5

  The next morning Anna and I set out for Zubiri. In pouring rain we trudged through mud, covered in waterproofed ponchos, looking like hunched-over witches with humpbacks. My poncho was yellow. Anna’s was red. A collie dog, his long hair dripping with sparkling rainbow drops, stopped and stared as though he had never seen apparitions of this sort.

  I loved the feeling of a portable waterproof house over me. I was a pilgrim, going slow, but getting there, a traveling turtle. We walked through fields of silent cows, herds of sheep, pigs, and horses. All stood as though in a water-soaked trance, not moving, not acknowledging us, somehow in a paradise of safety, knowing that all natural predators were in their own God-given moisturizing trance during the rain. It was nature’s way of calling a truce for all potential disturbances. The animals seemed to understand an invisible harmony and had respect for each other’s differences.

  I could feel the walking stretching my spine while the backpack gently massaged my kidneys. I wasn’t even aware of my blister. Maybe it had even gone away. I noticed a stick along the path and picked it up. It reminded me of the cane my mother had used in her old age. I stopped to tie my shoelace and walked off without the stick. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to accompany me. No other stick spoke to me. Then a few miles later, I saw another one. It was crooked and, like a crescent moon, turned inward. I picked it up. It was good to lean on, even though it resembled a crone’s discarded stock. I asked it if it wanted to walk with me … yes. I peeled away some of the hanging bark and made friends with it. I wanted to walk with this stick and didn’t want to lose it. I decided to take it home with me if we made it to the end together.

  The pain in my legs eased when I leaned on my new friend. I had a new guidebook too, which weighed two pounds, and I could feel it in my backpack.

  Was suffering necessary for enlightenment? No, I thought, that’s the old way of looking at life. Religious insistence on suffering was not supposed to be part of the New Age … not Christian, Moslem, or Hindu suffering. I thought of the jokes I had heard about the Hindu ascetic who finally reached the gates of heaven. He was given an ancient text to ponder before being let in. He understood the text until he came to a paragraph that made him cry. God asked him why he was crying. The old man looked at him and said, “But this says ‘celebrate,’ not ‘celibate.’”

  No, I would continue with my celebration of what was possible, understanding that my belief would create my reality, regardless of what had transpired down through the march of time in human history. Yes, I was simplistic and full of innocent wonder. I did not want to cave in to cynicism, and I didn’t want to lose my sense of childlike optimism. I did, however, need to know what made me like I was. What was it that made me certain that what lay in my soul’s knowledge was more real than my mind’s knowledge?

  I looked around as I walked. The hillsides were mystical, possessing treasures of experience that were there for us to hear if we would open up to them.

  I began to slip in the mud as I leaned forward on my new friend, yet it kept me balanced, though it produced a cramp in my right shoulder. I reversed my stick to my left hand. I was not in as much control, but it would be good to learn to depend on my left hand as much as my right because it was, after all, connected to the feminine right side of the brain. The balance was necessary to be centered.

  The forest was dotted with shimmering yellow marigolds. The sight of them reminded me that I hadn’t seen a yellow arrow for hours. I had been too lost in my thoughts. Had I gone the wrong way? I looked around for Anna. She wasn’t there. The rain obscured the view behind. Oh, God, I’m lost, I thought. And I was. I found myself on the edge of a muddy precipice. I remembered hearing that many pilgrims were injured on the Camino and often were forced to remain in refugios for weeks until they healed. Very few died, but it had happened.

  I stopped. A sea of mud surrounded me. Okay. This was the polarity, I thought. One moment I was walking in paradise, the next in a small panic because I was lost, without my girlfriend, and in real danger of falling. I took a step. The mud was as slick as ice. Then I realized something was protecting me. I wasn’t quite sure what it was. My stick seemed to retract when I attempted to plunge it into the thick mud. The earth itself seemed to have an intelligence that warned me against slippage. Was Mother Earth reaching out to help me? I remembered a walk in the California mountains. I hadn’t realized that the sun would set so fast and found myself descending in the dark. Only it wasn’t dark. The earth itself emitted a glow, just enough to light my way. I had been astonished, and when I told an Indian friend of mine, she said, “Oh, didn’t you know that?” I felt stupid and unaware of nature’s miracles. Now Mother Earth was nurturing me again. Why were we destroying her, disrespecting how much a part of each other we really were?

  Very subtly, I felt my angel presence again. Ariel was with me, I thought. “Feel what it is to be alone,” it said in my head, “to be stripped of so-called safety, to be one with nature, to be only with yourself.” Then it was gone.

  I took a deep breath and began to retrace my steps, certain now that I had bypassed the yellow arrow.

  I must be diligent as I walk, I thought, looking backward every few yards to find the arrow. I must find a middle way of feeling, balanced and aware, yet allowing other dimensions to guide me.

  I made my way back through the rain and mud. Through the birch trees, through the dense forest, up and down the slick hillsides, depending totally on my stick and the messages it received from the earth. The wind came up, pelting me with rain. I thought of the comfort of the refugio. The men snoring, the windows banging open and shut. I heard cars on a road not far away and remembered that I had heard that engine sound before.

