A Poem Sent by Kate

When you travel,

A new silence

Goes with you,

And if you listen,

You will hear

What your heart would

Love to say.

A journey can become a sacred thing:

Make sure, before you go,

To take the time

To bless your going forth,

To free your heart of ballast

So that the compass of your soul

Might direct you toward

The territories of spirit

Where you will discover

More of your hidden life,

And the urgencies

That deserve to claim you.

May you travel in an awakened way,

Gathered wisely into your inner ground;

That you may not waste the invitations

Which wait along the way to transform you.

May you travel safely, arrive refreshed,

And live your time away to its fullest;

Return home more enriched, and free

To balance the gift of days which call you.

(credit - John O'Donohue - thank you Kate!)

The arrival of this poem made me think of this ...
a bronze from the Alto del Perdon
Camino de Santiago

Day 4, Chapter 4, Letter to Ted

Reading Out Loud

Listen to an interview with Mary Ito on CBC Fresh Air on the morning of the performance http://www.cbc.ca/freshair/2010/11/saturday-nov-27.html

And look at these gorgeous photos taken by Wayne Eardley. This what it looks like to read the letters out loud as a call and response with Ravi and Ernie, and Besharah, as if one might be a whale, as if one believed in frozen music...

At the end of the evening,  Ravi's father quoted Einstein to me:

"No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. "

For those who have read the book, this would be the math solution I've been looking for.  Ravi's father is a math professor and knows of what he speaks.

It was an amazing night.

Getting Ready to Play with Ravi Again

THE CAMINO LETTERS in PERFORMANCE

Saturday, November 27^th, 2010, 7:30 p.m.

Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, Toronto, Ontario

I drove to Toronto in the rain this morning to drink cappucino with Ravi and finish planning for Saturday. And so the countdown has begun...  

Today was only the third or fourth time I've seen Ravi since I got back from Spain with my letters.  Before that I hadn't seen him since we were teenagers, but I was thinking of him because of a huge butterfly I wrote about in Chapter 2.  Ravi and I also used to float toothpicks down the melting rivers in the street in the spring.  I remember that, and I remember that sometimes we whispered about magic - though not very often.

I hope Ravi's mom and dad are able to come on Saturday because both of mine are gone. Ravi's mom remembers my great big butterfly right down to the last detail - I remember that it was black and white, she remembers that it also had yellow on the inner part of its wings.  It was as huge and wondrous as I remember from when I was six - I know that because she told me so. Ravi's mom believes in magic too, I think, and she was my mom's friend.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with Lizzie and her band Besharah.  Lizzie and I travel around in a grown-up version of connect the dots - that's what Lizzie and I do.   And so I met Brandon and Carey and Saskia for the first time and, driving home, I realized that I will never be the same after being in their company with the music that they are wrapping around my letters.  I think Saskia and I would agree that it's about the fugual nature of things, but that is another story that you will need to hear in music rather than words.

None of this is part of my plan for my life.  I've never stood on a stage anywhere.  I didn't do theatre when I was young.  I can't sing to save my life.  If you had told me a year ago that this - all of this - would be the life I was living I would have said:  Never.  Not ever.  Not me.

I stand and talk all the time as a lawyer. But I face in one direction and I say planned and scripted words, crafted for a specific purpose and offered to the judge sitting ahead and up high.  What I'm doing with Ravi on Saturday is not that.  That's for sure. 

I can't wait to see what magic Ravi and I are going to make this time, with new friends, floating along once again on our little toothpick boats.

Snails

Excerpts from The Camino Letters...

Chapter 5 / Lorca / Step

I am not joking about the bad mood - I was in a hideously intense mood, full of rage and regret and emotions I can barely name.  

I'm not sure what caught my eye exactly, but I saw something in the dirt and so went closer to look.  I dug it out and it was the most beautiful snail shell, larger than I would have expected to find on land.  

... Today, as I dug my snails, I sat on the path in the dirt and cried a small river from the physical pain of the past five days and the sheer relief of being alone. .... I have never considered the importance of solitude in protecting myself from all of the stickiness. I am so glad that I was alone today with my little snail shells and my dirty fingernails on that stupid, horrible path.

Chapter 15 / Triacastela / Sleep

The snails cling to the thick blades of grass by the hundreds and when they die they fall to the ground and are buried.  I have a beautiful picture, which I will show you.  It is exactly what you are talking about.  There is a magical geometry to these shells - I have spent a lot of time pondering them on the path since I am now carrying all of them with me.  Snails are also very sensual beings, according to people who have seen them up close.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7YIu_fzImg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BseGLUTkD8

A Review from South Africa

Camino Letters - A Review

The ‘Camino’ is the common name for a network of medieval pilgrimage routes through Europe leading to the tomb of the apostle St James the Greater which is housed in a cathedral in the city named after him - Santiago de Compostela – in north western Spain.

After deciding to spring clean her busy life and close down her legal practice so that she can spend a month in her garden, forty year-old Canadian Julie Kirkpatrick decides instead, practically on a whim, to walk six hundred kilometres of the Camino de Santiago pilgrims’ path in Spain with her seventeen year old daughter.  

She knows little about the thousand year-old pilgrimage trail and does no physical training for the gruelling hike that starts in the Pyrenees Mountains, crosses three mountain ranges and ends at Finsisterre on the Atlantic coast.  

Before leaving home, she asks twenty-six friends to set her a task for each day that she will be walking.  Many of the tasks are imaginative and surprisingly thought provoking.  Besides being asked to recite mantras and prayers, to think about the millions who have gone before her, to listen to the wind or to other people, she is asked to determine what events transpired in her life to lead her to Spain and what she hopes to gain from the experience. One friend prophetically asks her to write the first chapter of a book in her head as she walks.  As she steadfastly completes each new task they become a rite of passage, sometimes painful and angst ridden, sometimes joyful, filled with music and light, and sometimes esoteric (her day and night at the Templar shelter in Manjarin - page 147).

This beautifully written, heartfelt book is not a travelogue about walking the Camino in Spain.  The pilgrimage trail is the landscape through which the writer passes, a transient backdrop to her daily tasks which evolve into a fascinating patchwork of self discoveries, miscellaneous emotions, thoughts, memories and life changing decisions, woven into twenty-six exquisitely honest letters written to her friends when she returns from Spain 
[correction:  the letters were written as I walked].  

“I have decided to throw off the cynical and pessimistic world that I have created around myself and love my life, as the true spark of light that it is.  Paso por paso. Step by step. I have my proof.”

This book will appeal to all, but especially to women, mothers, daughters, and mothers of daughters.