Tag Archives: pilgrimage

Are the Himalayas Far?

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Climber asking high-heeled woman in bar to go to the Himalayas. She responds, "Well, thank you, I'd love to. Are the Himalayas far?"

It’s 1983. I’m sitting behind our apartment in Tucson, the desert sunlight dappling down through pomegranates, creosote, and a grapefruit tree, doing homework from my University of Arizona post-bachelor’s teacher prep program. I’m 25 years old.
 
My husband joins me and says, “I’m thinking about starting the ordination process.”
 
“Oh. Okay,” I say. I remember feeling excited about a new adventure, and happy to go along for the ride.   
 
“Well, thank you, I’d love to. Are the Himalayas far?”
 
Jed’s vocation has taken me places I never would have landed otherwise. Four years of seminary. Two babies. Six cities and five states—Massachusetts, New Mexico, Missouri, Illinois, and Oregon. Twelve houses. Nine jobs (for me).
 
I have friends all over the US, and a few in Europe. I’ve had a unique perspective on Church in action, both good and bad. I’ve enjoyed the benefits of Jed’s sabbaticals: England and Ireland, Iona, the Camino de Santiago.
 
This life has also been costly. 25-year-old Barb had no idea what she was saying yes to.
 
I’ve been doing this clergy spouse thing in one form or another for forty years, since the day Jed told me he wanted to pursue ordination as an Episcopal priest.
 
 “Well, thank you, I’d love to. Are the Himalayas far?”
 
Jed recently announced that he’s retiring this summer. (Trinity, Bend readers: You’re awesome! I love you so much.)
 
We’ve been anticipating his retirement for years, imagining what it might be like and what we might do.
 
But now that it’s here, I’m noticing a part of me hanging on for dear life, resisting the upcoming seismic shift. As costly, painful, crazy-making, and occasionally lonely as these decades have been, this is the life and the marriage I know. This is the life I’ve conformed myself around. This is the life I’ve cut off pieces of myself to fit into.
 
Two primary threads weave this web of resistance, I think: my relationship to change, and the difference between soul and façade.

First, change.
We’ve all been doing this change thing since puberty, really. Followed by leaving home for the first time. Graduating from college. Committing to a life partner, and maybe deciding to become parents. These celebratory changes in the first half of life are then followed by a smorgasbord of the more complicated changes: Divorces. Serious Illness. Retirements. Big moves. Deaths.  
 
Just because we’ve been doing the “Change Cha-Cha” for our entire lives doesn’t mean we know how to do it well. 

Marriages, births, divorces, deaths, retirements, serious illnesses, big moves—they’re all Square One dissolution events. 
 
Wayfinder Life Coaches learn this mantra for Square One: “I don’t know what the hell is going to happen … and that’s okay.” I’m changing this to: “I don’t know what the hell is going to happen … and I’m okay.” 
 
To complicate matters, Jed and I have also got our feet in Square Two, as we begin to imagine concretely what these actual bodies of ours will do beginning in August. The Square Two mantra? “There are no rules … and that’s okay.” Modifying again: “There are no rules … and I’m okay.”
 
I’m also grappling with the loss that accompanies change. We’ll be leaving a community that is dear to us. Places that are dear to us. And people that are dear to us.
 
 
Underneath those obvious losses is a more subtle, sneaky thing poking my heart. I can’t tend to this sneaky thing until I see it. And to see it, I’ve had to sit still for a long time, look within, and listen to myself.
 
Which brings me to Soul and Façade:
That part of me that’s hanging on, asking for attention and poking me until I listen? It’s that social self I’ve constructed over more than six decades, buttressed by being “the rector’s wife” for so many years. It’s my façade, feeling itself in danger, clinging desperately for survival.
 
Social Self, False Self, Ego, Façade, Cultural Self—all are labels for the same necessary part of ourselves: the part we show to the world in order to get through our days. This façade, first formed in infancy and childhood, is continually refined throughout our first four or five decades. Finally, hopefully, we begin to let go of that false front in midlife, when it gets too damn heavy to carry around. If we do the work.
 
For so many years, it was just easier to be who I was expected to be than to seek for the pure strength of my Soul within me. And, of course, as kids we don’t have the option to say, “Screw you and your bullshit cultural rules. I’m gonna be ME!” We must figure out what behaviors will keep us alive, and those behaviors get wired in.
 
For the first time in our adult lives, Jed and I can let those roles drop away. We can be whoever we want to be, individually and together. Oh, the freedom of that! And the anxiety. We’re a little “deer in the headlights” right now. When those roles drop away, we’ll be vulnerable and naked. And new.
 
Who will I be?

Who will he be?

Who will we be?
 
“Well, thank you, I’d love to. Are the Himalayas far?”

Here’s what’s helping me to stay over my feet right now, this minute:
 
1. I’m remembering that the Change Cycle is baked into our Earthling DNA. Death and rebirth, over and over and over, is what life on Earth is all about. Even rocks get into it. Resistance is futile. I have the tools to ride this wheel. I have understanding. I have my mantras. I’m okay.
 
2. I’m intentionally discerning who’s speaking, who’s running the show. Is it my Social Self/False Self/Façade? Or is it my Soul? The façade part of me is scared shitless, really worried about doing this right, and bracing herself against all the impending loss. My Soul, however, when I get down to her, is peaceful, connected, and not the least bit worried. So I’m spending a lot of time being quiet and listening.
 
