Available Light

Photographers call the periods just before sunset and just after sunrise "the golden hour" because of the colour of light and because its strong directional nature makes for some great shots - sometimes at least. This is the golden hour in the countryside just outside Canberra in Australian Capital Territory.  I've been away, and here is a diary of the last week. Friday 31 May. Flew to Australia via Auckland. Flights around New Zealand were delayed because of bad weather, so our flights were all late. got to Melbourne about 9.30 pm, picked up our rental car and found our way to a small but perfectly formed AirB&B on the 14th floor of a building in the docklands area. Saturday 1 June . Breakfast at a wonderful cafe in Footscray, then went to some favourite places in Melbourne - St. Kilda and Prahran, before driving into the city. We had seats for the two parts of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Princess Theatre. First show 2.30 pm, second 7.30 pm. A...

  The sun is rising on our last morning in Sydney. Outside are the calls of tree frogs and unfamiliar birds. Inside there are some few soft, brief whimpers from Zoe as she moves in her sleep and soon there will be the padding of Naomi's feet on the stairs. My son Nick lives in Five Dock, in the part of the city known as the Inner West where he and Charmayne have a four bedroom two bathroom house about 30 minutes by car or bike or train from Nick's office in the Quay area.  We have been here almost a week, meeting our newest grandchild and celebrating Naomi's 5th birthday. There has been a picnic and a few brief trips in the car, but mostly we've been pretty domestic. There have been many contented hours when I've been left holding the baby, and many more being cast in one of Naomi's games. Clemency's roles in these dramatic productions involve the two women, separated in age by a mere 59 years, sitting side by side, placing small plastic dolls into modestly ...

I watch my grandson approach some other little boys in the park. Being Noah he soon has befriended them and organised a little expedition, in which they move from slide to swings to see-saw and back again. They are all concentrating on enjoying the playground equipment, but are learning a good number of things incidentally: for example negotiating skills; how to establish and maintain a relationship; co-operation; how to strike a deal; how to insist on rights. All of these incidental learnings are far more important for the lifelong development of all these little guys than improving their skills at sliding down steep metal slopes on their backsides. I thought about this yesterday when Father Ron Smith asked me " Do you think your recent pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, via el Camino, have any constructive part in this new facility for 'taking time' in meditation and prayer? " While the short answer is "yes" the longer answer is about the incide...

El Camino de Santiago isn't one route but a network of routes stretching across every part of Europe. When the paths converge in Spain they make their way to Santiago de Compostela in a variety of ways: I have walked all of the Camino Frances, all of the Camino Primitivo and part of The Camino del Norte. As well, I have driven parts of the Camino Ingles and the Camino Portugues. All of the routes are well maintained, clearly marked and have an infrastructure for pilgrimage that will sustain pilgrims on a daily basis: there are pilgrim hostels or other accommodation options at regular intervals, fountains providing drinkable water, shops and cafes and bars. All have a plentiful supply of interesting things to see and do and on each of the routes there are fellow travellers who will provide congenial company. No matter which route is chosen, the experience of pilgrimage will be constant: you will walk a long way and find yourself profoundly changed by the daily encounter with a...

The flight from Auckland to LA was perhaps the bumpiest I've ever experienced. There were no hot drinks served for the duration, but they did get the meals to us on time. I had a good seat - right at the back of the plane where the fuselage narrows there are 2 seats instead of 3 in the side bays and I got one of them, on the aisle with a wide space beside me and extra legroom in front. I managed some sleep. Then it was LAX, with the terminal looking all modern and clean and neat, and a large staff of uniformed people keeping the swarms of us moving through their system. It was surprisingly and pleasantly efficient, quick and friendly. Then I had about 20 minutes of walking from terminal 4 to terminal 7, a couple of hours in a lounge and a couple more in a Canadair regional jet. We flew over that vast swathe of California and Nevada that seems devoid of trees and full of canyons. I saw Las Vegas below me, then the dusty grey brown landscape became speckled with snow as it ...

