getting far more than I do on a "regular" day. You can hide from yourself easily enough when you have all the distractions that we surround ourselves with in our lives; it becomes a little harder when you are walking alone for most of the day.
I knew that it had something to do with my insomnia, something to do with my Weltschmerz and with my fear of achievement. I thought that there was a misdiagnosis somewhere -- that what I had been doing to myself was the equivalent of telling an overeater that she would look much better if she were slim, or of giving a bowl of sugar to a hypoglycemic because it just seems logical that low blood sugar would be rectified by increasing sugar intake. Reality does not fit these forms of "logic": overeaters usually suffer from their condition because they are obsessed with the slim-body ideal, and hypoglycemia is exacerbated by sugar intake.
Something similar to this must be going on inside of me, and part of me at least is aware of it and has been trying (for who knows how long) to communicate it to the rest of me.
Not that I was aware of all this on Day 6. It was all murky seaweed yet.
When I went on a pilgrimage through Spain in 2007, I repeatedly thought that I could write a book about everything that was happening in and around me. A few weeks after finishing the pilgrimage I started this blog instead. It may be the rough draft of an upcoming book -- who knows -- but it is my surrender to the urge to try to put into words what might better be left cloaked under a vow of silence.