3. I’m paying attention to what feels good in my body. My body came into this world knowing what’s true for me. She still does. I simply need to use my skills, pay attention, and trust her guidance. Staying present and connected feels good. Worrying does not. 
 
(These skills—Embodiment, Soul-based Living, and Skillful Change—are components of my Coaching Intensive program.)
 
What does this mean for my coaching practice? I feel comfortable committing to this work through June. After that, who knows? Not me. So if you’re feeling the nudge for private coaching, now is the time to connect for a Clarity Call.
 
I’m also creating a three-month Group Coaching Intensive to begin in March. Details to come! If you’d like more information about that, let me know.
 
Ooof! This is a long one. Thank you for hanging in with me!
 
Gratefully yours,
Barb

P.S. This is the blog version of my weekly-ish newsletter. That’s where I share my latest writing, news, and coaching offerings. You can subscribe here, and thank you! 

Image: New Yorker cartoon, by Robert Weber 

Who do you think you are?

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Raptor flying in golden sky

This is a raw passage from my novel-in-progress, which begins where my first novel, Lost and Found: A mystical journey on the Camino de Santiago, ends. (You can download it for free here.)

Setting: Three days have passed since Martha walked over Monte Irago and past La Cruz de Ferro after saying goodbye to Hope and her dad, the final scene in Lost and Found. Martha and two other pilgrims—Sophie, an American, and Kevin from Ireland—sit at the long table in the dining room of El Serbal y La Luna (The Rowan and the Moon), an albergue in the tiny town of Pieros. They’ve agreed to walk together the next day, free of stories and identities. All they know of each other is names and nationalities.

Salty language warning: Martha has become quite fond of the “f word.” She and her companions use it in this passage.

The other pilgrims have drifted away in noisy clumps, leaving only us three at the long table. The hospitalero has disappeared, evidently having fulfilled his duties for the night. The hospitalero’s wife is clearing what looks like a hundred dishes from the table. Two older American peregrinas, around my age, are helping, feeling sorry for her. We listen to the helpful peregrinas’ halting Spanish as they ask her for directions, and her attempts to convey her wishes. But dish-doing is a universal language, it seems, and soon the only sound coming from the kitchen is running water, clattering of plates, and soft rudimentary Spanish.

I feel guilty for a heartbeat, wondering why they’re in there working and I’m out here taking my ease. I take solace in the smallness of the kitchen and its current bustling fullness. There’s no room for me in there. And it’s not my job, so I choose gratitude and turn my attention to the job in front of me. This is my job—to be here now with these two people, as fully as I can be, without pretense or façade.

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s try this and see how long we last.”

“What do you want, right now, this minute?” I continue. “Are you comfortable? Do you want to find somewhere else to sit? Are you ready for bed?”

After a moment I answer my own question: “I’d like to go outside and sit under that serbal tree in the courtyard and look at the stars. And maybe catch a glimpse of la luna, as well. Would either of you care to join me? I’d love your company.”

We sit in silence outside for an hour, simply being in the dark. I notice that sitting in the dark is a lot easier when you have company.

The next morning we find each other in the dining room for café and toast. After breakfast we walk and talk on the way to Villafranca del Bierzo.

“I don’t know what’s next in my life,” I say. “I feel simultaneously excited and scared shitless about that. I’m in the wilderness between settlements, I guess.”

“How do you know … no, let me start over,” Kevin says. “What’s scary about the wilderness?”

“The wilderness requires a completely different skillset,” I reply. “The wilderness takes self-reliance. Trust in my own skills to survive and find my way. Trust in my environment to provide, and trust in my ability to recognize sustenance and direction when they show up.”

After a pause, I continue. “Living in a settled place with other people goes best when I follow the rules and stay in the grid. That’s what I’ve been doing for so long.”

A longer pause. “I thought the Camino would be safe. Instead, it blew me apart. I don’t know who I am anymore. I’m in this in-between place, between my old settled life and something I don’t even know what it is yet. And walking through this unknown place,” I continue haltingly, as I find the words, “is something I don’t know how to do. Because I’ve never learned it. No one’s ever taught me how to do this. Actually, they’ve taught me the exact opposite of how to do this. And I, in turn, have taught it to others. … Oh God. I’ve perpetuated the grid. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

“Well, when we know better, we do better. Right?” says Sophie. “I’m with you, Martha.”

“What do we have to count on when we blow our lives apart?” I ask. “Where do we put our feet? Or do we just fall and fall and eventually learn how to live in this air, wind in our faces, that sinking feeling like an elevator drop in the pits of our stomachs, until that sensation becomes normal or at least typical and we’re no longer so freaked out by being blown up and away that we recover our centers and realize we’re okay? We’re just falling and it’s okay?”

“What if it’s flying instead of falling?” asks Kevin. “What if it’s not going to kill you eventually, and you can go back down to Earth anytime? What if up here you have perspective? What if up here you can see the lay of the land? What if … Oh! This just in: what if you’re not blown up at all? What if a mighty force has simply kicked you out of the nest? It’s been watching you—this big mama hawk watching you get too big for her nest, refusing to fly, expecting to be fed—and she’s finally seen her chance to get you into the air? The Camino was her opening and she took it! You’re not blown up, pieces falling to the ground. You’re flying, Martha. You’re fucking flying! And birds don’t carry any extra weight, do they? They can’t.”