  On any pilgrimage, the return journey is as important as the long soulful slog to the holy destination. To reach the goal and savour it is all we focus on as we march imperceptibly onwards. But once there, we turn and retrace our steps, hurriedly and practically. We return to our ordinary lives and the journey back is a transition, a moving back from one reality to another; we move from the holy to the mundane in a little anti pilgrimage.   So on boxing day we headed South, past Kawakawa with its famous toilets .  When I first met Clemency she sang in a folk group with Paula Feather. Paula's sister lived with Friedensreich Hundertwasser , the Austrian artist who once lived in Kawakawa and built the town's loos. With a close personal link like that (I'm astounded I wasn't mentioned in his will), of course we had to stop and take a look. I felt a little odd walking into a public toilet with a large and obvious camera, but the place was crowded and everyone...

On the last morning of the Bishop's conference on Pangaimotu Island, just off Nuku'alofa in Tonga, we had been asked to walk around to the other side of the island for our morning Eucharist. So, leaving our little ferry by way of a floating jetty we walked the ten minutes from Big Mama Yacht Club, where we had been meeting, and found Archbishop Winston Halapua waiting for us. He was dressed in an alb and was talking on his cellphone. Here, in this place where it felt about as remote as it gets he was still connected. Which was why he had asked to meet us there. The spot he chose was one where, as a small boy, he had gone fishing with his father. As he explained it, the clergy stipend back then wasn't nearly enough to feed the twelve members of the Halapua family, so his father put food on the table using his expertise with a throw net. Little Winston's job was to gather the fish his father took from the net and form them into a sort of raft to float back to the main...

I didn't take a lot of photos on the Camino; as often as not, taking snaps just didn't seem appropriate, but some of the ones I did take I am now putting into my Camino posts. Actually, the pictures are a mix of mine and Clemency's. For those interested in that sort of thing, the camera I used was a Nikon Coolpix P7100 . It is an excellent camera, though very prone to water damage. Clemency began the trip using a tiny Samsung point 'n' shoot, but after a very short while put it in the bottom of her pack and used her cellphone, an HTC One V . Her results were pretty impressive. You can check our photos out by looking at the older posts, below. I hope to finish posting pictures in the next few days. And in the meantime, here are a few others: A view from the city wall, Astorga Complicated overbridge specifically for the Camino, just before Astorga local bodies take the Camino and its infrastructure and also care of pilgrims very seriously. It is, after a...

We had an easier than expected flight back. Clemency sat in a wheelchair which meant we went straight to the front of the queue when boarding or going through customs, and there was always some pleasant person who knew where they were going to push her around the miles of airport corridors. We arrived home late on Thursday afternoon, and on Sunday had a pretty full day. In the morning we went to Oamaru for the 150th anniversary of St. Luke's parish, and in the evening to the cathedral so that I could dedicate the wonderful stained glass window donated to the cathedral and to the city by the Cullington family. The window is a truly magnificent piece, crafted by local artist Peter MacKenzie from Stella Cullington's ideas. Kiri Te Kanawa was the model for St. Cecilia who frames the right hand side of the window and modesty forbids me from telling you who was the model for St. Paul who stands on the left. Apart from rushing around the countryside and blessing windows and so fo...

I'm in Kuala Lumpur, waiting for a plane to Auckland. I have texts and emails from the home, and pictures from my children waiting in Whatsapp, but none of the life I will pick up again tomorrow seems, as yet, quite real. I have been astonished at how completely the Camino Santiago de Compostela had taken over my mental processes. There is another sense that the Camino is a spiritual exercise; that is, for the entire time one is walking the Camino, one lives in the now. Every day a pilgrim lives with a long term overall goal, that of reaching Santiago but until the last couple of hours on the last day that is just some vague future possibility that you hope will one day arrive, like retirement or Christmas. Every day there is a smaller goal: that of reaching the town you have designated as the next night's resting place, but that will inevitably happen, probably around 2 o'clock and can't be hurried, so that is never much in mind either. Instead of the immediate...

