Just four weeks to Santiago ….

Forgive me, this blog is called ‘zenpolitics’, and there’s not too much that’s political about what follows (though if you read through to the very end…). But if you want a taste of what it’s like walking the Camino, then read on.

Up at 6.30, it’s early October, and sunrise isn’t till 8.45 (the clocks haven’t changed and Spain is one hour ahead of the UK), so even if you hang around a bit and have a croissant (standard Spanish breakfast) and tea and a glass of freshly-squeezed jumo de naranja, even if you delay your start, you’re still out on the path by 8 at the latest.2014-07-30 10.35.34

Most mornings, happily, the sky is clear, and there’s a pre-dawn glow behind you. Always behind you. One feature of the Camino is that you’re always going west… There can be a gentle pinkish glow in the west mirroring the burgeoning glow behind you but it’s as nothing compared to the deep reds that run along the eastern horizon, silhouetting the mountains you’ve left behind on previous days.

Early October, and we have a remarkable morning sky: a last-quarter moon, receding to a crescent, and one morning no longer there (full moon by the time I reach Santiago almost three weeks later), and Venus as a morning star, and Jupiter, all together, within a degree or two of each other. Venus so bright that it only finally disappears with the first rays of the sun.

The way is marked, all the way to Santiago, by yellow arrows. At 8am you need your head torch to light your path, and you’re sometimes searching hard for that arrow, and taking the wrong route – and finding others are following you….  Like sheep we follow!

An hour passes, and you’re lost in an empty mind, or lost in thought, or simply measuring your footsteps, or listening to the first birds calling, or listening to silence. You’re singing a favourite song – for me it’s Autumn Leaves this time, as sung by Eva Cassidy, and much earlier by Nat King Cole. Appropriate, and a touch melancholic, but gentle and reflective, and so timely as weeks later I shuffle up the leaves walking through the wonderful oak and chestnut woodlands of Galicia.

Or try a hymn… a Methodist upbringing works wonder. One line, ‘the king of glory passes on his way’, stayed in my mind. God normally stays in one place, but maybe he’s a pilgrim too. That’s good for a few minutes speculation!

Another hour, and it’s a stop for a café con leche, and a cake of some sort. Or if you’ve missed out earlier, for breakfast. (Some albergues, the overnight hostels that put us up in bunk beds for 10 euros or less per night, don’t do breakfast and there may be nowhere else, so you walk on an empty stomach.) That’s a beautiful time. You’ve maybe six, seven or eight kilometres behind you, maybe already one-third of your day’s journey, and you chill out, savour the moment, feel good about yourself, maybe catch up with friends, have your first laugh of the morning.

Then it’s the toughest time of your day. Putting in some real distance. And the sun will be climbing higher, and if you’re back east, it’s still the early stages, and the summer’s not letting go just yet, then you’re hot, and your shirt is sticking to your back, and the straps of your rucksack which weren’t troubling you earlier are troubling you now.

The meseta, that high and wondrous plateau land beyond Burgos, is mysterious in the early light, under the moon, but in the heat of the day it’s a brown and long-ago harvested expanse of stubbled or ploughed (despite all the stones, some ‘sacred’, why, I’ve yet to discover!) and horizon-stretching field, without break of hedge or wall, undulating vast distances. It’s almost hypnotic, and when, as it was for me, it’s blowing a mighty gale into your face (Caribbean hurricanes even stretch their lower limbs into northern Spain) you’ve a battle on your hands. Clouds build and race in the wind across the sky. All you can hear is the wind in your ears. Try and pick up the sound of the wind in the long grass and thistles and thorns along the side of the path, but no way. Tumbleweed, sharp and looking rather lethal, comes careering past me.

Further west, you’re up at 3000 feet and there’s a ground frost, and equipped for a late Spanish summer you’re wearing every last item of clothing. But only for an hour or so, you warm up, and the sky is a pure blue, and the sun does get to work and warms you. But beware, after 5 in the evening, it may still be shining, but it’s lost its warmth, and the chill over the land seeps into you, and those clothes you left optimistically to dry in the sun on the albergue’s washing line stay resolutely wet.