He stops. “What do you think, Martha? Actually, no. How does that feel, Martha?”

“A lot better than thinking I’ve been blown up,” I say. “Flying is scary because it’s unfamiliar, but at heart I know how to do it. I was born to fly, not to stay in a nest. I have what I need, built in, to do this. I am what I need to do this.”

I stop in my tracks. “Oh my gosh. The only thing stopping me from flying is believing I can’t fly.”

Photo by Shreyas Malavalli on Unsplash

Forging a grown-up faith.

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Muddy Meseta Shoes
Muddy Meseta Shoes

I’ve been receiving more requests for coaching rooted in spirituality after writing “A letter from God to her daughters who observe Lent.” These writers are seeking coaching based in progressive Christian faith and practice. I want to help, and so I want to be transparent about my own spiritual life.

My husband and I walked the Camino de Santiago in 2014. Experiences of God were common for me on the Camino, although it was still mostly walking. One of those experiences has shaped my spirituality — how I imagine and connect with the Divine — in profound ways.

I was alone for a few hours on the 17th day of the 35 days it would eventually take us to walk to Santiago. We were walking between Castrojeriz and Fromista, across the vast central Spanish plateau called the Meseta, on a cold, rainy day. Jed stayed behind in the village we’d just walked through to buy lunch. I continued up the next hill alone, surrounded by other pilgrims also walking up a hill in the cold Meseta rain through the sticky Meseta mud. Gradually I became aware of a presence beneath me, in the earth, sustaining me and communicating with me. This presence felt muscular— “a womb-like heart,” I wrote in my journal. The presence felt incredibly big, and it overflowed with love. I knew this presence was love. I was connected to it, and through it to the pilgrims walking around me, to the trees at the top of the hill, and to the hill itself.

I was connected to everything in the universe through this deep loving presence.

I understood that day that the only thing God requires from me is to accept this connection, maintain it, and strengthen it. To stay connected, and to flow with what comes through the connection. That’s it.

This Camino experience was deeply physical, a mosaic composed of feelings and images. There were no words. I simply and clearly knew something then that I hadn’t known ten minutes earlier. And I still know it.

Here’s the thing we often forget about religion. It’s made up. It’s constructed. Religion is a container created by humans to hold experiences of God, Other, Ultimate Reality, Oneness, whatever you want to call the Divine. In Christianity’s case, it’s an invented response to experiences of Jesus – a Jewish peasant healer killed by the Roman Empire because of his love-based, rebellious, socialist message. His followers experienced his presence after his death, and they told resurrection stories about him. A loosely organized religion began to coalesce. When Constantine converted to Christianity, the church become aligned with dominant culture and spread across the Roman Empire.

Once created, religious containers take on a life (or a death) of their own. Communities begin to protect and pass on the container at the expense of the experiences the religion was created to hold. A couple of millennia later, that container sits on our shelf, cracked and dusty but still prominently displayed and precious.

I’m a child of the Christian church, gestated in mainline Protestantism. I was born into an Episcopal family, and the Episcopal Church has been my Christian place for the most part. I’m a member of “the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement.” My personal experiences of Jesus, both in church and not in church, are precious to me. Yet I seem to have most of my experiences of the Divine outside, under trees, on mountains, beside rivers, swimming in lakes, sitting on rocks in the sun. I also find much wisdom and solace within Buddhism.

People who contact me to explore coaching together usually want to answer these questions: How do I reconcile this Jesus-shaped place in my heart with my adult knowledge and experience? How do I navigate this uncharted territory with integrity and faithfulness? And how can I be true to what I know about God while keeping the peace in my family?  

For me personally, the question I’m living is: How do I reconcile my adult experiences and beliefs — my Camino experience, loving Jesus, and the oneness I feel with God in creation among them — with conventional church affiliation and Sunday morning worship?

I don’t know yet. This is a work in progress and probably always will be.

Here’s what I do know:

I’m not required to accept any authority but my own. I can trust my own authority and experiences of the Divine. I’m connected to the deep heart of God. My job is to stay connected. That’s all. That’s it. God will do the rest. My spiritual practice is doing whatever helps me allow, maintain, and strengthen my connection to God, and, through God, to all beings. Sometimes my practice is going to church. Sometimes it’s sitting on a rock with my feet in a river, praying. Sometimes it’s Vipassana meditation. Sometimes it’s none of the above.

My spiritual practice is doing whatever strengthens my connection to God, and, through God, to all beings. This is my call.

When I look at the Christian tradition through this lens, here’s some of what I see:

  • Language that places God outside or above creation weakens that connection.
  • An emphasis on sin, on our badness instead of our belovedness, weakens that connection.
  • I experienced the presence that day on the Camino as most like a womb, yet beyond gender. Patriarchal words and ideas weaken that connection.
  • Eucharist strengthens that connection.
  • Jesus stories strengthen that connection.

It’s not heresy, and it’s not sin, to melt that cracked, dusty vessel down and forge a new one. I believe this is our responsibility and our vocation. Death and resurrection is, after all, what Jesus was all about.

