Day 27

Which way now? I knew I had to make a decision once I arrived in Logroño and I still hadn’t made it when I left the hostel at 11.30. I was tired, not too tired to walk, the body has been doing well, my back has been better than it has been in years. Pulling the walking cart has strengthened the muscles in my lower back and keep the discs that herniated in the past in place. My physiotherapist advised me not to walk but I believe that walking can cure, as long as you take care of and listen to your body. I’ve seen a lot of walkers who overdo it or are unprepared, walk too much or too fast, get injured, then are forced to stop and lose the time they thought they were gaining.

I am tired of the Camino, of the rules, the commerce, the countless people all doing the same thing. There is a lot of beauty in it as well but today I don’t want to say “Bon Camino!” 20 times. I don’t want to explain I am not walking The Camino even though I am on the same road as all the people walking to Santiago de Compostella. I am behind on my schedule (not much of a schedule, the goal was to be in/around Logroña after 20 days and today is day 27), I am behind on my writing but it is the way it is. Walking and being and spending nights outdoors and talking with people takes its time. Even when I write, I only scratch the surface, writing in more depth is impossible. That is fine as well, after all that is what I am doing physically as well, scratching the surface every day. I am not behind on my walking kilometres, around 400, and the subject I want to address in more detail at some point, the territory, is present inbetween the lines, under the surface, in my notebook and memory and camera.
Which way now? Take a bus to the north and walk from there? The best route in the North is the Camino del Norte, I heard there are even more people than there are here. The problem of walking through the territory between the Northern Camino and the one I’ve been walking, the Camino Frances, is that it is rough terrain, a lot of mountains, limited public transport. Of course that is why the trails to Santiago are where they are: where walking is not too complicated.
What is progress? Keep moving or stay and rest and write? I know it doesn’t work like that but I opened the Tao randomly like I do every day to see if the chapter for today gives me some guidance, a hint. It is as good a way to make a decision as thinking it through is. I got chapter 8, about water.

The highest form of goodness is like water
Water knows how to benefit all things without striving with them.
It stays in places loathed by all men
Therefore, it comes near the Tao

Yesterday I crossed the Ebro, the longest river in Spain, to enter the centre of Logroño. This morning I watched 2 men when I was sitting in front of the cathedral. One was cleaning the plaça with a big hose, the other was watering all the flowers and trees with a similar hose. But in the north there is the sea. Which water should I chose, staying or leaving?

I look at the man on his horse, high up on an enormous pedestal, surrounded by words chiselled in stone: fortaleza, patria, lealtad, victoria. Birds fly around his head. There are no answers here. I go to the Punto de Lecturo, a library in public space with a terrace around it, there are a couple of busses in the afternoon in northern direction, there is time to decide. I hope they have some poetry and when I go in I discover they specialise in poetry and there is a beautiful collection to chose from. I take Machado, Whitman and Basho, seat myself outside and breath. There is no decision, there is only poetry, that is until a man walks up to me and asks me about my walking cart and if I am walking to Santiago and before I know it he is telling me the story of his life and shows me photos of his son who is on holiday in the French Pyrennees, photo after photo of beautiful landscapes and a man in swimming trunks standing next to a lake, under a waterfall, on a towel in the sand. My rule number one is to listen to people when they ask for my time and attention but I have to control myself to not tell him “Please, can’t you see I am reading?” He says he lived in many places but they are all the same. He says one shouldn’t read in summer, winter is the time for reading. He leaves, I read, I decide to stay. I have to regain some energy.

So I stay. And I go to the other Punto de Lecturo, a converted aviary in a park where there are books about birds and plants, La Pajarera, and there is Thoreau and Rachel Carson but I read a book I don’t know, The bird within me, based on the paintings, letters and diaries of the Swedish artist Berta Hansson. There is a statue of a man there as well, but it isn`t made of stone, it is a wood, a man holding a book, on a pedestal as well but the pedestal is the trunk of a tree and he has no feet, as if they are one, the tree and he. It is Don Quixote, looking serious and sad. His head is covered in bird shit, there are feathers everywhere around him.