*

Mornings are chill but beautiful. But not always. And one afternoon is memorably dreich. Climbing up  to O’Cebreiro, at 4000ft, into the rain and mist and wind, it’s a wild and surreal version of winter up there. I decide I’ll take a room in a small and very cheap hotel. The sheets are damp, and it’s back to my sleeping bag. Night comes early, but a few yards up the road there a glow of light: the door is open, and there’s a Pilgrim Mass, and the church is warm and full, and a cocoon of wisdom and good feeling in a chill landscape. It dates back to the 10th century, and that makes more than a thousand years as a place of refuge.

The following morning is a nightmare, a slippery five-hour descent in the heavy rain. I dry out, just, and the following day, down in my river valley, the sun breaks through at 9.30, and then it’s four days of magic and bright-sky walking through the green and hidden landscapes of Galicia, cattle and corn cobs and big views, and every half-kilometre a way-marker telling me that I’m half a kilometre closer to Santiago.

Santiago now only a morning’s walk away… There’s a change in the weather, but the rain has stopped and I walk avoiding drips (they catch the head torch beam) from the chestnuts and eucalyptus above me through a dark dark wood until I exit into a faltering dawn. There’s an old church, with its open tower and two bells and locked door, and the path diverts round the airport, past the TV headquarters, and endless roads frustrate, and there’s rising excitement, but it keeps being dashed as you turn into yet another road. Then finally, into the old city, and I trek round to the Plaza  Obradeiro… only to find scaffolding hiding the Portico de Gloria, every pilgrim’s ultimate destination for 800 years, and a loud political, anti-government demonstration underway. Much drumming, and chanting ‘un pueblo unido jamas sera vencido’ (‘one people united will never be defeated). I almost join in: we chanted that in the 1970s. But it wasn’t quiet, and it wasn’t holy, and it wasn’t spiritual.

Later, later, I told myself, and with a thousand pilgrims alongside me and the singing nun leading us in the Jubilate Deo at the Saturday evening mass, and again at the Pilgrim Mass Sunday lunchtime, I knew I’d arrived – heart and soul as well as feet. And the great censer, the thurible, the botafumeiro, began its long arcing swing as the Sunday service ended, a pendulum to end all pendulums. I’m told it was intended originally to defumigate newly-arrived pilgrims. I can’t speak for our clothes, but all the albergues have showers, and we all make a beeline for them on our arrival. So we’re a pretty clean lot in the externals.

We’ve also cleaned out a lot of mental and emotional junk by the time we arrive.

The rest of the day we’re all of us meeting old friends and saying our goodbyes. The rain has relented and the sun, briefly, is brilliant, and Santiago is every bit as inspirational as I anticipated. If not a little bit more so.

Some head off to the coast, and Finisterre, finis terrae, the end of the world. For me it’s a plane home. The end of the world will have to wait.

(I said no politics, but as I left the old city I looked back and there was a walker struggling his last steps into the city, as I’d done two days before, and on the back of his shirt three words – END AUSTERITY NOW.)

Why walk the Camino?

Walking for five minutes or five hours, there’s one recurring question we ask each other. Why are you walking the Camino? Usually in life, maybe standing by a bus stop, there aren’t any easy ways into conversation, and most of us, en route to work maybe, are too lost in our own thoughts or anxieties to want to talk. But on the Camino you’re a big exception if you don’t acknowledge someone with at least a ‘buen camino’, and you may well walk together a little while, and that question will always come up, in one guise or another.

And the answer? Spiritual, religious or personal? Maybe it’s simply the challenge, a bit like walking the three peaks in the UK (Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon) for the hell of it, often against the clock.

The spiritual and religious blur into one another. This blog is inspired by Zen, but also firmly rooted in the Christian tradition. Walking the Camino with an open mind, and finding peace and serenity, and rejoicing each morning as the dawn turns into day – that experience is the same, whether your Christian, or Buddhist, or simply ‘spiritual’, in the best sense of that all-encompassing term.

When asked why I was walking the Camino I’d say my reasons were personal, spiritual – and historical. I love the tradition, that sense of others walking before me for the last 1200 years.

In medieval times you’d be looking for the church (the Catholic church) to grant you absolution from your sins, and the pilgrimage to Santiago was a uniquely powerful way of achieving that. The journey mattered as much as the destination, as a pathway to merit. You couldn’t take a plane to Santiago, or walk the last five days from Sarria, and receive a certificate, as you can now. Wonderful churches, on a scale which would have left pilgrims agog with wonder, grew up along the route, and the hospitals, hostelries, provided care and shelter. This was the Christian gospel in action, in a marvellous way, and even if our faith is not as theirs was, we can pick up on something of their experience, and be inspired by it.