I wish church on Sunday morning was right there with me. It’s not. So I’m very intentional in my church attendance. Sometimes I don’t go for weeks, and I choose mountain or river or studio church instead. And then I go back, because something in me needs this occasionally anachronistic Christian tradition to feel whole. I’m focusing on letting go of what doesn’t serve me and choosing to live in unknowing for as long as it takes. I suspect this is the work of a lifetime. This work feels uncomfortable often, especially because I’m married to the rector. I’m working to find that elusive and shifting balancing place where I’m living in integrity, being present for my husband, and feeding and being fed by others who love Jesus.

I want community to do this work within – the work of forging adult faith, engaging the sacraments and stories, and participating wholeheartedly in rituals that allow, maintain, and strengthen my connection to God’s deep heart and, through Her heart, to all beings.

I say “forge an adult faith,” not “find an adult faith,” because, for me, this process requires melting down and separating out what’s useful from what’s not. Forging faith requires acceptance and endurance of the refiner’s fire. Forging faith requires discernment of what nurtures us and our world. Forging faith requires courage to honor our experiences. Forging faith requires trusting resurrection and joining with God to make something new. Forging faith means creating a new vessel for the Holy One in our midst, and holding that vessel lightly.

This all sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? So why bother? Why not walk away? My rational, quantitative left brain asks this over and over.

Walking away is the answer for some of us. It’s not my answer. Since you’re reading this, walking away probably isn’t your answer, either.

My current response to my brain’s protestations is that my heart knows things my brain doesn’t. My heart remembers what it felt that day on the Camino – the bottomless peace and love flowing from that bigger, deeper, holy heart  – and it won’t let me walk away from this spiritual journey. To live in integrity, for me, requires that I take faith and spirituality seriously. To be whole, for me, requires forging an adult faith, one component of which is Christianity.

If any of this resonates with you and you’d like to talk further, please contact me to schedule a free no-obligation consultation. I’d love to connect!

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Barb Morris Camino de SantiagoTHIS IS A SCENE FROM MY CAMINO NOVEL-IN-PROCESS. PLEASE SEE THE FIRST EXCERPT, “THE MESSIES,” WHICH INTRODUCES THE NOVEL AND WHY I’M POSTING THIS WRITING IN ITS RAW STATE.

So here our three travelers are, Hope on the floor and Martha and her mom on a soft couch covered with an Indian throw, safe and warm in the arms of the Hospital of the Soul. Hope is happily eating sugar cookies off of prettily-flowered china and chattering away. She licks her fingers with gusto and relish, licking the sugar and crumbs off, then swiping the crumbs off her plate with her finger. Hope is content, and so is Martha as she watches Hope’s contentment. She’s aware in a corner of her mind how truly bizarre this is – sitting in the warm living room of a house in Spain called the Hospital del Alma with her dead mother and her little daughter who until just a few hours ago was curled up in a chest freezer nestled in her chest, naturally, right beside her heart.

Martha realizes that her heart has been keeping Hope alive all these years, and the Hospital of the Soul is the perfect place for the three of them to be.

 I wonder if others can see all three of us, or if I just look crazy and alone from the outside. But I choose to believe the evidence of my senses – here these two are. Hope is eating cookies. My mom is next to me, drinking chamomile tea with honey. I feel warmth from the wood stove. I can see and hear María outside building a mosaic in the patio’s east wall. A pine tree I don’t know the name of overhangs the glass ceiling of this room.

 I am simply grateful to be here.

I love this space. I love the earthiness and the colors and the constant surprise. I love the hospitality of it – not a Parker House hospitality, but a hospitality of the heart and home. This is a place on the Camino designed for one purpose only – refuge for peregrinas’ souls. A Hospital of the Soul. I love the complete lack of expectations and judgment. “Come in and sit.” That’s all. Warmth, nourishment, comfort, welcome. All it needs is cats.

And at that moment Martha see kittens in the back, on the patio, and the place is complete. She could sit here forever.

This magical child who’s evidently not an apparition will need some clothes. Are those rubber-toed red sneakers adequate to the task of walking at least a little every day? They’re from a time when support in kids’ shoes was nonexistent. Martha hears herself worrying about Hope’s shoes, because she has no idea what she’s going to say to Maria at dinner when she asks for their story.

Here’s all she knows: she retired from her teaching job, a job she loved for many years and was good at, because it was time. Class sizes were growing, the kids were getting harder to reach, and she had less time and creativity because of mandated curriculum and tests every other week, it seemed. So it was time. She would have done a few more years, but then the district sweetened the retirement deal for older teachers and she jumped ship.

My kids didn’t need me, I’d seen The Way and done a little research, and I knew I needed a Thing to Do right after retirement. An intentional journey wanted to happen and the Camino met that need – cheap, flexible, set up for solitary walkers. A week after I turned in my school keys I was on a plane to Madrid, then a train to León, a bus to Pamplona, and another bus to SJPP*.

