(A well edited) Packing List

After reading a three page sample of my book, my will-be editor suggests removing almost a third of my content. “Less is more,” she says. This again.

On the Camino, they say, your backpack should weigh no more than 10% of your body weight (for me, 11 pounds). Despite this, I started out with a 22 pound pack. After my very first day on the Camino I mailed home almost six pounds of stuff. It was an early lesson in editing, and it was liberating.

So now, when asked to consider getting rid of a whole bunch of words, I will remember that there is a certain freedom in getting by with only what is essential. Less IS more. Keep it light. Shed the excess. It is all, in the end, a lesson in letting go.

For any of you planning to walk a Camino, I thought it may be helpful to have a (well edited) packing list. Here it is:

In a 45L Gregory backpack I packed:
• A pair of collapsible hiking poles with removable rubber tips
• 1.5L platypus (a bag to hold water with a sipping tube)
• A Spork and an airplane-legal camping knife.
• 1/3 roll of toilet paper
• A few of each of the following: Advil, Cold FX, cough drops
• Assorted Band-Aids (regular, butterfly and for blisters)
• Guide book (the non-essential pages torn out)
• Compact head lamp
• Cell phone with charger and European plug converter
• A super small hair dryer (don’t judge me – it came in handy for drying my shoes when they got wet.)
• Toiletries: small toothpaste, tooth brush, tinted powder sunscreen (face), 100ml sunscreen lotion (body), hotel sized shampoo and conditioner, half a bar of soap, travel sized deodorant, nail clippers, dental floss, mascara.
• Safety pins (to pin wet laundry to my backpack) – ESSENTIAL!
• Castil Soap – natural, biodegradable all-purpose soap that worked great for doing laundry by hand
• 1 pair of double layer socks
• 3 pairs of performance quick-dry underwear (expensive but worth it)
• 2 sports bras
• Keen hiking sandals (which carried me the whole 250 kilometers!)
• A pair of foam flip-flops for the hostels
• A ball cap
• 1 ultra-light neck scarf (as sun protection)
• 1 wool Pashmina
• 1 long sleeved performance shirt
• 2 short sleeved performance T-shirts
• 1 fleece with built-in cuff mittens
• 1 waterproof ultra lightweight rain jacket
• ¾ length performance tights
• 1 pair performance shorts (for layering and for sleeping in)
• A tank top for sleeping in
• Zip-off cargo pants (with pockets)
• 1 ‘lounge-wear’ style dress that could be worn both as a night gown and out on the town
• Quick-dry, chamois-style travel towel
• A pillow case
• Light weight sleeping bag
• Security belt that held my passport, 400 Euros, a bank card and a credit card
• Small, flat day-purse
• A written version of my itinerary (this proved to be essential in times of limited internet access)
• A tennis ball. Yes, a tennis ball. A portable massage therapist for tight hips and soles of the feet.

 

The Way

2011
I lay delirious on my couch. It’s been a day and a half since I last ate. I haven’t been this sick in years. Maybe the grief has finally gotten to me.
Despite my pounding headache and blurred vision, boredom inspires me to watch a movie. I scroll briefly through the options and settle on a movie called “The Way” with Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. It’s about ‘The Camino’, a pilgrimage in Europe I know nothing about, but the description makes it sound like I won’t have to think very hard. What could be simpler than walking?
I hit Play and the Universe plants its seed.

~

I watched “The Way” for the fifth time last week. Some people would call this an addiction. I call it research. This time, though, was my first time watching the version with the director’s commentary; Emilio Estevez, his father, Martin Sheen and the film’s producer speak with each other as the film plays, muted, on the screen. I was glad to have four previous viewings under my belt – I could almost recite the lines by memory as the three men explained their intentions behind each scene. Sheen divulges that the movie took six years to realize from its inception. It took them six years to get their story told. That sounds like a long time. I am already struggling with the idea that my book will take longer to write than the gestation period of a human being. While someone out there is using their next nine months to create a whole new person, I am getting through only a portion of the book-writing process. What have I gotten myself into?

When Sheen and Estevez are asked about their own experience walking the Camino they say “Pilgrimage is reconnecting on a human level”, “You have to carry your own burdens. All the things you’ve created – your judgements, your fears, your sins, your resentments, your joys. Take up your bag and start walking, but know that you cannot do it without community.“

The movie’s slogan flashes across the screen: ‘Life is too big to walk it alone’, and I am reminded that I am, in fact, still on pilgrimage. We all are. We always have been. And though the journey may be long, we are walking it together, and I am grateful.

Present Tense

“Write drunk, edit sober.”

-Ernest Hemingway

It appears I have many, many hours of sobriety ahead of me.

I was, what I am estimating to be, half way thorough my book (30,000 words) when I unconsciously switched from writing in the past tense to the present. I was describing a pivotal scene in my Camino – an emotional one, and in writing about it, I was transported so thoroughly back to that moment, it was like I was literally living it again.

