Tag: Canadian Company of Pilgrims

A Long Slow Walk

“I think that this sense of well-being that comes with timelessness, the sense of being at peace – it must be very, very old. And it must be like a stylus dropping into a groove on the surface of the planet and making this music. And we are, our bodies are, that stylus, and we’re meant to move at this RPM that comes with the movement of our bodies.”

Paul Salopek, “A Path Older Than Memory,” Emergence Magazine

Last week, I took the time to open, click, listen, and read the conversation with Paul Salopek and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, founder of Emergence Magazine, an award-winning magazine and creative production studio that explores the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. An hour later, so intrigued with their conversation, I shared it on Facebook, logged onto their follow up ZOOM conversation live streamed from the UK this past weekend, and recommended it to my local Camino group at the start of our Saturday walk.

Salopek, an award-winning journalist, embarked ten years ago on a winding course retracing the migration pathway of early humans out of Africa, across Asia, eventually to cross the Bering Strait, down the Americas to Patagonia. Both in Emergence and more fully on the National Geographic page hosting this epic photo story, he describes how his personal relationship to time and the sharing of meaningful stories has deepened while moving through the world at three miles (5 km) per hour, or as my friend Christina Baldwin writes, “at the pace of guidance” and story.

“And I thought this would be an interesting experiment in slow storytelling or slow journalism, a way of slowing down my methodology and immersing myself in the lives of the people who inhabit the headlines of our day. So it’s been kind of a giant kind of a planet-sized studio to think about how stories are connected—not just kind of mega stories, say the climate crisis or human conflict, but our individual stories as well. And one way that I’ve found that does it really well is by slowing myself down and walking from person to person. That’s basically the premise of this. It’s a listening project where the destination almost always is another person.”

Paul Salopek, “A Path Older Than Memory,” Emergence Magazine

I love to walk. I have been walking more or less every Saturday morning in Edmonton’s famed river valley with my local chapter of the Canadian Company of Pilgrims, a “yes” I’d said several years ago on a wintry morning in January, and easily the most significant “yes” I’d said that year. What initially started as one member’s quest to train for his first Camino de Santiago trek, where walking was the raison d’etre, has evolved into a time for us to walk, be in community, and enjoy coffee at local cafes. True to my style, some Saturdays find me more extraverted, engaged in a series of edifying conversations along the path, while others, like this past weekend, ask of me to surrender to the silent restorative of its sunny, almost balmy morning. Stopping for a moment near the trail end, I smelled and felt those faint stirrings of spring, in time with this week’s celebration of Imbolc, the first day of spring in Celtic tradition.

I didn’t grow up in a walking family. Though recently it registered that I may have “inherited” an affinity for trekking from my father, who as a young teen at the conclusion of WWII, found himself alone, displaced, and dodging prisoner of war camps in Germany, taking months to walk his way home to the Black Forest where his mother held her breath waiting for his safe return.

Germany’s Black Forest

I used to regularly hike in the Rocky Mountains, though it’s been well over a decade, and I miss those outings with my women friends. Since Covid, I’ve made two long distance walks, the Portuguese Coastal Camino to Santiago de Compostela, Spain in May-June 2022, and most recently, the Via di Francesco, from Assisi to Rome in September-October 2023. I’ve discovered, like Paul, and many of us, my pace is about 3 miles (5 km) per hour…even when sauntering, my preferred way of moving (when I’m not kitchen dancing.)

“You do not have to, you know, make your way to the jungles of northeastern India to experience this thing. I think it’s there for you. And it might be a little tougher to see and experience if it’s part of your daily life, whether you’re living in a small town or a megalopolis or anything in between, because, as usual, if we stay sedentary, we get scales over our eyes, and we stop realizing the wonders of the everyday world around us because they become over familiar. But walking peels those scales off and allows you to rediscover the extraordinariness of so-called ordinary things. And that includes a walk through your town, a stroll out into the fields, or a park near your house—indeed, your backyard, if you choose to go micro, right?“

Paul Salopek, “A Path Older Than Memory,” Emergence Magazine

Walking with Annie was an invitation in peeling off the scales. As I wrote in a post during what would be her last days, “Walking Annie is no longer exercise. It’s fresh air, the gift of being outside noticing life around us.” Admittedly, still missing her, it takes a bit more presence and intention to notice life around me, scales off, without her. And yet, more often than not, I experience what Paul Salopek describes as an:

“astonishing internal metronome that’s built inside of us, inside of our body, that distinguishes us from almost every other animal…this goodness that’s kind of humming in our bones, waiting to be let out.”