Everything had been pretty normal for the context of doing this crazy thing of walking 500 miles to Santiago, for the first week or so. Little stuff had started happening around then. She’d found herself taking unplanned side excursions and detours, sitting by the side of the track for a few hours, walking by herself a lot. These things just seemed to happen. But once on the Meseta, they’d come fast and furious, getting odder and odder all the time. The voice in the Templar church. The cougar who talked. The jar of messies. She was beginning to get used to it. Retrieving her daughter from a freezer in her chest and having her mom come along to help thaw her out was only the latest. It was also, she knew, of a completely different order of magnitude of crazy. These two seemed to be real people. Her mom she could explain, sort of. This little girl dressed in clothes from the 1960s, not so much. What will they tell Maria, she wondered.

Just then Hope got up, wiped her hands on her 1960s trousers, and climbed into Martha’s lap. She put her arms around her mom’s neck, said in a muffled voice, “Thank you for unfreezing me,” and fell asleep. Martha glanced at her mom and found her mom looking at her. They shook their heads, smiled, and returned to silent fire-watching. El Hospital del Alma, indeed.

Eventually they heard the back door opening and María making noise in the kitchen. “I’ll go see what I can do,” said her mom. She heard her mom ask in Spanish how she could help. María evidently found her something to do, since the next sound she heard was voices and occasional laughter. The sounds of wine glasses being filled, along with cooking noises and smells, came from the kitchen. Her mom came to her with a glass of Riojan wine.

Martha reached out a hand to take it, saying, “Mom, I’m so glad you’re here with me. I don’t understand it, but I’m glad. I think I might be crazy.”

“You’re not crazy, sweetie. You’re wondering how long I’ll be here, right?”

“Thanks, Mom. Of course I am. And I’m also trying to just be here now and enjoy this gift. Since I’m not crazy.”

Her mom smiled and returned to the kitchen. Martha sat, a daughter she didn’t have this morning on her lap, and drank her wine. I’ll take it, she thought. I’ll take it. I won’t get to keep it, I sure as hell don’t understand it, but I’ll take it. I’ll enjoy every minute I get with these two, and I won’t mourn them before they’re gone.

Supper starts with a salad of baby greens and peas, because it’s June in Spain and Maria’s garden has just started producing. The flowers and tomatoes will come later, in a month or so. Chicken and rice, and quejada for dessert. Hope has been pulled up to the table on a stool, and she’s digging into her chicken, cut up for her by María, and her rice. She eats the peas with her fingers, eschewing the lettuce. It’s her first real meal in decades – she’s been kept alive by Martha’s heart but she’s hungry for real food.

This meal is delicious. “Gracias, María. Es delicioso,” Martha says. María responds, “Y gracias para ustedes. I am happy you are here.” Hope keeps shoveling it in, humming happily. Then she looks up and says to Maria, “I’ve been frozen next to my mommy’s heart for a long time. Today she found me and unfroze me, and here I am!”

Her mom added, “And I was walking along and saw Martie sitting on a rock in a field of poppies, this one on her lap, and I thought they might need help so I went to see what was up. As I got closer I could see that I knew them. Then I saw that they were Martha and Hope, both of whom I was surprised to see. Martie because I’m dead and she’s alive, and Hope because I hadn’t seen her since she was a little girl.”

Okay then, thinks Martha. She won’t be any help explaining this to me, or anyone else. Maybe when you’re dead you just take weird shit for granted.

María simply nodded and took another bite. “There were angels all round you three,” she said. “You were glowing when you entered my house. It’s called El Hospital del Alma for a reason.”

*SJPP is Camino shorthand for St. Jean Pied de Port, a small, charming Basque French town that’s served as the Camino gateway over the Pyrenees into Spain for a millennia or more.

Camino Fiction by Barb Morris

The Emergence of Hope, Part Two (Camino Fiction)

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Barb Morris Camino de SantiagoTHIS IS A SCENE FROM MY CAMINO NOVEL-IN-PROCESS. PLEASE SEE THE FIRST EXCERPT, “THE MESSIES,” WHICH INTRODUCES THE NOVEL AND WHY I’M POSTING THIS WRITING IN ITS RAW STATE.

Martha is sitting in a field of poppies with a frozen child in her lap. She notices that although poppies are soporific in stories, on the Camino she hears them say “Wake up!” She croons to the child, strokes her, puts her cheek to the little girl’s cold face, listens to the Meseta wind and watches the poppies sway, for what seems like hours. Softly holding this frozen girl – waiting for signs of life.

She sees peregrinos walking in the distance – they’re far enough away that she can’t tell them apart – occasionally one will notice her and wave. She waves back so they know she’s okay. A woman leaves the road and walks through the poppies toward them. Martha watches the expressions cross the woman’s face as she gets nearer. She sees surprise, concern, comprehension, and finally immense kindness.

“Hola,” she says. “How can I help?” They recognize each other’s American-ness by all the nonverbal cues – North Face and Osprey, smiles and eye contact.

“She’s frozen. I’m thawing her.”

“You must be tired. Let me take a turn.” Martha realizes that, yes, she is indeed tired. The woman takes her towel from her backpack and spreads it on the ground, then sits on it and reaches her arms to Martha. Martha gently hands her the curled up girl child.

The woman asks, “Where did you find her?”

“In my chest,” says Martha.

“Ah,” says the woman, and she looks at Martha with deep brown eyes. “I understand.”

