Leaving el Ganso and heading to the woods. Going to find a nice place to set up camp.

Back when all my little goals seemed so important
Every pot of gold fill and full of distortion
Heaven was a place still in space not in motion
But soon

I got you
I got everything
I’ve got you
I don’t need nothing
More than you
I got everything
I’ve got you

We went walking through the hills
Tryin’ to pretend that we both know
Maybe if we save up
We can build a little home
But then the hail storm came and yelled
“You need to let go, you’ve got no control. No”

I got you
I got everything
I’ve got you
I don’t need nothing
More than you
I got everything
I’ve got you

This weight’s too much alone
Some days I can’t hold it at all
You take it on for me
When tomorrow’s too much
I’ll carry it all
I’ve got you

And when tomorrow’s too much
I’ll carry it all
I got you

I got you
I got everything
I’ve got you
I don’t need nothing
More than you
I got everything
I’ve got you

Jack Johnson

We may be going all the way to Cruz de Ferro, who knows! No plan, just pilgrimage.

Foncebadón

Staying at a lovely vegetarian albergue tonight in Pieros called El Serbal y La Luna. Complete with a beautiful meditation/yoga/massage room, bunk beds that look like they belong in Tarzan’s treehouse, and amazing, nourishing homemade meals. No wifi though- a lovely man has gifted me his wifi from his iPad, along with his family granola recipe. In return, I’ve given him some magnesium to help him sleep. Camino magic, Camino love.

xoxoxo

I think I just walked 40k. I don’t know. Everything hurts but holy crap what a stunning hike through the mountains.

Mansilla de las Mulas.

El Acebo

No interwebs yesterday…

“Introduction; Nothingness” by Hayden Calnin

If you are aware of a state which you call is,
Or reality,
Or life,
This implies another state called isn’t,
Or illusion or unreality,
Or nothingness,
Or death.
There it is-
You can’t have one without the other.
And so as to make life poignant,
It’s always going to come to an end.
That is exactly, don’t you see, what makes it lively.
Liveliness is change, it’s motion.
So, you see, you’re always at the place where you always are.
And you think, ‘wowie, little further on and we’ll get there. I hope that we don’t go further down so that we lose what we already have.’
But that is built into every creature’s situation,
No matter how high,
No matter how low.
So, in this sense all places are the same place,
And the only time you ever notice any difference is in the moment of transition.
When you go up a bit, you gain.
When you go down a bit, you feel disappointed, gloomy, lost.
You can go all the way down to death.
Somehow, there seems to be a difficulty in getting all the way up.
Death seems so final,
Nothingness seems so very, very irrevocable and permanent.
But then if it is, what about the nothingness that was before you started?
On the contrary, it takes nothing to have something,
‘Cause you wouldn’t know what something was without nothing.
You wouldn’t be able to see anything, unless there was nothing behind your eyes.
The most real state is the state of nothing.
That’s what it’s going to all come to.

This is one of my very favorite songs. Makes ya think.

We (Frederikka, a Dane, and Ramon, Spanish architect living in London) started our climb into the mountains in just the weather guidebooks warn against, hill fog. But everyone assured us it would be fine.  And we were following the one agreed-upon stipulation: don’t go up there alone.  We walked up into the fog and then through it, and then we saw the sun through the fog, and soon the sun cut the fog and we were in a new world. All day up, across and down the Hospitales route, with the ruins of earlier pilgrim hospitals sprinkled over the top of the mountain.  The promised wild horses were there.  And it was wonderful.  Frederikka spilled most of her water early in the trek, so we conserved. Near what we thought was the end of the downhill we were all out of water, but there was water dripping down plants from the mountain so we filled our bottles,  slowly, from the drips. Sated with water, we started walking again.  Five minutes later we were in a bar in the town that was just around the corner, unseen, from our hydration station.  In the albergue in Berducedo for tonight.

Molinaseca! Set my personal record at 37k. There is an immense variety of wild flowers in the valley before reaching town.