Listening and reading and looking at Paul’s journey, I’m stoked to envision my next long, slow walk, wondering what memories will be evoked, people encountered, stories conjured, bones set to humming, all waiting to be let out?

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Inside the Season’s Cocoon

While a week late, and a post missed, I’ve kept my promise to myself to “stick to the knitting” and my writing practice here. During the interim, two rejections from the group where last year I’d been invited to read my submission to their ekphrastic poetry contest (beginner’s luck?) – I was sure I had a good one – and another written in the wee hours of Wednesday’s dawn to meet another contest deadline. Fingers crossed and regardless, I’ll get feedback from the judges. Always a boon.

Too, after a record-breaking long and warm and sunny August, September and October, wherein I was playing pickleball outside until Hallowe’en, winter – apparently fed up with waiting – suddenly, unequivocally barged in with November. Blowing and blustering throughout Alberta, it dropped nearly a foot of snow in a matter of days, wreaked highway havoc, and gave us the dubious distinction of being among the coldest spots on earth this week. Add Tuesday’s full moon lunar eclipse; peculiar and powerful planetary alignments wreaking their own astrological chaos; news from home that a high school chum has been seriously afflicted by dementia; another friend coping with pneumonia and two small children; a frozen vehicle; Annie down with a GI tract infection (she’s better now)…

Neither complaining nor making excuses, I’m simply noticing what now has the capacity to knock me sideways, crawl deeper into the covers, and, despite the sun and blue sky, colorfully renounce my gratitude for the seasons, especially this one. I refuse to call it a symptom of age…more the wisdom that comes with…a finer attunement to the nuanced…the paying with attention in my body, and not over-riding it with my thinking. Saturday’s Camino walk in the river valley with a reprieve in temperature, and later with Annie, restored my appreciation.

Last weekend I took the bus to Calgary to attend a Friday poetry evening and Saturday workshop with Pádraig Ó Tuama. Such a treat to physically sit in his presence and hear him do so brilliantly what I’d only ever heard him do through Zoom and podcast space…recite remarkable poetry and invite us into how to listen to its structure for its meanings. Thank God, I knew to book the bus when I’d made the arrangements during early September’s golden glory. (I have a kind of prescience when it comes to weather…that finer attunement thing.) Both of us walking alone as we approached the venue, I introduced myself, said a few words as we climbed the stairs to the entrance, and then made our separate ways. Pretty neat for this enthusiastic fan. Too, I was standing in line to purchase his “hot off the press” Poetry Unbound collection, only to recognize immediately behind me award-winning Calgary poet Rosemary Griebel. We have a virtual friendship initiated when she wrote me a lovely compliment on my blog. Knowing she’d be there, I’d brought my copy of YES, her most recent collection, for her signature. Again, pretty neat for this appreciative fan. And then at the Saturday workshop, of all the coincidences, by way of her friend, Peg, we discovered we share a birthday. How neat is that!?! A bit of kismet perhaps…especially as we talked about Camino walking and her interest in Portugal.

I had several takeaways from the weekend inspired by both Pádraig and Rosemary. With my own rejections fresh, I felt restored hearing Pádraig say how difficult it continues to be for him to find places and publishers for his poetry, still how many and often the rejections. Its antidote, he said, was finding a small, intimate group of writers with whom to share the work, so as to uplift each other in the efforts made, support each other through the process of editing, submitting, and receiving rejections and acceptances. In the acknowledgement of her book, Rosemary mentioned the friendship and support received from her regular local poetry writers’ group. Into my new vocation now for a couple of years, I know its solitary, often lonely nature. I returned home committed to putting a call out, both to the Universe (trusting my efforts are adding), and to some writers to ask if they’d meet me in the sandbox – virtual is fine – to support each other as we make our way with words.

And speaking of Camino, mid week I was invited to present “A Creative’s Way of Walking Her Camino” to the first, post covid, in person gathering of our local chapter of the Canadian Company of Pilgrims. Using a story I’d written for Portugal Green Walks and the upcoming issue of Sage-ing: The Journal of Creative Aging – a synthesis of my blogs – I shared my way of traveling in general, and in particular how I had walked the Portuguese Coastal Camino – using journal, painting, photography and poetry to grok within the experience’s impressions and memories. I was delighted not only with the feedback from attendees and planning committee, but more so to have been “seen” in this way of my vocation, to be, as one of the members said, the chapter’s “resident artist-poet.” Now this is very neat!

I am now inside the season’s cocoon, wintering. Despite the initial shock, I am surrendered to the inevitable, ready to savor having designed time for writing, studying Italian and “rewilding,” walking, cooking, hand work, seeing friends, sharing time with my “pack,” playing pickleball. Feeling life full in the midst of its fallow.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.