inventory/being

an inventory of being. 

it is 20:20 on August 30th, 2015 as I write this. 

I am in Pamplona, Spain, and tomorrow I board a bus to Roncesvalles where I spend a night and then begin to walk.

Because tomorrow is the day I arrive at my starting point, I am writing now. I am writing now because I think I want silence, to start. It was so nice when I was off social media earlier in the summer for a while. Mm. A kind of silence and disconnect and just me in my brain-ness, before I begin. 

Although even that is, I know, a trick thing to say, "before I begin". 

Because exactly a week ago I encountered words that reminded me how this has already begun, constantly beginning. 

I like remembering where I have been to see better where I am now. To think of a week ago today, I remember stresses that come from too much time at home and not enough of it spent being who I am. There was this mounting pressure I did not want to address of too much left to do and nowhere near enough time to do it and slow internet connections and do-I-need-a-new-sleeping-bag kind of hassle. And so I did what I usually do when my deadlines are around the corner and I just kind of stopped doing anything productive and skimmed through emails I've sent in the last few months, distracted myself with posts on various Camino blogs. 

Two things came up. 

'The Camino provides.' 

         and suddenly I felt this trembling like the end of something that doesn't want to hold up anymore, and then things kind of just crumbled and I remembered that oh, oh yeah. Oh yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. That is what this is, this ancient pilgrimage thing. The Camino provides. Oh fucking yeah. 

and 

'The Camino begins the day you decide to do it.'

     the day I decided to do it? Here are the words I wrote in an email about it to my friend Mike: 

i looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and my eyes were bright shining through me and i said to myself, I can do this. this is something I can do. this is part of my life I can live, I can do this, I will have my time to do what I want. 

and all this sincerity whelmed up and rushed out and I had this jumping feeling in the cells in my veins that this is so much possible, this is so much what I can do. just walk, walk alone, walk with others, walk with my own two feet for like 7 weeks through Spain and to the ocean, eventually, and I can do this. 

"I can do this". 

and in a similar rush last Sunday night, I came back to me. My Camino began rooted in possibility. 

OH RIGHT. 

Okay. 

So I took a deep breath and decided to let go of the fractured frazzled puzzle pieces of everything, let it just fall away and approach this all remembering those two things: that my present is taking care of itself and I have been on my Camino long before I left the country. 

And if I am to remember all that mid-April to end-August contained, well then. 

Well then, I am in for something else entirely on this physical/spiritual culmination of all such things. 

inventory of being: 

heavy eyes from not much sleep the last two nights//last week of nights: 

     remembering late nights packing and then, my last night, and then overnight flight to Lisbon and then two small sleeps and then overnight bus to Seville and then last night hostel friends, pen pals who just finished their Camino, picking me up and taking me out for beers in the park as the sun set over the Pyrenees, spectacularly, acapella Basque music floating over families and couples and lovers and candles being lit by small children, sitting on the streets by a plaza and drinking beers and eating patatas bravas on the warm stones and people, so many people around us, shoulders (like yours, soft by streetlight) and backs and legs and laughter, dancing out til 2am and the warm night packed with humans outside

feet propped on this hostel couch where earlier I finished a book that made me cry because it ended with these words: 

"Something beautiful lives inside us. You will see. Just believe it. You will see."

which makes me think maybe it is not so bad to have a soft heart that cannot always forget and can always love again and moves on 

my heel pain is less, not gone but less, and maybe it'll be around forever but hopefully not and I am determined not to let that stop me. to know the limits and beyond of my body, but smartly. 

I had a conversation with a man on a bench while I looked for my bus from Seville to Madrid. In my limp-along Spanish I told him I was a peregrino (pilgrim) and we chatted and I laughed and it is all the more reason to be open to such small chats because 

     I remembered what it feels like to have wonder run through me and I do not remember the last time I felt that, like suddenly I am present and feeling and unravelling all together, knowing 

the last time I travelled alone was on exchange and I am not who I was then and my heart is not currently broken and everything everything feels like I am new again, like I have fallen apart and am falling again but maybe falling into place 

      this is not the same foundation-building desperate need to travel I have felt before and I am lucky to have friends who say listen, it will never be what it was and you don't need to make it that and that is good and better for you. 

So I breathe and say okay, yes. How does the me right now feel, how does me right now listen to what is around me and what sounds best. How do I do me, do this, do life as it happens, every minute. 

So I breathe and say okay, yes. 

It is such an unknown I've never really done before but I get so emotional in hearing/reading stories of it in a way that feels inevitable to be here. It is a long walk and I want to walk a long walk. 

I want to walk a long walk because I want to move until I feel my heart in my throat and my feet because I feel, am alive, and I can feel that alive in all the ways I feel that I am me, now, fully (fuller). 

I want to walk a long walk because my last night was the last night that I had, 3am becoming 5am becoming the city swirling around me waking up, because I can't stop that night from coming back to me in moments and I think maybe it was a night meant to happen, as sweet and kind and giving and good as it all was, every cosmic second. And I don't know what to do about it, and so I will walk. And write postcards.

I want to walk a long walk because I came out to myself and the people in my life and I am still maybe winded from that, and I want to walk a long walk because it is not a one time event, it is again and again a new way of knowing my skin and my self. To keep unlearning, to keep questioning, loving. 

I want to walk a long walk because the last 5 months were the last 5 months that they were, the last year was the last year it was, the last 4 years were what they were.... I think this is more of a need, here--that I need to walk. I need to keep going, I need motion. 

I need motion because all that had propelled me before, my time in the place that gave me purpose (school, UBC, unceded Coast Salish territories), is no longer mine to be in. Also, a whole bunch of societal shit I was built on and into is no longer okay for me to breathe, it is toxic in a way it hasn't been before. 

     I need to move myself now, physically, to find what it is that moves me, in every other way. I have an idea of this and that, the things that hurt and hurt the world, the earth, the land, the systems and oppressions and injustices and privileges, and all the moments of awe and colour and music and laughter and stars that somehow find their way anyways: this moves me. How does it fit, does it, why? 

I hit a pretty hard post-grad blues point this summer. The rest of my life is now rolling expansive in front of me, for all that the future is a myth. But I do face an infinite amount of 'now', and how do I want to fill that? What moments do I want to make up my life? 

I am breathless always for the ways I have been afforded the space and time and resources to do this-emotional, societal, material, all of it. I am knocked over always by what it means to be able to walk, to move, to consider and be touched and experience all of this. 

here is the sky from when I laid in the park where the concert took place last night: 

I have no idea what is to come. 

And that is perhaps the way it should be. 

these are the guiding questions to what happens next: 

   who am I

   where have I been 

   where am I going 

so here is to moonlight and warm breezes and dust and blisters, to sleep and sleepless nights and the backs of people and words that bring laughter and messages from good people and the everything, the everything that this always is 

x 

-k