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“A Blessing”
During the summer of 1999, I traveled to Spain to walk the Camino of Santiago, or Way of Saint James, a pilgrimage that I began in the Pyrenees and followed across the north of Spain to the medieval town of Santiago, some thirty miles from the Atlantic Ocean, and more than two hundred miles from the Camino’s starting point in the small village of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, just across the French border. Although I made the traditional visit to the cathedral where I kissed the stone lips of a saint, I did not complete the ancient process of symbolic rebirth by going all the way to Finisterre to burn my clothes and immerse myself in the cold, salt ocean.
Nevertheless, as I had hoped but in ways I could never have anticipated, the weeks of walking had worked profoundly on me. During my twenty-eight day journey, the concerns that had brought me to Spain—concerns centered on the end of my marriage and the uncertainty of my future—began to fall away. My hips loosened, the spaces between my ribs seemed to expand, and I felt myself breathing more fully. Soon, I was walking more securely and simultaneously more gently upon the earth.
***
In his essay on walking, Thoreau calls this sort of movement ‘sauntering.’ To understand his meaning, the history of the word becomes crucial. Sauntering, Thoreau tells us, returns us to those “people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity under pretense of going á la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land....” In Thoreau’s understanding, a true saunterer—someone sans terre—is one with no particular land or home, and simultaneously one who is at home everywhere.
I learned how to saunter during my month on the Camino, in part because the Spanish people maintain such abiding respect for the pilgrims, especially in the small villages. Their welcoming hospitality, which might mean anything from a warm greeting to the invitation to partake of a family meal, inevitably plays an essential role in enabling the pilgrim, Thoreau’s saunterer, to feel at home everywhere.
Ironically, sauntering here in West Texas, a region I have inhabited for five years, has not been so easy, in part because so much of my life in this semi-arid landscape has been focused on work and its unfortunate companions: stress and more recently, physical pain. As a way into cultivating a new attitude towards mind and body, I have taken to walking the tree-lined streets of my neighborhood, especially during the hours of late afternoon when the perpetual West Texas sun is still bright—but kinder.
Part of the reason I’ve taken to walking, especially at a time when most of my colleagues are still working dutifully at their research or course preparations, is a chronic myofascial problem I have been struggling with for more than two years now, a problem that began in my neck and eventually spread to my shoulders, upper back, and arms. This problem—one of muscle tightness and occasional muscle spasm—currently prevents me from sitting at my desk or computer for any real length of time. In addition to stretching and massage, walking is one of the most healthy activities I can do for my body, precisely because the body tries to re-align itself when one walks. We are creatures of movement, after all.
As for the source of this problem, almost ten years ago, I injured the intricate network of muscles of my neck and upper back while working on my dissertation on a laptop computer. Although this was and is a repetitive strain injury (RSI), the complicating factor—then and now—is the stress I hold within these areas of my body. At the time of the original injury, my ex-husband was having a lot of trouble managing bipolar disorder, an illness he was diagnosed with a year after we married, an illness that ultimately led him away from academia and into the ministry, a career and a lifestyle that I was in no way prepared to embrace.
While I channeled my energy and mental focus into my dissertation, my marriage was in the first serious stages of disintegration. A part of me knew this already, though it took time for me to fully face this fact—why I finished my dissertation in a year. Instead of dealing with my personal life, I worked. After a very difficult three and a half years, he and I finally divorced. In the months that followed, I began making plans to walk the Camino.
Throughout the next three years, I remained practically pain free. In my own mind, my muscles had re-learned their healthy patterns. I therefore looked at the gift of a laptop computer as a new opportunity. Somehow, I was not self-aware or attuned enough to the rhythms of my own body—and equally importantly, I was not educated enough about the nature of RSIs—to realize that the laptop encouraged incorrect body mechanics. Even more, it entered my life at another difficult period. This time, I was juggling a heavy teaching load in a non-tenure line job where I was earning very little money and had no job security. Simultaneously, I was trying to write and define the new relationship that had brought me from the Midwest to Texas. Some two months after I resumed intensive work on a laptop, muscle spasms erupted throughout my neck and upper back. With very little treatment from my primary care physician other than a series of prescriptions for anti-inflammatory medications and muscle relaxants, and with very little change in my lifestyle, beyond the compounded stress of trying to deal with the muscle pain that circumscribed the time I could spend working at a new ergonomic computer, the injury eventually spread to my forearms, wrists, and hands.
What few people outside the bodywork and alternative health care professions seem to fully recognize or respect is the innate interdependence of soft tissue. An injury that begins in the shoulders can easily travel to adjacent muscles through fascia, the web-like connective tissue that holds tissue in suspension and supports organs, nerves, and bone. I am not speaking metaphorically here, for there really is no beginning or end to fascia, which also acts as a transmitter. The strain of an original injury can therefore be transmitted via fascia to other vulnerable parts of the body.
