Uncategorized

It’s Your Camino

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I’m barely five miles into my walk on the Camino when I wonder if it would be cheating to take one of those electric Lime scooters that everyone around me seems to be riding. It’s 11 a.m., I just sat down to have a cafe con leche and something to eat, and I’m not sure I can get back up.

“Cheating,” is an interesting concept on the Camino. While religious in origin, the Camino is far from the sole purview of religious pilgrims, so my secularism isn’t a problem. The Caminho Portugues is believed to be the original way of St James (Saint Iago, hence “Santiago,”), who preached “love of God, self, and stranger,” before his image was resurrected almost 800 years after his death in the form of the Santiago Matamoros (St James, slayer of the Moors) when Christians sought to repossess the Iberian peninsula from Muslims.*

While the Caminho Portugues Central is the second most traveled Camino after the Camino Frances, and is the religious heavyweight of the Portuguese paths (it is also called the Caminho Real), multiple Portuguese Camino routes exist.  They range from the traditional central route to the mostly touristy Senda Litoral (the seaside path) that I take today, leading out of Porto along the river Duoro and up the promenade on the coast before connecting with slightly more traditional routes. Most people I meet are combining paths over the next two weeks to arrive in Santiago, and many will actually change course along the way based on what we learn from one another as we greet, connect, and part ways. So if secularism isn’t a concern, what does “cheating” mean?

Among the most popular sayings you hear among pilgrims is “It’s your Camino!” It’s a way of reminding you that your journey – your personal journey here, both the geographic and emotional paths you are on as you pilgrimage – are your own. Your journey truly is the destination, despite all of us gunning for Santiago. Each of us decides for ourselves which route(s) we want to take, how long we want to spend on them, whether we travel alone or with others, and what it means to us to be here. Your Camino is your own, no matter how many people may be walking it with you.

Over the next few days, I will meet people who are here to commemorate the loss of loved ones, people who are pondering changes in work, family, or spiritual makeup and walk the path to meditate on potential futures or discuss them with others, people who are simply on vacation, and people who are, in fact, on a religious pilgrimage. And despite having thought briefly about whether or not to do this walk before setting out on it, I of course will be dumbstruck to find an answer when I am asked later today what my personal reason is for walking this Camino, at this time. As always, it is not the whether, but the why that causes me pause. And maybe that is my journey: understanding my why.

My cafe con leche arrives, along with an avocado toast and a glass of water. As I caffeinate and get some nutrients in my body, I watch surfers catch waves on the Atlantic right in front of me. The waves come from far away but roll in gently compared to the ones I have seen on television, filmed to the south, not far from here, in Nazare. These waves are welcoming, the challenges slightly smaller, and people of all ages are paddling toward them, into them, and floating back to shore on their energy.

I stand and stretch, sit back down and am nuzzled by a dog that has been sitting beneath a nearby table. I give the scruff of his neck some good scratches and watch more scooters go by, and decide that yes, for me, on MY Camino, a scooter for sure is a cheat I am not interested in, so I will pay the bill and walk the rest of the way.

*Information on the history of the Caminos and St. James come from A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Camino Portugues by John Brierly (Kindle Edition, 2022)

Los Angeles, Uncategorized

The Sounds of Silence

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There is no picture to go with this post, and for that, I apologize. But you can make one for yourself. Go ahead. I will help.

Close your eyes. Go on – close them. Close your eyes, and take a breath – slow, long, and deep. I’ll tell you what the breath smells like: clean, a little sweet with the scent of fecundity. Fall sun, the whisper of winter, a slight afternote of salt floating in. Now let out that breath and take another. And while you take it in, listen, and I will tell you what you hear: nothing.

You hear nothing, and that nothing is everything. It is the space that is made for a pair of mergansers to fly across a field and alight on the pond near you. It is the space that is made for a sudden wind to blow – strong enough that you can see it coming across the still surface of the water and listen as it shakes down the alders and birch and begins the winter process of stripping them bare. On its way, it bats the apples from the trees by the beach to the ground with a heavy, abusive thud that leaves sugar spots on their skin and calls the deer to feed, their slow chew a silence of its own, until they sense your presence and stop, perking up their heads in a frozen stance and then prancing away – a hop almost like a rabbit – the pattern of it smashing grass beneath their feet with the quiet underbeat of a drum.

Let out your breath and take another. Keep your eye closed. Here come the geese, the heaviness of their wings sweeping by you like a brush across a snare drum – sleepy, slow, the shushing of mother nature putting the earth down for a nap. The beat of fall. If you whistle for the dog, he will come, too, soft and silent across the grass and then faster, his own background beat, louder as he comes to your feet and stops suddenly and it is silent, except for his heavy pant of breath, backed up by a faint lap of waves sipping from the rocky shore and swallowing shells back down to sea with the tinkling of a wind chime.