Martha knows those eyes. She’s looking into her mother’s eyes. As their eyes fill with tears, the girl child stirs. Martha reaches out a hand to the girl’s face. It’s warm, and she catches a tear softly falling down the girl’s cheek. Thawing is happening rapidly now – the little girl is breathing and stretching and making little noises as she wakes up – Martha sees that this child is younger than she thought – maybe 4 or 5 – red rubber toed sneakers, little jeans, a pink shirt, fine brown hair cut like a bowl on her head like the Beatles used to have – and deep brown eyes looking up at her and her mom.

“Hello, sweetheart,” says Martha.

This is weird, she thinks. I’m sitting in a field of Spanish poppies with my mom, who’s been dead for twenty years, and a little girl I found in a freezer in my chest. Okay, then. Smiling, she lies down in the sun in the poppies, looks at her mom cradling the smiling child, and closes her eyes. She feels the rocks beneath her and knows she’s getting dirty and damp, and she doesn’t care. It’s totally worth it to feel the Earth along her entire body. Ground below; air and sky above. Poppies all around. She reaches out her hand to the woman sitting next to her, places it on the woman’s nylon-clad leg, and relaxes. As she falls asleep she wonders – will they be here when I wake up?

They are. They are deeper in the poppies, holding hands, the little girl bending to smell each flower and laughing as they sway in the breeze. The sun was halfway between noon and the horizon. Martha is hungry. She sits there watching the two dear creatures, listening to her daughter’s tinkling laughter that sounded like a creek in the summer and her mother’s low murmurs in response.

That’s surprising, she thought. That’s who she is to me. Martha stands up, brushes the dirt off her legs with a swish, and says, “Hey, you two. Let’s go find supper and a bed.”

They turn and start toward her. Her daughter lets go of the older woman’s hand and runs toward Martha. “Mommy! (That settles that, thought Martha.) You’re awake! Grandma and I were looking at the pretty flowers. She says they’re poppies! Let’s go to that town over there!”

She pointed her little finger toward the town they could see beyond the trees – a large church and monastery at the base of a terraced hill with a ruined castle plopped on top. Who does that? wonders Martha. Who’s designing these quintessential Camino vistas?

She shoulders her backpack and takes her daughter’s hand. Her mom folds up her towel, wipes off Martha’s pants with it to get the last of the dirt, stows it in her backpack and puts it on, straps on her poles, and heads through the poppies back to the road.  There are just a few pilgrims still walking as Martha and her girl follow the older woman to the road, holding hands.

Martha understands that her Way just got a lot more complicated. And more companionable.

I don’t know how long I’ll have my mom with me, and my daughter probably isn’t real either, she thought. This is so interesting, and I’ll ride this wave as long as it lasts.

An hour later they walk up the cobbled street through the old gate into Castrojeriz. Martha and her mom have taken turns carrying their little girl, whose name it turns out is Esperanza, almost always called “Hope,” most of the way. As she explained, “I’m tired. After all, I a little girl, and I just woke up after being frozen for a really long time.” Martha suspects she also wanted to feel her mothers’ arms around her, holding her, singing to her, telling her how glad they were that she woke up.

It was like that, that this one, now three, arrived at the door of El Hospital del Alma. And how it is that they are the fortunate pilgrims who find themselves sitting in front of a warm wood stove, drinking chamomile tea with honey, eating cookies and chocolate-covered strawberries off flowered china plates, asking the hospitalera where to stay, and are invited to stay in her one guest room that just happens to be empty that night.

“I will cook for you dinner,” says María, “and you will tell to me your story.”

Camino fiction

The Emergence of Hope, Part One (Camino Fiction)

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Barb Morris Camino de SantiagoTHIS IS A SCENE FROM MY CAMINO NOVEL-IN-PROCESS. PLEASE SEE THE FIRST EXCERPT, “THE MESSIES,” WHICH INTRODUCES THE NOVEL AND WHY I’M POSTING THIS WRITING IN ITS RAW STATE.

Martha is walking. Always walking. Although the sun is shining, for now, yesterday’s rain is still very much present in the deep Meseta mud and the puddles. Her shoes are muddy. The hems of her pants are muddy. Her mood is muddy.

What the hell am I doing out here? Martha thought, not for the first time and almost certainly not for the last time.

“You’re here to heal,” said the Voice.

Oh, God. Not you again. And what does healing look like? Healing looks like wholeness, and connection to Source, and health. So that’s wholeness, holiness, and health, right?

The Old English root* is very happy right now. As she walks, she takes those words one by one.

Wholeness. Opposite of split apart. When something’s whole, everything is attached and doing its job. Wholeness has good boundaries – intact boundaries. There’s an “in” and an “out.” I know what is inside me and what’s not inside me. I know what’s me and what isn’t me. And I feel and am aware of ALL of me. I don’t split off the shadowy parts – the parts that remember bad stuff and feel shitty.

 And what does “feel shitty” mean? It means feel sad and hurt and small and powerless. That sounds like childhood stuff. Wholeness means feeling the feelings of the little girl hearing her brother being beaten; watching her dad drive away with her cats to the pound; losing her dad, brother, sister, and mom – oh, my – that’s deep pain. And no one saw me. No one cared. It’s the anger at being powerless and invisible, too. So “wholeness” means welcoming and loving those memories and that knowledge. Wholeness is gathering in ALL of me in and feeling those feelings. Wholeness is care for ALL of me – body, mind, soul, emotions.