***
During my weeks on the Camino, several extraordinary, even uncanny events took place. One of the most powerful involved my encounter with an older Brazilian woman named Erika, who I met in Navarre, a semi-arid region a few days walk from the Pyrenees. Erika had run out of water and still had several hours of walking before she reached the next village. After I offered her my canteen, we resumed the journey together, and she told me that she had decided to walk the Camino because she had never traveled alone. Now that the last of her five children had left home, she at last had the chance.
Slowly, I came to understand that to Erika I embodied an independent, tantalizingly unfamiliar breed of woman. At thirty, I had no children. I was committed to the pursuit of my own art, and to the nomadic vocation of university teaching. So too, having lived in urban centers throughout my adult life, I remained pretty fearless when it came to moving through new surroundings on my own.
Erika had something important to teach me, too. What I learned from her—a lesson I find myself having to re-learn, again and again, despite the way it resonated deeply within me, both then and now—is to trust the present; for it was Erika who told me not to mourn the past, and simultaneously Erika who stressed the futility of trying to anticipate the future.
“Who can possibly predict what lies ahead?” she said. “When you and I set out this morning, neither one of us had any idea of the other’s existence. And now,” she smiled, her amber eyes shining, “think of how much we know about each other. All this,” her voice lifted, “in just a few hours.”
During the three days that Erika and I spent in each other’s company, we shared our life stories; at least we shared the parts of our lives that seemed most relevant to our decision to walk. I told Erika about the end of my marriage to a man I had met during college, a man I once believed I would love, honor, and cherish until my death. At the time, I felt a great deal of guilt about my need to leave, despite the fact that I also knew there was no other way.
When I told my parents about the divorce, my father, with whom I have a more tenuous relationship, understood. My mother, with whom I have always been close, discouraged, then mourned my decision. My mother’s lack of support caused me a great deal of pain—and anger. After all, I tried to tell her, I was a woman at the beginning of my adult life. How could I be the caretaker—even if the care-taking was temporary—to my husband? And after the delusions that accompanied mania, not to mention the depression that followed, and all the other bio-chemical changes caused by the medications they prescribe through trial and error, how could I possibly find my way back to the adventurous, rangy man I had married during my first year of graduate school?
Erika was a woman close to my mother’s age and one who shared a strong family ethic and Catholic background. Yet she was also a woman with no emotional investment in me. Not only did she help me to literally walk through some of my most difficult emotions, she helped me to learn how to trust myself and the present more. And despite her own fears, or perhaps because of them—for she told me how difficult it was to divorce a husband who had been unfaithful to her throughout their twenty-five years of marriage, a husband whose behavior her culture largely sanctioned, a husband a deep part of her still loved—I trusted the wisdom of what she had to tell me.
In a small village some thirty miles from Pamplona, Erika and I hugged each other tightly before saying Hasta la vista— ‘Until we meet again.’ Though I have not seen Erika in almost six years, I continue to think back to what she told me about trying to ground myself in the present. And I continue to try to re-learn a gift that seemed so effortless on the Camino, where the present overflowed with so much: weather, foot pain, thirst, beauty; and a feast of sensory experiences, from cowbells in the green hills of Galicia to the fragrant eucalyptus trees in the environs of Santiago.
***
A few blocks from where I live, there is a house with a ramp leading up to the doorway. I passed the house, a nondescript gray ranch with a series of clay flowerpots lining the walk, many times before I understood the reason for the ramp. The child who lives there, a frail boy of some six or seven years, has cerebral palsy. I first saw the boy last Halloween. Dressed as a head-wound patient with fake, bloodied bandages wrapped around his head, he made his way down the street with the help of a metal walker. His father accompanied him. From a distance, I thought he was just another boy with a penchant for the gruesome and a big budget for his costume, not to mention a love for playing his chosen part to the hilt—hence the crooked, halting movements. Once I drew closer, however, I realized that while the bandages were pretend, the walker was real, for the child’s knees bowed in towards each other, while his ankles seemed to want to wobble away.
I saw the boy again on a bright afternoon the day before I began taking notes for this essay. In fact, the boy is its catalyst. The previous afternoon, I underwent a cervical epidural injection, a procedure I vehemently resisted when the doctor first proposed it fourteen months ago. Over the course of the past year, however, the tenacity of the pain in my neck, shoulders, upper back, and arms (despite my progress in physical therapy and despite the ways in which I modified the yoga practice I began after the initial injury) finally convinced me to undergo a cortisone injection to the cervical spine; an injection my doctor hoped would get the nerves—and by extension the muscles—to settle down. Though the injection itself was relatively painless once the anesthetic took effect, the possible risks—nerve damage, bleeding, increased pain—had me so terrified that once the procedure was over I burst into tears and continued to cry for the next half hour. I wasn’t just crying out of relief. My tears were also motivated by the despair I have felt lately that there is no real cure for what is wrong with me, and therefore no permanent way out of a problem that impacts the way I live and work.
