Duesos

Day 20
Ahhhh, this place and this weather are exactly what I dreamed of for the camino.
Coastal paths, some made up and some stony tracks, some roads, little pretty villages surrounded by farmland and nature, mountains in the close distance and sea on the other side. Today I took three sea-dips, one a skinny dip with a friend to fulfil a challenge she'd been set!
But today I undertook to take no photos, apart from new flowers, and only cheated for one selfie with the above-mentioned Trix (Netherlands), one video of what I assume is the collection of home towns/countries of all the guests at the accommodation we were passing, and one pic at the skinny dip beach of what looks like naked woman crouched in the surf (but isn't)! I've also shown a different euphorbia, perhaps the 'euphorbia euphoria'.

So much more could have been 'captured' on camera, but how can I be really present to an experience if I'm always putting a machine between my face and the Real World I'm wishing to be present to? On day 14 I took a minute long video of the waves thundering into the rocks at the bottom of the cliffs (which I showed here as a single still) and was rather abashed to realise I had 'got it' on camera before I had actually stood and looked at it/ listened to it breathed it/ felt it/l loved it. That's not how I wish to live. I choose to be HERE, NOW, with THIS and with US. Will you join me?

Letting people speak and listening in such a way as to hear them rather than interpreting and categorising what they say in terms of my life is also how I want to live, and practice living. I've been observing myself and observing others in our getting-to-know-each-other chats day by day, and wondering why people ask certain questions: is it to understand their conversation partner better or to understand themselves? Both are valid! But a balance feels healthy. Don't you recognise that feeling of being peppered with questions and wishing they would Just Stop? And also that experience of being deflected from a real encounter by someone who hides behind clever quasi-insightful probing?
And don't you know that quality of true exchange with someone when the conversation flows and resonates and feels mutual, warm, accepting?

Today took me past the half way mark of the Camino del Norte. I have walked around 280 miles. Guess that makes me hardcore!Les mer