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ENG:
/…/ I tell you one of my highly spiritual experiences back from autumn, which is a typical camino story considering its dramaturgy, and as for its unique content, very “Rooolandistic”.
The last water before Santiago is the brook of Lavacolla. Pilgrims from afar had usually the last opportunity to wash themselves, 8 km from the finish, before seeing St. James. ‘Cause the pilgrim is dirty and stinky – nowadays actually only a minority of them, for examples me. This washing became a popular tradition; lately it’s been symbolizing a kind of preparation, spiritual purification for the encounter with the apostle. I’d heard of it in a documentary but I have already forgotten. (One part of these kind of traditions I followed, the other part I didn’t, depending on what I felt it was for me. This one I didn’t really care about, I didn’t even remember of it.)
I wanted to camp in Monte do Gozo (5 km before Santiago) in order to catch up with the midday pilgrim mass in the Cathedral the next day. It was already evening, end of October, and a sudden need to urinate crushed on me at a resting place. Rocinante, as usual, started to graze, so I sat down on a bench for a little bit. I didn’t really know where I am exactly, only that it’s already very close to Monte do Gozo. However, tiredness came to me out of nothing, thus for some minutes I even fell asleep sitting, so I rather camped here, at the bank of the brook. Then, at 6 am I woke up to an urgent and relentlessly rushing diarrhea. There was no other option; I had to crawl into the cold, so I dived into my slipper in the gloom – and with the same vigour, into Rocinante’s excrement, insomuch that the donkey shit was splashing between my toes. (I think I mentioned before that he always shits at the closest point to my sleeping place on purpose.) I was just looking around where I could crouch but the sun was already coming up, and all the point were visible from some of the houses nearby, so driven by the urgent compulsion I went into the brook, found a good hiding place under covering trees and – mea maxima culpa – emptied all my intestinal content of unholy quantity and quality into the water. The brook is a great bidet, at the same time cleansing both my feet and slippers from the donkey shit... After departing I read in the guide book (the style of which freaked me out so much that I rarely used it) that it certainly was the brook of Lavacolla, where the above-mentioned tradition is still alive.
I camped here in autumn...
...although I would have to camp here, on the other, more beautiful side of the site. But in this case I would have found place to hide outside the broom :)
Understand? I had to wash myself here! Where millions of pilgrims with spiritual burden have already done the same. (OK, maybe not exactly the same, hehehe.) Not to mention that diarrhea is purification itself!
When I realized this, the flow of synchronicity crushed on me, I marched towards the apostle’s tomb grinning. As if my body has knew what I didn’t. This kind of Camino experience has real attitude- and personality shaping power: when you experience that there’s some relation between your nervous system and the Earth’s magnetic lines and other people’s (including the dead and the unborn) nervous system and the universe and all other things, or in short I’d say: between you and the God. This also indicates that the pilgrim could as well get the guide book the fuck out (which actually René definitely did during his way and continued without it), ‘cause it’s not about fucking recipes dictated by some people that you have to follow, but what the way specifically gives to you.
If it gives you to lose your way (as it happened to me in various forms), then you have to contemplate on and handle it somehow. In the other hand, if it throws that you have to follow a guide book, it also has its symbolic meaning. So the whole way is a big-big metaphor of life. Good go accomplish it to look at your life from above, realize your truth. The Way, the Truth and the Life: all the same!
I have to add, I didn’t get to the cathedral on this day ’cause I was stopped by the rain at the Albergue Acuario in the suburb, the only almost-donkey-compatible place of Santiago of which it turned out lately that Balázs had been working there for years before founding his own little place with similar feeling: age of Aquarius, prayer flags, love&peace etc. In which actually I’ve been working recently.
So in February, arriving here 8 km from Santiago for the second time I washed myself on purpose in the surrealistically cold brook. This day was the first and for some time the last with good weather. In the afternoon the sun finally came out and I was marching in a big flow singing. Arriving in Monte do Gozo, a fellow came out of his huge hacienda to tell me he likes my donkey and would like to buy it. I was just wondering about the same, how I could sell it. However we couldn’t meaningfully communicate, so I wrote down his number to call him later with an “espanglish” expert.
I put my tent on a wooded part near to the pilgrim monument which is supposed to commemorate the happiness of the first sight of the cathedral’s towers – here:
The picture was shot back in autumn; this is the “Mountain of Joy”. The cathedral emerges about a half inch left from the photo’s geometrical centre, in the size of an ant’s cock in the picture. This time I spent here more nights. /.../
