When I’m in my favourite place on the planet I like to get up about sunrise and walk the length of the beach. When I start it is dark, and when I reach the end and turn for home the clear warm light of the golden hour is illuminating the sea and the coarse yellow sand. And there are my footprints, the markers of this morning’s pilgrimage laid out for all to see them, at least, ‘til the tide comes in a bit. They tell a story of my own attentativeness. Why, out of the thousand possible routes did I choose this one? Why did I stop there? Why not here? What a person pays attention to tells you a lot about them. That’s as true of me as it is of everybody else.
This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
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