In the movie The Way James Nesbitt plays Jack, an Irish travel writer who, reacting against his upbringing, refuses to enter churches, but come Santiago, he’s there, in the cathedral. Religion as it should be is both celebration and sanctuary, and the pure Romanesque of churches at Torres del Rio, Villalcazar and Fromista, to quote just three examples, reminds us of that. Maybe it influenced Jack (OK, I know he’s fictional!) as it influenced me.

Walking over 500 miles you find your prejudices challenged. All your petty grumbles and bigotries in time come to seem rather absurd. So too with the church, and I’m thinking of all denominations. Too often in ordinary life it mirrors our own human failings, even encourages them. On the Camino it rises above them in a very literal sense – the churches, the great cathedrals, and a path a millennium old, often climbing up ahead of us, as it does onto the meseta, beyond Burgos.

For me, Santiago, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, they’d been companions and support and inspirations for pilgrims a thousand years ago, and they were for me this October. I’m not suggesting they had a literal presence for me. But I walked with an open mind, and set myself to connect with how pilgrims from another very different age must have experienced the Camino.

An open mind requires stillness and, walking in the pre-dawn with the crescent moon behind and stars ahead, you are walking into the stillness, and it takes you over.

‘Be still, and know that I am God.’

The pilgrim and the refugee

Four weeks walking on the Camino, from Logrono to Santiago in northern Spain. (I walked from St Jean Pied de Port to Logrono back in June.) An average of seventeen miles a day, across high plains and mountains, rain and shine, legendary cities such as Burgos and Leon, and villages just hanging on in the modern world. Hard on the feet. But I had a path to follow which others before me had followed for 1200 years, and I had a fabled destination, and I could remind myself that the journey was as much the destination as Santiago itself. And there were new friends to make along the way.

Others have been walking longer distances this summer and autumn, with only a vague destination, somewhere north, maybe Germany, a path with no history (following a route usually taken by road, not on foot), where the destination is everything, and the mode of transport a cruel and hard footslog. Whereas on the Camino you’re welcomed by so many, and you’re a little bit of a hero when you arrive in Santiago, on this other journey there’s often hostility, and while for many there’s been a welcome at the end there’s always been the likelihood that borders will be slammed shut.

If you’re walking the Camino you’ve a home to return to, and maybe a minor hero’s welcome there as well. On the other journey, there’s no home to return to. At best it was a camp, and squalor, and at worst home has been destroyed, and family and friends may have been killed.

On the Camino you can absorb the history of 1200 years, you’re following in the footsteps of countless other pilgrims, there’s a physical challenge to drive you along, and an uplift of spirit and a closeness to creation, and to God if we will, as we walk, and St James, Santiago, to welcome us at the cathedral’s Portico de Gloria when we arrive.

For walkers further east, they’re travelling up through the Balkans to find fences at borders and stations closed, and motorways open so that you can exit a country more quickly – on foot. There is no triumph of the spirit (though there is a triumph of the will), and God’s creation in the heat and the rain is hardly benign.

So little in common between the two paths, the two caminos. The one born of personal challenge, the other of desperation. But the comparison is important, and telling.

We Camino walkers need to remember our good fortune.

But there’s one thing the two journeys do have in common. Refugees heading north across Eastern Europe may meet all sorts of hostility, but they’ve also been met with love and warm welcomes by so many, especially in Germany. We’ve seen a triumph of the human spirit, of all that’s best in us. There’s no better way of demonstrating compassion one for another than finding someone a home.

The refugee issue is the hardest issue of our times, reflecting current crises and long-term population issues. But our starting-point at all times has to be compassion. Political solutions are for the medium and longer term. For now, if we lose sight of compassion we lose sight of our basic humanity.

All the news I haven’t heard….

Returning from walking the Camino, and returning to the world of 24-hour news, which I’ve avoided for four weeks, I’m struck by the intensity, the ranting, that accompanies  so much political discourse. That’s hardly surprising. One reason for being away so long was to point up that contrast between the every day, as we experience it, and the ordinary day – the day that we might enjoy if only we learnt to stand still awhile, take in the dawn and the passage of the sun and the clouds across the sky, to take in a deep breath, and keep breathing.