  I descended a mountain of loose rocks still upright. More boulders followed me into the riverbed below, mercifully missing me. Charlemagne and Saint Francis of Assisi went through this with hordes of armies and throngs of followers? What were they thinking? What made them do it? What was making me do it? Why was I here? Now, I was walking backward, retracing my steps. Was that the point? To retrace where I’ve been with another viewpoint? I looked up ahead. Anna was standing there, dripping in her red poncho. She waved. “Over here,” she called. “Here is the yellow arrow.” I trudged toward her, mud up to my calves.

  “A trickster put the arrow going the wrong way,” she said. “The Camino forces you to ascertain what is the truth and what is a human trick. Such is life, eh?” She chuckled. “I walked straight into a person’s barn,” she said. “A dog attacked me. I became incensed and screamed at him. He went away.”

  What would I do if a dog attacked me? I wondered. I had always had dogs in my life and thought I understood them. But what if I didn’t?

  Anna said if a dog attack ever got serious, she would stop and pray. I wondered if I would have the presence of mind and self-possession to do that. I had heard about the dogs on the Camino from reading books about it, one book in particular by a man who had apparently been attacked by a pack of dogs led by a particularly vicious black one. He wrote as though his life had been at stake. It happened in the abandoned village of Foncebadón, which lay ahead about two weeks’ walk from where I now was. The dogs of Foncebadón had been the one true fear I had had in contemplating the Camino. I was genuinely terrified…. I would think about it later.

  After resting for half an hour, Anna and I proceeded. What would I do without her companionship, someone who had done this thing, had been here before, someone who spoke Spanish and was reasonably confident? We followed the correct yellow arrow and climbed through pines, beeches, and oak trees. Before crossing the main road again, I saw a path of stones known as Roland’s Footsteps, for the legendary knight who had sojourned here. The path of stones led to the former Venta del Puerto (Inn of the Pass), which was now a cowshed. Time was no respecter of history. It was up to humans to ferret out the past.

  We passed a bridge leading to Zubiri and then a fountain adjacent to an ancient church. We stopped and filled our water bottles with the clear fountain water. So clear, so delicious. I sat by the fountain and put my feet up, concluding that all I really needed in life were good shoes, a loyal stick, and pure water.

  We arrived at a village some hours later and entered a bar filled with men and smoke. The men were screaming and yelling at a bicycle match on a small TV set. When we walked in, they turned around and applauded.

  We had five miles to go before we reached the refugio in Zubiri. Could we make it before dark? I remembered the light of the earth in the California mountains, and as we trudged, I stopped to watch a humongous pile of dung where beetles had gathered to eat. They were all in the same place even though there were other piles of dung. Why didn’t they spread out? They were something like the humans in that bar back there, or people who clustered around the pool in Florida when there was a spacious beach out there.

  Up and down two more mountains we trekked. The rain had stopped.

  When we reached Zubiri, there was no refugio. Somehow since Anna had been there, it had been disbanded and the old school, now used for pilgrims, was full. No room at the inn, so to speak.

  It was now dark. In order to reach the next village, we needed to trek along the road for five more miles. The headlights of cars lit our way as we felt the windswept force of their passing us. They often honked their horns and cheered us on, yelling, “Ultreya,” from their windows.

  “What does that mean?” I asked Anna.

  “It means moving forward with courage,” she answered.

  6

  We finally arrived in Larrasoaña at ten P.M. We had been walking since early morning in the mud and rain and had covered twenty-five kilometers—more than fifteen miles.

  Everyone in the barracks was asleep, sounds of snoring and labored breathing echoing through the darkness. I found the cold-water shower, undressed, looked down, and saw that I had an open abrasion on the inside of my upper left thigh. Anna had some A and D ointment, which I applied. I thought I had brought everything I needed. There was no showerhead, just a hole where the water came out. I washed my hair, dried it as best I could with my little towel, which was already wet from having dried my body. I heard myself groan, and then I began to laugh. That made Anna laugh. Everything was so painfully preposterous.

  Starving, we went into the “eating room” in the back of the refugio. Men were smoking and laughing. Someone gave us thick, oily soup with pieces of chicken floating in it. We laughed harder. This was why we were constipated. I had eaten nothing but prunes all day, but it hadn’t helped. We laughed some more. We found our way back to the barracks, unfolded our sleeping bags, put them down on two lower cots. I put in my earplugs and fell down into sleep.

  At six the next morning, I washed one pair of my socks and one pair of underpants in the cold-water shower and hung them on my backpack to dry as I walked. I used the toilet brush to clean my boots. I had already gotten into a time modality where I didn’t want to waste a minute when I could be walking and accomplishing my goal to finish.

  On the stretch to Pamplona, I began to walk faster than Anna. It was my natural rhythm. There were many other pilgrims who walked faster than I.