Walking and thinking. Thinking and walking. That’s Martha’s Camino, today.

Holiness – knowing I’m going to die?! Being open to the More in which I live and move and have my being. Trusting what I know from that place in me that’s connected to ALL THAT IS. Holiness is fostering that connection, or is that “health”? Health is everything I do that fosters holiness and wholeness. And there’s actually a lot of overlap between wholeness and holiness. Holiness underlies wholeness. Holiness is the foundation of wholeness. Wholeness without holiness is struggle. It’s knowing that I’m held in Love that makes wholeness possible – it’s faith in the ultimate okay-ness that allows me to invite the memories and the old feelings back into the light. The submerged and frozen feelings – like a chest freezer in my chest! A good place for a chest freezer, right?

She is suddenly afraid of her post-Camino life. Eventually she’ll have to stop walking, right? Eventually she’ll get to Santiago, or Finisterre, or run out of money, or her body will give out somehow, and she’ll have to face her future. A wave of panic sweeps through her – heart racing, breath shaky, hands quivering, skin sweating – what will she do with herself when this is over?

The Voice asks a question: “Sweetheart, what do you WANT to do?”

And she knows that the roots of the panic are in the old tension between doing what she thought she should do and what she wanted to do. It’s been a long time since she’s known what she wants to do. Really, truly, deep in the core of her being wants to do. A very long time.

Martha understands her job now: pay attention to what she really, truly, deep down in the core of her being wants. And the parts of her that she split off – the girl with the sadness – have wisdom for her. The girl who knows what she wanted got left behind – frozen in the chest freezer – for safekeeping, it turns out. She’s there, along with powerlessness, invisibility, anger, and deep hurt. She’s so sad and wounded. She’s lying in there, all curled up, covered in frost, eyes closed.

If I thaw her out I’ll be a crazy person. But she knows what I really, truly want deep down in the core of my being. She knows. Did I put her in the freezer? No, I did not. I didn’t know she was there. I didn’t know I was there. She’s a part of me.

 Okay, then.

Martha walks off the path and sits on a rock in the sun. She reaches into the chest freezer and picks up the frozen girl child. The child is solid and sturdy. And cold. So cold.

Martha cradles this girl to her body, gently stroking her, putting her warm cheek against the child’s frozen face, and waits. Hours pass. She notices, for the first time, that she’s surrounded by bright red poppies. Poppies everywhere, white daisies and sky-blue cornflowers mixed in. The Meseta breeze blows. The flowers sway. The trees in the distance move, too, and she feels the warm air on her skin.

* Our modern English words heal, health, whole, and holy all find their root in the Old English word hāl, which means “healthy and entire.”

The Rain in Spain (Camino Fiction)

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Barb Morris Camino de SantiagoTHIS IS A SCENE FROM MY CAMINO NOVEL-IN-PROCESS. PLEASE SEE THE FIRST EXCERPT, “THE MESSIES,” WHICH INTRODUCES THE NOVEL AND WHY I’M POSTING THIS WRITING IN ITS RAW STATE.

It’s a cold rainy day on the Way. A perfect day for pondering discomfort. Rain on the Camino means you walk in the rain. Unless you stayed the night in a hotel and you can book another night, you have to leave. You could go find a bar and sit there until the albergues open at 2:00, but, really, what’s the point of that? You might as well walk. The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain – decidedly NOT true. Galicia is famous for being rainy, and it’s NOT in the plain.

One of the best pieces of advice Martha gleaned from the American Pilgrims on the Camino Facebook group was to buy an Altus poncho in St. Jean*. She’s grateful for it today. It’s big enough to cover her backpack – it comes with a pouch that snaps in and out – and it covers her legs, mostly, too.

The downside of not using a backpack cover is that if she needs something in her pack she has to get under the poncho somehow. The upside of the Altus covering her pack is that her pack stays dry, unlike the packs of the people she sees around her that are covered only with the backpack cover. The rain, especially this windy rain, will find its way in and around the cover. She’d rather have a wet body and a dry backpack.

Fortunately, along most of the Camino, there are frequent bars for getting warm, or at least warmer. This morning they’re packed full of wet walkers. Martha wedges her way through the pilgrims congregating in the main room jostling for the barkeep’s attention, and finds a place for her backpack, poles, and poncho where it can drip a little and hopefully not on someone else’s stuff. It’s dark in this bar – nooks and crannies all packed with pilgrims seeking refuge from the deluge outside. It’s an incessant rain. A thoroughly wet rain. NOT liquid sunshine. Feeling inside her layers for her passport and money, she pulls out a few Euro and joins the throng of peregrinos waiting for coffee. She’s pretty sure some of them are feeling impatient. They want this process to be efficient and orderly, but this is Spain. The land of six-hour workdays and afternoon siestas. Spaniards don’t rush, and they don’t like loud, pushy Americans and driven Germans.

She waits, drifting along with the tide of people toward her turn to order. “Café con leche, por favor, señor,” she says. “Y tiene tortilla? No? Pan tostada? Bien, gracias.” Toast it is. She ponders, again, the wonder that is Spanish toast. This is breakfast. Perhaps she’ll find tortilla further along the Way – or perhaps this will have to do until lunch. She’s already hoping for soup to go with her bocadillo*. Bread, bread, bread. All this lovely bread. It would be hard to be gluten-free on the Camino. It’d be easier to be vegetarian, by far. She sees out the door on her way back to a table in the corner, squeezing between dripping peregrinos, carrying her coffee and toast, that it’s still raining.