The ordinary  day as I describe it would for many be an extraordinary day. ‘Life isn’t like that.’ But it is the real life of all history. It is we who are fooled.

I’ve long experience of working with children and schools, as a parent, a school governor and, a little while back (and hugely enjoyably) as a cricket coach. Positive messages, focus on opportunity, on working together, on compassion for others and understanding of our natural environment, that’s what we try and inculcate, along with the hard facts and great ideas and practical skills….

And yet beyond the school gate there’s the TV news and the newspapers, ranting, focusing on personalities and often irrelevant detail, resorting to preconceptions and prejudice at the earliest opportunity. If school is about the getting of wisdom, everyday life for kids is an all-too-rapid getting of unwisdom. As parents, the press and people everyday are perceived to behave – so the world tells them should they, our children, and there’s little that the finest teacher can do about what happens beyond the school gate.

(I’m not overlooking all the negative impacts of politically-driven expectations on schools, children and teachers. But schools remain remarkable places, and teachers, so many of them, no less remarkable.)

Walking the Camino I’m aware how many young people have held on to that wisdom of childhood, and built on it. I walk with optimism. Returning, I’m reminded of realities.

But I’ve not lost my optimism. This blog isn’t will never be a tabloid-style retreat and rant against the world. It is about engagement and purpose, focusing on the simple things, and doing them well.

The small private acts of life

I mentioned Mobi Ho’s introduction to his translation of Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness in my last blog.

Thich Nhat Han suggested to Mobi that he do the translation slowly and steadily, in order to maintain mindfulness. And he translated just two pages a day. Translating a text such as this is of course rather different from typical daily life. But it is a reminder to give our full focus, our full mind, to each task, however trivial.

It would be good advice for writing a blog.

But what of life on a public – on a world – stage, the other side of life? There could hardly be a greater contrast than that between the conflict in Syria and the focused and private attention given to a translation – or any private activity.

I’m reminded again of that building in Syria used down the centuries as both a church and a mosque.

What we’ve lost in Syria is a way of life which held Christian and Muslim together. It may be a decade, or decades, before we can bring them together again, in a way where they can share again the small (and all-important) private acts of life.

We must hope it will not be forever. History tells us it so easily could be.

Compassion and conflict

This is a longer blog than I would wish. But the subject doesn’t allow of anything else.

I’ve been reading the early pages of Richard Flanagan’s novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about the brutal skirmishes between British and Vichy France troops in 1941, with Palmyra and Tripoli both figuring in the conflict. It brings home again how key down the centuries Syria has been, as a pivotal territory in the battles between countries and empires. And how, until recently, Aleppo and Palmyra had survived.

The Australian troops who came out of Syria alive then found themselves Japanese POWs after the fall of Singapore, suffering a different and sadistic brutality – the main theme of course of the novel.

On another tack …back in the 1960s Thich Nhat Hanh founded the School of Youth for Social Service in South Vietnam. It ‘drew young people deeply committed to acting in a spirit of compassion’.  They refused to support either side in the Vietnamese conflict and ‘believed that… the true enemies were not people but ideology, hatred and ignorance’. Several were kidnapped and murdered. (Quotes from Mobi Ho’s introduction to Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness.)

The juxtaposition of these two conflicts in not intended to draw out any comparisons. In Vietnam the School was at least able to function, at a sometimes terrible cost. Syria in 1941 and today is a different and terrible kind of all-out conflict.

But compassion – is there any room for compassion in conflict? The battle in Syria is a battle for a way of life, against a perverted ideology. The practice of compassion is such circumstances is a mighty challenge. But compassion, and specifically the saving of life, must come before any desire or insistence on retribution or punishment. If in this case there is scope for working with the Assad regime – not an easy case to argue – and by extension with Iran, and also with Russia, then we should do so.

The PM in the House of Commons today spoke of Assad ‘butchering his own people’. Even so, treating with the Assad regime, and bringing to an end one conflict, may be the only way in which we can focus on IS and Al-Qaeda, with whom we can never treat. I’m sure this is already being discussed behind the scenes: it will take extraordinary diplomacy to achieve.

We should not delay. I read today that an Al-Qaeda-related group has seized a strategic airfield in Syria near Idlib. The momentum is still moving in the wrong direction.

Jeremy Corbin – the future?