Around the same time, I had taken an editing workshop for ‘writers in the midst of a manuscript’, and though the feedback I received on the three page sample I provided included such praise as “cinematic, descriptive and wonderful creation of atmosphere”, the constructive comments revealed that I was sometimes writing very emotional content with very academic language.This, I realized, was absolutely true. I was looking back on what were deeply moving, highly spiritual, intensely emotional right-brained events from the perspective of my intellectual, fact-based left brain. I was editing while I was writing. I was sober for what I should have been doing drunk. So, I have begun the task of taking the academic in me out of my story – of letting my right brain lead the way by becoming present. Literally.  (Ironically, this is one of the reasons I walked the Camino. I wanted to practice living life from a right-brained perspective.) Lesson learned…again.

Changing language from past to present tense is proving to be therapeutic. It is a reminder that the present is where real life takes place. I hope that this transformation of text will serve to bring you, the reader, into the story with me. To experience it as if you were there too. After all, I would much rather bring you along on the journey with me than simply gathering you together afterwards and explaining myself through a looking glass.

So, allow me to raise a glass (of water) and propose a toast to relaxing into the The Present Tense – where it’s not actually tense at all. It is, in fact, quite liberating.

XOXO

The opposite of writer’s block.

People ask me all the time if I’ve had writer’s block yet. The answer is always ‘no’. It is quite the opposite. I am constantly writing, even if I have no where to put the words. I get woken up in the middle of the night and am fed my lines. At the most inopportune times I am overwhelmed with things to add, things to edit, things to say.  Sometimes I feel as though I am not the writer of this book at all – I am simply the medium through which this story is passing.

I  keep a pad of paper and a pen by the side of my bed. It is for those times that I wake up and cannot get back to sleep until I submit to whatever energy is wanting to drive this story forward. Last night I was woken up by the sensation of my spirit soaring like some kind of piano concerto. I scribbled  down the memory of walking with Eunyeong, a Korean pilgrim who had quite her job and two days later showed up on the Camino Portuguese with borrowed gear. Her shoes were not even her own. We shared a major language barrier, and yet we seemed to have an intense connection. The day we met on the Camino we had both been crying for the same reason – we were overwhelmed by the kindness of others. She had met a Portuguese man – a stranger, who had honored her as a pilgrim by washing her feet and dressing her blisters. They too did not share a language.

After days of struggling to share out thoughts with each other, Eun broke a long stretch of silence and said to me (and this is the line I scribbled down late last night), “I cannot understand your words but I can hear your heart. I feel what you feel.”

When I woke this morning, I had a message from Eunyeong. At precisely the time I was writing down her words she was sending me these:

“I am listening to piano music – “Annees de Pelerinage” (Years of Pilgrimage) by Franz Lisze. It is not easy to express myself in English, but I think about the Camino with you.”

 

Do you see now? I am not the writer of these stories. I am just the teller. 

I am afflicted with the opposite of writer’s block.

 

A Calling

Last week, while attending Winnipeg’s monthly Camino Coffee evening – a lively rendezvous of seasoned and perspective pilgrims (Join us! Everyone is welcome!), I was asked, once again, why I decided to walk the Camino. For the first time ever I was able to sum it up with a quick and concise response: “It wasn’t a decision – I was called.” I was then asked the question, “Why did you decide to write a book?”. My answer was the same.

These were not things I planned on doing. But in both cases there was a quiet nagging, a  persistent unrest, that would not allow me to go on without acknowledging the need first to walk and then to write. The writing of this book was so far off my radar that, ironically, I pledged that I would not take pictures, put pen to paper or do anything other than rely on the experience of the Camino itself to leave an impression on me while I walked. I therefore have no images, no documentation and very little concrete evidence that I was even there. I am relying on my photographic memory, some pieced-together texts and a widely-opened heart to serve as my proof. I am relieved to report that I was right – this is all I need to tell the story. It is inside of me, waiting to be recalled. Waiting to be transformed into words.  Waiting to transform its readers. Just as the experience transformed me.

Let the journey begin.

 

Foreword

I walked the Camino Portuguese de Santiago in the fall of 2015. I am constantly being asked to describe my experience there – people genuinely want to know what it was like. But every time I open my mouth to respond, nothing comes out. A Camino, it seems, is too enormous to sum up in a sentence or even a conversation. So, my answer will be coming in the form of a book.

Writing a book, much like walking a Camino, is a slow process. So for those of you who’ve asked; for those of you who really want to know, waiting for a book to be born may prove to be tortuous. This blog is my way of sharing my journey with you, little pieces at a time – both the journey of book-writing and ultimately, the journey of walking a Camino.

Thanks for coming along with me.

Bom Camino.