This is what silence looks like. This is the picture to send with this post – of stillness and breath, of a life that happens around you like a quiet background beat of a drum to steady the earth’s breathing, and your own.

Now, open your eyes. Take a deep breath and try to hold on to that picture while the sounds of the city replace it with the cacophony of urban-ness, an aural affront that wakes your brain to alertness. It is endless, unpatterned: the unpredictable whine of a siren down La Brea. The inevitable, irrational hum of a helicopter over Hollywood, or the highway, or on a trip to the beach – the Uber of the rich driving through your backyard – louder, louder, closer, too close, too loud, receding, gone. Replaced in irregular waves of sound and motion. The neighbors are having the same discussion about their relationship across the alley over the one constant: the whir of air conditioning units pushing too hard at work, broken at irregular intervals by plumbing from the floor beneath you, so loud it may be in your own kitchen or bath.

These are the sounds of the city, and they create a picture of their own. The backdrop is an uncontrollable foreground that we don’t breathe in. We don’t move to them so much as follow them along, dodging their beat, letting go of our own, occasionally in step, or stepping aside. Welcome back to LA. Welcome back to the wake up.

Los Angeles, Uncategorized

Hollywood Forever

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People keep asking me how I like LA. Or how I came to be here. Or if I think I’m staying.

I, myself, barely remember that I am here lately. This is the first weekend in 7 weeks that I’ve slept in my own zip code, and between those weekends, I’ve been working a good number of 11- and 12-hour days at the office. In weeks like that, does it matter where one lives?

And yet it does. Because where else but LA could you take four pieces of art that have been sitting in your apartment, patiently awaiting frames for a year, to finally get the love they deserve, and end up taking the dog for a walk in that ultimate commitment to never leaving LA: Hollywood Forever Cemetery?

Tucked between the Paramount lot and Santa Monica Blvd, with a clear view of the infamous Hollywood sign on most days, Hollywood Forever Cemetery has a little of something to love from every corner of this city. There are Russian Orthodox here, and Russian Jews, and German Jews, and just plain Jewish Jews. I would imagine there are some just plain Russians and Germans and Chinese and Japanese and Vietnamese and Italians and maybe some Brits and people of other sorts, but I didn’t happen upon their individual ‘neighborhoods.’ There’s a Jewish mausoleum and a Catholic mausoleum and a giant empty space of mausoleum waiting to be filled with anyone ready to commit to whatever Hollywood brings on.

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On a sunny Saturday that threatened to heat up, numerous palm trees and other deciduous arboreal delights provided ample shade and some wandering space for the dog. Like the rest of LA, the cemetery is absurdly dog-friendly. Of course it is – it’s the eternal home of Toto.

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The grass is pleasingly unkempt; the cemetery (unlike LA) is not overly-coiffed. Its natural irregularity is inviting, and I was tempted to wander through the crowded rows of tombstones on a plush offroad journey. But I was informed by a friendly but firm security guard that dogs must stay off the grass. The reason, he pointed out from his seat on an official golf cart, is because the graves and some of their stones ride right up against the curb in a significant portion of the park.

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The stones are worthy of their own rolling credits. It’s not the people who lie within or beneath them – though there is a Golden Age of Hollywood Who’s Who list buried here – it’s the pure variety of the stones themselves. They are stones the size of ledger paper. There are stones flush to the ground. There are stones the size of coffins, and stones that are sarcophagi; stones engraved with the symbols of Masons and Oddfellows, Stars of David and Coptic crosses, and things I’ve never seen before. There are family plots that are monuments themselves; there are crypts and obelisks and something that looks like a cross between a real pyramid and a pyramid you’d find on the Vegas Strip, but of course, this is Hollywood, and what is Vegas but a variation on that theme?

0138f3644ce778d9849254dbda70fa83661dbfcd92There are homages here. To mothers, and sons, to brothers and daughters and great grandparents ‘united in eternity’ side by side, their portraits etched in granite above them.

01933319891c1522ea42a2bc0789be3f7399c7c708There are artists and actors and singers and writers and producers and directors and normal Joe’s. There are granddaughters now walking with canes and aided by great granddaughters carrying picnics to visit family members on a sunny afternoon. There are mourners gathered, and empty chairs set up awaiting more. And there are tourists – foreign and domestic, and local, like myself, wandering through a local past and wondering about the future. It’s a village of passed souls breathing a little life to those of us still walking above them, looking up at the palm trees and blue sky, and wondering how we got to this incredible place.

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