Enough now to say that I supported Michael Foot 35 years ago, and realised my mistake.

I love the idea of Jeremy Corbin. The socialist, the rebel, supporter of the disadvantaged and the outsider, a rallying-point for opponents of austerity. But his solutions of another time, not least nationalisation, soft on Europe, careless in his national (certain trade union leaders) and international friends (for example, Hugo Chavez) – to be of the left is a sufficient credential. He’s rowing back toward the centre now that the leadership is within his grasp. How he copes if elected, how much he accommodates, how, come the Labour Party conference, he copes as the new leader – that will all be telling.

Debate, passion, moral purpose – they are all there in the Labour leadership debate. And a remarkable level of sanity and even camaraderie in the face of big differences of point of view.

What there will need to be if Corbin is leader is a hard realism as well as the passion. History is littered with unintended consequences. Without that hard realism Labour will fragment and we will be left without an effective opposition. No longer do we have the LibDems holding the Tories in check. Labour could easily – I fear probably will – score a spectacular own goal.

By the rivers of Babylon

The second day of September, the rain has relented, it’s 7am and the sun is shining, and down by the Thames the Canada geese have gathered, and I have as usual to navigate my way around both them and their droppings. The perils of running.

All so peaceful, though I can hear a gentle sloshing from the river if I stop beneath the big sycamore, and listen.

I run back into traffic, and a little bit of civilisation, although schools are still not back, and the roads still have a hangover August holiday calm.

I think of Sangatte, and the migrant crisis further afield in Europe as I head back home. Good fortune hardly describes my situation. We rejoiced so much in the Arab Spring, and it’s turned out to be the last and terrible throw of the neo-con mentality, where we assume that our western democratic ways are somehow inevitable, that history is pre-determined. I trust we will never think or feel or argue that way again.  It may be the highest aspiration of mankind, but the wholly unnecessary and unpredicted fate of Syria, visited on Aleppo, on Homs, on Palmyra, and the open channels for migrants through Libya, remind us that we meddle at our peril. We may affect to dislike the el-Sisi regime in Egypt, but we know it will serve a purpose in the end. Syria was on a slow irregular and tortured path before 2011, but it was stable, and the old country survived alongside the new middle classes in the cities.

I will read again William Dalrymple’s description of traveling through Syria in From My Holy Mountain. The image of a building shared as a place of worship by Christian and Muslim communities stays in my mind. And there was Palmyra to visit, a place of wonder.

Sometimes I run quietly and enjoy the silence and, God willing, the sunshine. On other days the thoughts come flooding in.

Palmyra

All I can do here is mark the attempt to destroy temples at Palmyra, and remember how others burnt the library at Alexandria and destroyed the Buddhist library and university at Lalanda, in the 13th century AD. Lalanda it seems was lost almost through inadvertence, simply not understanding what you destroy. Did the Turks mean to destroy Smyrna so totally in 1922?

Destroying Palmyra is about the destruction of heritage and culture, at the highest level that makes us human. And it’s intentional destruction. That’s what sets it apart. Brute invaders wantonly destroying had little understanding of what they destroyed, Here we have something different: history seen as a perversion and a visible sign of a debased humanity. Calculated and willed destruction. Whereas we see Palmyra as its highest expression.

There’s an Islamic notion of paradise intertwined with all this destruction. IS would do well to read Dante, and the different levels of hell he matched to the levels of the misdeeds of their earthbound perpetrators. Or to reflect of the notion of karma, reaping what you sow.

But we are of course In a different world, where different and crueler criteria apply.

I have no solutions, and I’m not writing this in anger, though I have felt fury. I’m writing this simply to mark the threat to Palmyra and to record my own sense of how much it matters.

In a country of so much human suffering should we care, and does it matter? And, yes, of course, it does.

Watching and listening

Saturday evening gave us a beautiful sunset and we sat outside and watched the bands of red build and fall away. Our last, almost our only supper in the garden this summer?

Retreating indoors there was that marvellous final sprint from Mo Farah in the World Cup 5000 metres. Would I could have seen it live. Then, by way of total contrast, listening on the iPlayer to Andras Schiff playing the Goldberg Variations at the BBC Prom. A lightness of touch and an intensity, and a profound hush across the RAH.

A few seconds and a full hour – both will stay with me.

And that sunset wasn’t half bad.