On the day I saw the boy, I started out feeling rather sorry for myself. Yet I remained self-aware enough to realize that sadness and anger are ultimately unhealthy companions. Besides, it was an exquisite day. The sun had burned away all the clouds, and the big screen West Texas sky was endlessly blue. A block from my house, children flew kites in the park. A pair of new mothers circled its periphery with strollers. A golden retriever, his silky coat glinting in the sun, chased a tattered Frisbee and barked exuberantly. The activity of the scene—the infectious laughter and energy of mid-April on a particularly balmy day—buoyed me up. As my dog and I turned the corner onto one of the neighborhood’s most picturesque streets, I lifted my face to the sun and hummed.
When I saw the boy and his father out in the front yard, I slowed my pace. Some twenty feet away, the boy stood within his walker. Yet he wasn’t holding on. Instead, he clutched a baseball bat and kept calling to his father to throw the ball. When his father pitched, the boy swung but missed. They both laughed, and the boy grinned in my direction and told me that he was playing baseball. “You’re doing a fantastic job,” I called back.
***
Pilgrimage is all about living in the present. When one’s feet hurt, blisters or muscle strain can become omnipresent. I learned this after spending two days navigating the hard pavement in the environs of the city of Burgos, some two and a half weeks away from Santiago. After developing excruciating blisters on my heels, and a bloodied, bruised big toe, I almost considered the possibility that I would have to stop walking for several days, possibly even a week. Otherwise, I knew I could become one of the mournful pilgrims who’d have to give up completely.
Pain places one fully in the moment, but so does joy.
Once, towards evening, I found myself following a quiet dirt path through the soft foothills of the Pyrenees. The light of the setting sun caused the leaves on the high trees to glimmer like shining coins. As if this glory was not enough, I soon came face to face with a shaggy, reddish-brown pony whose golden mane almost hid his dark eyes from view. Almost but not quite, for I could see that he was looking directly at me. And allthough I had seen many animals along the way, including several horses and a young foal, no animal had ever stepped directly into my path. What made this pony’s presence even more remarkable was the loneliness of the scene—where had he come from, I asked myself, and why?
Ultimately, I came to believe the pony was there because I needed to see him. Since college, I have loved James Wright’s “A Blessing,” a poem about the speaker’s encounter with a pair of horses in a field:
…They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs…
The pony who stepped onto the Camino immediately recollected that poem, especially its closing lines:
…Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
When I took ‘Break into Blossom’ as the title of a novel I wrote during the last years of my marriage, I discovered that Wright wrote “A Blessing” during a period of deep depression following the breakup of his marriage.
***
Yesterday, the chair of our department sent an email to the faculty entitled “Ellen Mary’s Dog.” When I clicked on the message, I learned that my colleague’s sweet-tempered white spaniel mix who often wagged her tail shyly but eagerly around the department, had been struck and killed by a truck the day before. The email also said that Ellen Mary, who was devoted to the dog in the way that a parent is devoted to a child, needed our support.
During the early evening, my husband and I arrived at her red brick house in a development so new that her neighbor’s house, excepting the concrete sub-floor, had not yet been built. After accepting a bouquet of pink roses and a box of Twining’s tea, Ellen Mary hugged us both, then ushered us into an airy white room with high ceilings and cream-colored carpet. A dog door flapped in the breeze. Nearby, we saw a fleece dog bed and a wicker basket filled to the brim with toys. Many of these toys still lay scattered across the floor.
Neither one of us is close to Ellen Mary, despite the fact that she and my husband have been part of the British literature division for almost a decade. Yet both of us respect her work and her commitment to the students, the department, and the university’s under-funded Women’s Studies program. So too, being animal lovers ourselves, both of us understood how much Ellen Mary loved her dog, Snowflake, or ‘Snow’ as she more affectionately called her. Earlier, when I telephoned to ask if we could come over, she sobbed, “Snow was everything.” This statement was not entirely an exaggeration, for she eventually told us that the graceful little creature with the lacy fringe of fur on each of her paws and along the tips of each of her ears, had taught her how to love.
All three of us were soon crying as we talked about beloved pets, several of whom we, too, had lost to cars or illness. We shared the ways in which we coped with their absence, as well as the innumerable ways in which they enriched our lives by keeping us anchored to the present.
“Some days,” Ellen Mary said, “a student would come into my office, crying or angry. Eventually, Snow would come out from under my desk and sidle up to the student, and the student’s whole mood would change.”