The trick to seeing Santiago Cathedral is to get there early. It opens at 7.00 am every morning, though it is the back doors that are open, not the big front ones. We got there around 8.15 and basically spent the morning there. The first thing for me to do was to visit the crypt and pray before the bones of St. James. I´m not entirely sure why, as readers of previous posts will know, but somehow, for me the Camino was not complete until I had done this. There in a small cellar, down a flight of steps was a silver casket containing James´ mortal remains. A young woman prayed before them and then pushed several copies of her CV through the grill to lie before the coffin. Unemployment is high in Spain, and I guess both her faith and her intention were obvious, and I found the sight intensely moving. I knelt there and remembered several things. A parish priest who, at the end of his pilgrims blessing had asked us to pray for his parish when we got to Santiago. Then a farmer tending ...

   Track on the last day I spy with my little eye, something beginning with... Waiting on the Cathedral steps... encountering angels... The final walk into Santiago was, in many ways anticlimactic. From Arca I walked in the dark along the soft earth of a path through an oak forest and began a gentle climb. By the time the sun rose the towns were becoming frequent and had taken on a particular character, that of subsidiary settlements to a large city. Around 11.00 I passed the Santiago city limits but still had 11 km to go before I hit the big smoke. Soon it was kilometre after kilometre of senda path following a straight two lane tarmac road, then an amazingly ugly sculpture on the top of Mt. Gozo, then the suburbs. I crossed motorways, walked past and through shopping centres, waited at pedestrian crossings, dodged cars on roundabouts. And without much warning, after an hour or so of suburban trudging there were the towers of the cathedral looming o...

A few people asked me before I left New Zealand how I intended to continue my spiritual practice while walking. The answer which I have arrived at over these past couple of weeks is that the Camino IS my spiritual practice. I go to mass but don´t take the sacrament. I pray daily and when I can manage, use the Jesus Prayer as I walk, but these are secondary. I repeat: the Camino IS my practice. Now I suppose I have to explain what I mean by that, and I am writing this after four hour´s walk through some very beautiful Spanish countryside and after a Spanish beer. Spain serves the largest beers in the world: ¿ will that be a bucket or a rather unmanly half bucket sir ? and today´s was the coldest in the world, I kid you not; the foam froze to the side of the glass between the bar and my table. A day or two ago I became very annoyed at some English graffiti. An adolescent hand had written on a wall, "Go home tourism "pilgrims" ". A crude picture pointed out that t...

Yesterday wasn´t a great day. Clemency felt so much better that she decided to walk on, and even to carry a pack. So, we set out early from Palas du Rei and walked slowly out of town intending to stop at the first cafe for breakfast. The trouble was, we moved just a little bit too slowly and by the time we got the requisite 2 km down the road the cafe was overwhelmed by pilgrims and had put out the Sorry Full signs. So we walked on to the next one, which didn´t turn up until around 11:00. All our carefully worked out rules of hydration and nourishment were torpedoed and we paid for it. Clemency, with an amazing show of courage, walked for about 10 km before she had to sit down on a farmer´s stone wall at about 11.30 and ask a passing Spaniard to phone her a taxi. The taxi indicated it would be there at mid day, and we decided she would take the packs in back seat comfort to the next town, Melide, while I walked on. Clemency was in considerable discomfort, but I was not far behind ...

The Camino has a way of working things out for you. When we were trying to figure out what to do for the next few days, we met two South Africans, Shirley and Lara. A mother and daughter they had been walking for a few days and Shirley was not able to continue. So it was decided Clemency and Shirley would catch the bus to the next town and Lara and I would walk together. It worked out pretty well. Clemency made it to Portomarin with a minimum of trouble and I walked 36 km through soft forest paths, up a couple of gentle hills and through any number of delightful country villages. For most of the way I had the company of a lovely young woman who shared with me some of the reasons she is walking the Path of Miracles. The sun shone, the route was gentle and the scenery as pleasant as any we had encountered. Just after sunrise, just out of Samos About 11.00 am Lara and I passed through Sarria and past the best equipped Camino shop I had ever seen. There was every conceivable type o...