Everything on the Camino is a metaphor. How you do anything is how you do everything. She’s thinking about her students. Her FORMER students – how some of them were so open to screwing up, and some were so resistant. It’s about how well you tolerate discomfort, she knows. She knows this about herself, too. Her first instinct when she’s uncomfortable is to run home to mama. Go back to where she felt safe and warm and dry and unthreatened. It’s taken a long time to train her brain to overcome its first impulse. Part of that training comes from working with kids for as long as she has – she pretty early on noticed the disconnect between her wanting to be good at something right out of the gate, and encouraging her kids to explore and be messy in pursuit of a goal.

There they are again! Messies are part of learning. She knows this. Being okay with messies – seeing messes as compost rather than mistakes – has been huge in her life. Part of her goal, Martha realizes, on this camino craziness, is to get really good at messes. To take her best shot, to leave before she’s ready, to follow her gut and listen to her heart. To see the messes as holy – sacred – inevitable byproducts of growth. Necessary for growth.

Maybe messy isn’t even the right word, she thinks. Maybe it’s like the furrows left by the moles – or pencil shavings – or a snake’s skin, or dead leaves and shed branches or a beetle’s carapace after metamorphosis (do beetles shed their shells?) – like the chrysalis a butterfly leaves behind. Every process requires a mess if it’s deep enough, maybe?

Is my former life a chrysalis hanging on last year’s yarrow? I kept thinking the chrysalis was my forever home. Every metamorphosis, every turn of the wheel, every ride around the change cycle, leaves pieces behind. Every death and resurrection leaves a trail – a bundle of clothes inside a tomb. A memory.

 I am so fucking wise, she thinks. When did I get so smart?! But it’s true. We all have these cycles. Cycles within cycles within cycles. And even though the Camino is a line from pt A to pt B, it has cycles within it. There’s the big beginning à middle à end à beginning again one from SJPP* or wherever, walking for 30 or 40 days, ending in Santiago, then going home. Within the big one, which is ALSO embedded in the larger cycle of my life, there are smaller cycles. There’s the cycle of each day, and the meeting walking parting cycle of ephemeral relationships, the cycle of each mile, the cycle of each step, even the cycle of each breath. There might be an accumulation and letting go cycle, too. Breathing is like that. Eating is like that. We breathe in O2 and exhale CO2. We eat food and let go of pee and poop.

So maybe messes aren’t negative at all – maybe they’re inevitable byproducts of changing ang growing. They’re our shed skins and chrysali (Gk?) and fallen leaves and husks of seeds. We are designed to grow and change. Learning is our job. And the only way to learn something new is to do something new. And the only way to do something new is to do it. And the only way to do something new is to embrace the feelings that go with not knowing how to do something and doing it anyway. Some of us are better at than than others, but ALL of us can learn it. (Or relearn it.) We all used to know it, when we were babies and we didn’t know about mistakes. Then school got ahold of us, and parents who needed us to be certain ways – to be competent so they felt competent, maybe, and we learned that learning was supposed to be seamless or we weren’t doing it right. And if we couldn’t do it right, we probably shouldn’t be doing it at all. If we couldn’t get it right pretty quick, then it wasn’t what we should be doing and we needed to go find the thing we COULD get right really fast, because that was our calling. And then we needed to keep doing that one thing over and over for the rest of our lives.

Does anyone do the Camino perfectly? Martha wondered. What would that even look like? Let’s see. You buy all the right gear the first time. You always walk as far as you intend to walk, and you always find a bed in your preferred albergue. Or, if you don’t, some lovely local gives you her spare room and you become friends for life. You never pee behind a bush or take a shit in the trees. No blisters and no injuries. You always have exactly what you need, and are able to give to less-prepared peregrinos from your excess.

Ewww. That sounds awful! That sounds dry and sterile and dead.

 How about THIS  for perfection: you do enough research and then you go and you survive. A lot of stuff goes wrong or doesn’t go the way you hope it will. There are times you’re uncomfortable – tired, cold, hungry, unsure, sore, scared – and yet here you are. You get through it, increasing your tolerance for feeling tired, cold, hungry, unsure, sore, and afraid. You roll with it. You surf the waves, rather than having a reeally good expensive boat. You’re IN it, rather than on it. And there are moments, even hours and days, of bliss and joy and exultation and warm happiness and simple true connection – of feet on the ground, breathing and walking and listening and seeing and smelling and tasting – feeling how strong your body is and how big your heart is and how delicioso it feels to be wild.

 The rain continues to fall steadily as Martha leaves the damp warm dark bar. She peers out from beneath the already-dripping hood of her Altus poncho and finds the arrow* embedded in the rain-slicked cobbled street. She follows the arrow, hoping to get another ten kilometers under her belt before stopping for the night. 

*CAMINO PLACES, NAMES, AND THINGS WHICH WILL NEED TO BE DEFINED, OR PERHAPS I’LL INCLUDE A CAMINO LEXICON.