We understood, and ultimately we found it hard to leave her in that snow white room with the dog toys on the rug because, Ellen Mary said, she didn’t have the heart to pick them up yet. I hugged her for a long time before we finally walked away, reassured to learn that she was open to adopting another stray—Snowflake had been badly abused, fearful, until Ellen Mary taught her how to trust—in time. “Snowflake opened up the floodgates,” she said. Once the water begins to flow freely, the movement can be (thank god) impossible to stop.
As my husband and I walked towards the car, our hands instinctively reached for each other, and I wondered if Ellen Mary saw, and for a moment, I almost wanted to hide our intimacy.
First thing this morning, I found myself thinking about her, reminded that she saw the construction truck run right over her dog without ever stopping. Ellen Mary rushed into the street, crying, “I love you, Snow,” then picked up her bleeding dog, and carried her to the car. At the veterinarian’s, she wondered if she’d have to make a decision, but the doctor told her that Snowflake had just died from massive pelvic injuries.
***
All any of us have is the present. True, our past experiences enable us to continue to reach out to other people and creatures in spite or perhaps because of our losses. And sometimes our pasts prevent us from trusting strangers, friends, even lovers and family. As for the future, we think about and plan for it, and sometimes we even live for it. Every year, I put money in my IRA. My parents, now in their early seventies, are still investing for the future, though they have—at long last—begun to travel extensively.
Before my husband and I left Ellen Mary, she told us that she had deferred getting a dog until her fifties. “First there was graduate school. Then there was a new job. Then there was tenure. Before I knew it I was fifty, and I still didn’t have my dog. When I got Snowflake,” her voice cracked, “I bought this house. If only I’d had more time with her…”
***
I’d never realized that soft tissue can remember, until my body taught me the strength of physical memory. When I work at the computer, and sometimes when I bend over a book for too long, my muscles “remember” to tighten up. So too, when there’s a particularly fraught conflict at school, and sometimes when I’m just feeling exhausted or irritable, the tension goes straight to my neck and upper back. And inevitably, when I re-experience this pain—especially at its sharp, emotionally-charged, debilitating onset—some part of me revisits the source and the coloration of the original injury.
That’s right. Somewhere deep within my psyche as well as within my soft tissue, I find myself returned to the young woman who tried to bury fear, anxiety, anger, and grief in work. That young woman turned in the rough draft of her dissertation to her doctoral advisor, then developed a migraine. Upon waking, muscle spasms coursed through her neck and shoulders. For the next three years, learning how to heal became a central part of her physical and spiritual quest. A profound part of that journey involved walking the Camino of Santiago.
It has taken me close to a decade to make and to understand these connections. Fortunately, with understanding comes change and healing. This gives me a great deal of hope, as does the self-awareness with which I now approach my work and daily living. Hope also arrives in the example of the little boy and his father playing baseball in the sunshine; it exists in Ellen Mary’s recognition that one day not too very far off in the future, she will want another dog. And it is a fundamental part of the compassion I feel and act upon; a compassion that stems, in large part, from all that my own difficult experiences have taught me about the absolute need for community and connection.
Like the soft tissue that knits together each of our bodies, we, too, are interconnected. What we transmit is partly determined by our histories. Yet we actually have a remarkable amount of power and freedom, especially once we realize that connection can be as natural as reaching out a hand to stop someone’s fall, or sharing someone’s tears.
***
Twenty eight days after beginning my journey along the Camino, I reached Santiago just before sunset. In Santiago, the pilgrims are housed in a beautiful, old seminary high on a hilltop overlooking the city. That day, I spread my sleeping bag onto the floor of an immense room with reddish-brown wooden floors and French windows, the white curtains fluttering in the breeze. After washing my face, I headed outside and joined several other pilgrims on the seminary steps. In the distance, the tile rooftops and the steeples of countless churches stretched for as far as the eye could see. The sky blossomed a rich shade of rose. Towards the horizon, that rose turned a vivid orange.
Dressed in my only sweater and my now ragged jeans, I pulled the sleeves over my hands—for the air had turned chilly, especially now that I was no longer moving—and closed my eyes. At that moment, I no longer regretted the choices I had made, nor did I worry about what the future would bring. Surrounded by other pilgrims, most of whom were sitting quietly, I had no sense of being alone. If anything, I felt more interconnected, more a part of a larger, mysterious whole than I’d ever felt.
A few steps away, a young man with curly, black hair sang in soft, melodic Spanish. An equally dark-haired girl leaned against his shoulder. I looked at them, and I thought of the ponies in James Wright’s poem—“They love each other./ There is no loneliness like theirs.” Simultaneously, I thought of the pony who had stepped out of the shadows to greet me. When the young man caught my eye and smiled, I smiled back.