I am in Rome. But it is going to take a little while to write this next post. Have patience. Give me a few days.

Walking has a spiritual component. My walks connect me with self, with history, with nature. They help me understand myself better. Read the posts from my walk from Winchester, England to Rome, completed in June, 2017 and my hiking trip to Death Valley earlier this year. Check back for posts from my walk on the Mary Michael Pilgrims Way from Carn Les Boel near Land's End in Cornwall to Glastonbury, beginning May 1.
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Sunday, June 25, 2017
Due giorni più a Roma
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
Da solo, l'ultima mattina in Toscana
Alone, the last morning in Tuscany. Patrick caught the bus from Radicofani to Chiusi yesterday afternoon, continuing by train to Rome. We had known from the start of this year's walk that we would not be finishing our journey together. Though the "dream" to walk the VF was mine, I invited Patrick to join me. Thus the "dream" became his as well.
That the dreams might not be identical became evident in the accommodations we each needed to make. Patrick accommodated me in many ways, probably more than I realize. I accommodated him as well, in ways I am certain he does not realize. Through almost ninety days and nights we had only one "discussion."
My dream was to walk the VF. I'm pretty sure I will make it to Rome, but I will not have walked the entire way, as those who have been following along since the beginning might recall. I gave up that dream early in the walk, several days before Canterbury, when I made the really big accommodation to Patrick. One day we skipped a leg and took the train instead. The why's and wherefores aren't important now. It's history. I did it for friendship, though it hurt me deeply. But it's a slippery slope, and once you skip a leg there are many imagined good reasons to skip another. As I recall, we skipped three in total that first year, certainly less than fifty miles in a total of more than 1,500 from Winchester to Rome.
When Patrick suggested skipping a leg this year, I demurred. "Why?" Patrick asked. "We've done it before." I told him " Not since we left the St. Bernard pass and entered Italy" – actually not since Besançon a couple of hundred kilometers earlier. A small victory for a dream reconfigured.
Whether from the beginning or emerging at some later date, Patrick's dream was to walk the last stages and arrive in Rome with several others he holds dear, Colette and two long time friends, in addition to myself. I had always intended to walk the VF alone. But when Patrick was suffering through some difficult family issues, I invited him to join me. Knowing he is a man of faith, I thought the project would excite him and help him, and a pilgrimage to Rome would be a devotion, an extended prayer for intercession, an act of faith.
For me, though, a walking quintet could never be in the cards. I know and like the people he will walk with. I stayed at the home of one during a visit to Paris. They are good people. But I know myself. It is not the way I want to walk to Rome. I expressed this to Patrick last year when the possibility arose that some of the others might join us for part of that year's walk. Perhaps I was too politic. Perhaps I should have been more direct, more definitive. But this could never be my dream.
So once Patrick committed to his dream and we set out this year, we knew that the day would come when we would embrace, kiss each other's cheeks, and wish each other a "Buon Cammino." We didn't know it would be Radicofani but we knew it would come. Patrick arrived in Rome Saturday night, forty-eight hours before his flight back to Paris. That gave him an opportunity to attend mass at the Vatican on Sunday, something he had long wanted to do. I hope he found great comfort in it.
Since my down day in Siena, we had come another sixty five miles, walking through luscious Tuscan countryside. My spirits were much improved despite temperatures in the nineties and a few climbs made more difficult by the heat.
The morning after Patrick left, I started out with Giuseppe and Carole, friends I had made last year, who I knew would be finishing their walk to Rome this year but who I thought I would not get to see due to their different starting point and starting date. But after checking into the spedale in Radicofani, doing my chores, and returning from hanging up my laundry, who should I see but Giuseppe and Carole just getting settled in. So my first morning alone without Patrick, my last morning in Tuscany, I walked with them for about an hour. I walk at a pace that is natural for me, my passo naturale, and that pace is somewhat faster than theirs. So I did not see them the rest of that day. That is one of the differences between walking with someone and meeting someone, even someone you know. Groups form and breakup as the hours and days go by. Patrick's pace and mine are close but not identical. I'm a bit faster but he has the capacity to walk farther. Though we walk apart much of the time we always stop at some point to wait for the other. We always eat together. We always stay the night in the same place (with one exception not relevant to the discussion here).
That morning was my last morning in Tuscany. As I entered Lazio, the province in which Rome is located, on my way to Acquapendente, I ran into a number of other pilgrims, a Japanese woman Patrick and I had been occasionally walking with and two Italian pilgrims from the Venezia I had met the night before. The next day, from Acquapendente to Bolsena, I ran into Giuseppe and Carole again and a few other walkers.
It was not until today, from Bolsena to Montefiascone, that I walked entirely alone.
I started out late. I did not see another pilgrim all day. I occasionally ran into someone out for a bit of exercise, a man walking his dog, a farmer tending to his crops, but I did not walk with anyone. I spent the day in woods, in vineyards or walking through agricultural estates, on country roads and even an impressive stretch of the ancient Roman road, the Via Cassia Consolare, Roman basoli paving beneath my feet, more than two thousand years old, weathered but otherwise the Roman road of antiquity. There were wonderful views on and off of Lake Bolsena, a volcanic caldera, below me. For most of the day the only sounds I heard were sounds of nature, not a single car for hours on end.
