(no subject)

Oh Lincoln. You and your blatant advertisement.

Good idea! +3

I do have quite a lot of information up now on the blog I link to in the praxis (the word "availab le" in "make it available". Yeah, it's kind of hidden. Maybe I ought to fix that.) Right now I've got the first 20 days up there. But, as I do think it leaves out some details, an answer to your question:

I met an angel, and I met a demon. Well... Not quite an angel, and not quite a demon. Instead of angel, I might say ... an acolyte or - i suppose - a holy pilgrim. And instead of demon, I think it would be more appropriate to say sprite, or pixie (though he wouldn't have taken kindly to that) or elf, if you use the old meaning and ignore the Tolkeinization. We'll go with acolyte and sprite, because they rhyme.

I met the sprite first, on my 8th day walking. His name was Joel. He was born in France, had lived in Ireland for nine years, and currently owned a garage in Italy that he occasionally slept in. As a result of all of that, he spoke French, Italian, and English fluently. And as a result of his self-proclaimed addiction to the Camino I think, he spoke Spanish fluently as well. Everything he had was green. That's not strictly true, but true enough. He had an army surplus backpack, and a jacket to match which he wore draped over the backpack like a scarecrow when it was warm. He wore a tubular knit hat that made his head look longer than it was, and a pointed grey beard that made it look longer still. His ears may have been pointy as well. He constantly wore a foolish smile and his blue eyes had a tendency to twinkle. He hunched when he walked.
When I met him he was making a tobacco pouch out of some scrap leather a woman had given him in Florence. That was how he made his money. He'd make the pouches, and sell them for upwards of 15€ apiece. Or he might trade them and give them as gifts. I lost track of him after a few days, but those pouches kept showing up around me for weeks. Other than the money from the pouches, he was penniless. He'd been so for many years. And it was easy to see why. When I was with him, he had just come into a large sum of money, something like 40 or 50 euro, and during the day we walked together he bought two bottles of wine, two pouches of tobacco, as well as a variety of other consumables. Drank one and a quarter of the bottles for lunch, sharing them around, and tucked the remainder inside the lapel of his jacket, which he wore just for the occasion. He always seemed to have what the people around him needed, and was more than willing to share.
He was doing his fourth camino when I met him. His third without money. His first during winter. "It's a drug," he told me, taking a drag on a spliff. And he was definitely one for drugs. One of the few people I met who never complained about the ill effects cigarettes had on his health. He didn't care. He loved tobacco. His favorite expressions were "yee-haw" and "fuck it." Before I left him, he told me to do my own Camino. He told me that the Camino would provide, that I didn't need to worry about finding friends or food. I'd meet everyone I needed to meet, and I'd get everything I needed to get. He gave me a leather pouch to hold the money I made juggling. He was a good man, for a given value of good and - if my mystical thinking is to be indulged - a given value of man.

The acolyte I met later, on the 19th day of my camino. I'd heard of him from Joel weeks before, and from others as well. He was the pilgrim from California everyone thought was crazy. They said that he'd been traveling for something like 10 years, and that he sharpened knives for a living. Before I met him, I'd been following rumors I picked up at the albergues, trying to catch up with him, if only to meet a fellow countryman. I thought he was four days ahead of me when he walked into my room.
"God knows." he said, glancing at the ceiling and smiling.
We instantly got to talking. He told me about his pilgrimage, which had indeed been going on for ten years. He'd traveled all through the Western US, then down to Mexico (though, despite having lived there for several years, he spoke Spanish with an unforgivable Californian accent). From there, he'd been invited to Jerusalem, and from there to London. After London, a lucky ride with some members of the 12 tribes of israel had taken him to the start of the Camino. He showed me a map of his route in a taped-together day-planner, and as he continued to talk I leafed through it and found that it was also a sort of journal. One of the entries began "today it changed and I saw evil at the bottom of the stairs..."
Dante - that was his name - looked much older than I'd expected him to. He had long black hair fading to grey, and a big squared-off white beard. His eyes were big and sincere to the point of being terrifying sometimes. His hands were hard and the skin looked ill-fitting, too tight when he opened them and too lose when he relaxed them. He spoke to god on a regular basis. He told me the story of the first time. To condense it a bit - I can tell the whole story if there's interest - he despaired, crying out for god to help him, and then something snapped and he felt a sudden manic calmness. Manic in that he claims not to have blinked for hours. God showed him Jesus' star, and then guided him to his bible and showed him a passage describing exactly what he was experiencing. He read for hours, finally understanding the scripture. Then he had a vision of waking up in a strange room with a very distinctive painting of a rose on the wall. A few weeks later, he moved into an apartment with that very painting.
I travelled with him for the next two days, and came to the conclusion that he was a bit mad, but that his madness made him a force for good. When my horrible shoes began cutting my feet, he asked at a nearby bar and found some other shoes for me to wear. He gave my Korean friends cooking advice, and entertained us with a swedish harp that had a mexican resonance box specially attached to it.
But he had his quirks. He couldn't eat breakfast until god told him it was okay. He kept to Jewish law as well as Christian, and so usually ended up not eating with the rest of us. He woke very early every day, left the room where we were sleeping, and wailed and chanted off-key prayers in the hall. He insisted every toast be to god, and that every meal begin with a long and repetitious praise of the incredible mercy of Jesus Christ. I left him the day after Christmas.

You asked for one person. Why did I give you two? Because in a lot of ways they were the same man. Both Joel and Dante had crafts that fed and sheltered them on their journey. Neither had much money. Both lived on faith. Both had wisdom to impart. But what fascinated me was how they got to such a similar place by such different paths. Leather versus steel, hobo versus pilgrim, magic versus religion, drugs versus divine ecstasy.

During my journey, everyone I left behind caught up with me a few days or weeks later. Everyone except for these two.

Any other questions?

(no subject)

Thank you, that was amazing! I'll be reading your link...

(no subject)

No problem. Let me know if there's anything else you're curious about :)
Anything I write down is one more thing I'll be sure to remember.

(no subject) +1

The journal is great. I second Lincoln's recommendation that everyone check it out!
My new question is, could you comment on your experience of the religious aspect of the pilgrimage? (Because I got the sense that you aren't necessarily a devout follower of the religion that this route is usually associated with?)

(no subject)

Anything I write down is one more thing I'll be sure to remember.