  We passed villages with medieval churches that were and had been the center of people’s lives for centuries. They were ornate and imposing and resonated with secrets of the past that I could feel from the walls.

  On this land, it is said, Charlemagne and twenty thousand Christians had battled fifty thousand Moorish Saracens. The Saracens had hidden themselves for days before they ambushed Charlemagne’s Christians. Twenty thousand people died in a few hours of battle over whose God was the true God.

  Charlemagne’s desire was to unify all of Europe under Christianity, and the Moors would die by the sword for Allah.

  Nothing under the sun had changed much. The Camino had been the scene of Charlemagne’s military pilgrimage. I wondered what Jesus would have thought of the noble Christian emperor and leader. The Camino that the early Christian saints had traversed had become a killing path. Yet it was called “the way” because whoever traveled it found his or her relationship to body, patience, food, water and feet and his or her orientation to distance and to God. Perhaps the act of ultreya should be reversed. Perhaps we should move backward with courage, so as to understand what we really came from and who we were.

  I had had dreams and, of course, feelings of remembrances from the past of different times and places. I couldn’t be sure of what they meant. I only know I have always felt a pureness of nostalgia about life experience being more than we think it is now. I don’t like using the term reincarnation because it is so loaded with religious and perceptual prejudice. I’m not even sure that a past experience happened in the “past.” I was beginning to become more and more aware of what Einstein had always claimed, that there is no such thing as linear time; we invented it. To me, I could feel things that might have occurred in the “past” but that were alive now, as though there was a time parallel in which different events occurred all at once. Why shouldn’t all time be occurring at the same time? Why couldn’t each of us be vessels of the totality of experience, which we simply choose to focus upon whenever we want?

  At the age of seven, I remember standing on a piece of ground at Jamestown, Virginia, feeling absolutely certain that I had stood there hundreds of years before. The wind brushed across my face as though it had revisited me with that memory. Only it wasn’t really a memory. It was happening to me at seven years old as a revisitation.

  Such “memories” or revisitations had occurred for me in many parts of the world. I’ve always wondered if my love for travel hasn’t been a desire to go home again to another place and time. In India I had known where temples and backstreets had been. In Russia I felt tearful when I looked at the Russian alphabet, which I knew I had once comprehended but couldn’t read now. In Japan I knew I had been a geisha. And on and on. Was I retracing experiences I had already had in my own travels through time? Or was it possible to flick a time switch and click into any of those times and places now?

  I remembered having an image of this that was simple and explicable to me. If I stood in front of a mirror and gazed at my entire body and that body was the containment of all of my experience, then I possessed the totality of my experience at that moment. If I focused on, let’s say, one of my fingers, and only one of my fingers, then that finger would become the totality of my focus for the time that I focused. That finger, in effect, would become one experience, but that would not negate the fact that the rest of my experiences existed simultaneously in the totality of my body. That would mean that all my experiences were occurring simultaneously, although I was focusing only on one.

  For me, this was not a problem of perception. I was not locked into linear reality. My reality encompassed everything simultaneously. Therefore, depending on my mood or desire for adventure, I could dip into simultaneous realities whenever I tuned into them. Sometimes I felt I had no control over reactivating the focus. Dreams seemed beyond my control, yet when I analyzed the dream state, I realized that on some level I must be controlling in some manner what I dreamed. In other words, my subconscious was manipulated by the superconsciousness in order to give myself more clues as to who I was. My higher consciousness was connected to God (the source, creation), and existed to remind me (my conscious and subconscious) that I also was a totality of experience that was connected to God.

  Then I found myself on the Camino in Spain, where so much killing had occurred in the name of humankind’s connection to God.

  Why here?

  I had always loved period pictures. There was something familiar to me in them that I loved to look at: the dress, the morals, the way of life. Anything to do with the past was an entertainment both emotional and familiar to me, although I never thought I could successfully enact a character from the deep past because I seemed too modern to myself. It was as though I knew I couldn’t go there again, even in acting, because I remembered how it had actually been and didn’t want to denigrate it with a fantasy Hollywood overlay.

  I had the same fascination with the future and the presence of other worlds inhabited by beings that I also had a familiarity with. So to me, the past and the future were part of me now. There was nothing wacky or preposterous about knowing the lines of time such as I understood them to be. They just were, like nature or the sky. In other words, I felt that time existed in me rather than that I existed in time.

  As I walked the Camino, I asked myself why I had come to do this. Was I, in effect, walking backward in a time that already existed in me? Yes, I thought. I have been here.

  The image of myself as the coffee-skinned, black-haired girl in my dream came up again. With each step she became clearer. She rode horseback over this road. She was free, but always running from something chasing her. She didn’t want to be noticed until it was her decision. I had so many of these feelings today. I had loved being a public movie star when the professional requirements of publicity were there. But I had developed many escape routes in my private life to fool the press, the paparazzi, or anyone who would invade my private life. I seemed to be wearing my life like an open book with my candidness and writings, but there was so much that I had been wily about concealing.