But most of the day was spent in walking meditation, deep in my own thoughts, occasionally coming out of my reverie to check whether or not I was still on the path, and then, moments later, I was back in thought again. Many of the thoughts I had in prior years came back to me. The fact that I am nearing the end of the journey prompted other thoughts. I began to get clarity on the meditation I referred to in an earlier post, the one that occurred to me on my way to San Gimignano, and which I hope to expand on in a future post. I walked in near silence, gravel crunching beneath my boots. My mind was calm. Tranquillo.
Patrick and I have had some really great days walking the VF. Our reception and send off at Canterbury was memorable. Our hiking the alps and reaching the top of the San Bernard Pass together, ending our first year's walk in a triumphant embrace, was fantastic. We had several really glorious days this year walking in Tuscany. But I must tell you: today is right up there, one of the most satisfying days of the entire pilgrimage.
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
Mi sono svegliato in un veramente cattivo stato d'animo questa mattina
I woke up in a really foul mood this morning. It was a sort of Thomas Mann feeling, a slow-motion descent towards a silent lonely end.
It could have been the warm, sticky Siena night, uncooled in spite of the overhead fan that only succeeded in circulating the air within the stuffy room. The window facing the small rectangular courtyard three stories below provided no relief. It faced only on three other featureless brick walls.
Or maybe that foul mood came from reading the news in the early morning dawn of mid-June in Europe when it is too early to wake yet only a glimmer of hope exists that it might be possible to coax another hour or two out of a restless sleep. So you find something to do that isn't stimulating and might actually bore you enough to drop off again. Didn't work. I read the news. I wish the media would strip the names of nations and politicians out of their stories so I can believe what I want about whatever place, rather than take the current reality-series world as it is. Or better yet, I should just divorce myself from what's happening out there and not let it intrude on the business of walking.
Or it could have been yesterday's visit to the Sinagoga di Siena, a tired sad place, full of history and a lot of pain, serving a community of only fifty, the remaining Jewish citizens of Siena. After passing so many churches over the past almost 1,400 miles, visiting a fair number with Patrick, finding wonderful art in some and real comfort and meditative space in others, I thought it would be uplifting to experience my own tradition's places of worship. It wasn't uplifting at all. No person of the Jewish faith was permitted to work on the synagogue's restoration so the design and its implementation show no sense of the spiritual at all. It looks more like my childhood memories of my grandparents' late nineteenth century-era apartment on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn than a house of worship, a three dimensional plasterwork oval in the center of the ceiling, white on gray, a few plaster thunderbolts radiating across the ovoid's perimeter. The contrast between "church" and "synagogue" was way too stark, especially for one like me whose conception is that if there is a singular motivating force behind the infinite, He-She-It cannot possibly care in which tradition one honors it, whether it be a tradition of religion, the personally spiritual, or science. To be clear, in my conception, a science like cosmology is also a spiritual enterprise: dedicating one's life to the mysteries of the infinite, the secrets of creation.
Or the mood might have been for another reason. I know I was feeling the loneliness of waking on one's forty-sixth wedding anniversary, missing the one I should have been waking next to, cuddled in on a cooler, Northern California summer-is-winter morning where lingering against bare flesh brings a warmth that has nothing to do with physical temperature but everything to do with the only real meaningfulness of existence, the love of one whose life is symbiotically entwined with your own.
But I know that it was also the feeling I get every year approximately midway through these walks, when the thought arises of what a ridiculous conception it is for an almost sixty seven year old to trod hundreds or thousands of miles from some indistinct point A to another point B, no matter how celebrated, beautiful, and storied cities they may be. In the dead midway, there is no conception of Rome, only an objective to get there. I get this way every year at one point or another.
From Lucca to Altopascio to San Miniato Alto to Gambassi Terme to San Gimignano to Monteriggioni to Siena, the most recent steps of my journey, I've been suffering through temperatures in the high eighties and low nineties Fahrenheit. But I have also been thrilled by the actuality of the kind of Tuscan landscapes one readily imagines, the ochers, yellows, browns, and greens of dust filtered sunlight on hills, fields, and farmsteads. I've also engaged in meditations that come to mind unbidden, one in particular en route to San Gimignano that I need some time to unravel. Yet this morning in Siena I was in a foul mood.
The day improved, lightened by a smiling, young, bright-spirited Chiara, the guide on a walking tour Patrick and I took this morning. We decided to spend an extra day in Siena and Chiara expertly maneuvered seven German tourists and two pellegrini-cum-tourists through the Duomo and gave us background on works by Michelangelo, Donatello, Bernini, and others, escorted us through the medieval heart of Siena, and let us in on particulars and secrets of the current day Palio.
I felt even better after getting a shave at the shop of one Giuseppe Castigleone and better still when during an evening passeggiata I discovered that one of the hole-in-the wall restaurants I had passed while searching for Giuseppe's place, a short narrow restaurant that earlier in the day seemed more appropriate for a donner/kebob shop or a take away pizza place, had set tables on the street and was in fact an absolutely authentic osteria serving food da casa, all home made. It is hard to escape tourists in Siena, and there certainly were some of those strolling along the street, but here the primary foot traffic was Sienese returning home from work or taking places at the numerous other shops that transformed themselves into local eating haunts in the early evening.
By dinner's end, I was in a reasonably good frame of mind, until I climbed the fifty-seven steps back to my airless room for another restless night's sleep.