Peregrina Pining...

My cousin just asked me if I felt the withdrawal of the Camino that others talk about. I do feel something rather all encompassing sometimes. The Camino is emotionally, spiritually and physically intense. Tears and laughter were never very far from the surface when I was there. Colors were bigger and brighter. The road was longer, the mountains higher. Heat was hotter, cold was colder, pain...well...okay pain always hurts...but it really hurts more if you have no escape from it for hours and days.

I am back in Toronto in a city I love very much, with people I love very much and missed very much and I am grateful to be home. But I am aware I am missing something. I understand, now, why people get addicted to this road...to this journey...to the intensity of naked experience. I miss everybody KNOWING they are spirit living an earthly existence. I miss the openness of people in talking about it. I miss the quick, yet deeply effecting connections with people all there to look for themselves...for God...for God in themselves.

There is no facade. No matrix. The veil is thinner. You can hear the Voice in your head. The Voice of love, the Voice of wisdom. There is no traffic to drown it out. No clamoring up the corporate ladder of indifference that interferes with the quiet message of your beating heart. Your heart. Your heart that says there is something more to this life...this world...this experience than what we blindly raise up as a false prophet. Our lives have truly become a game of Monopoly with everyone racing to get to the end before everyone else. Or to get out of jail free.

There is more.

There is silence. The silence with nowhere to go...nowhere to be...the silence where you can hear your Guides, your God, your Universe.

There is beauty. The beauty that will make you cry if you are brave enough to open yourself up to it. It's looking at the sun like it is the first time you have ever seen it. It's looking at the mountains like they are living, breathing entities who experience your beauty as you experience theirs. It's looking at the people you encounter everyday and seeing their beauty. Their beautiful, imperfect perfection. It's being able to see the beauty in things we don't normally think of as beautiful.

There is passion. The passion that is being courageous enough to feel everything. Feeling pain and being with it. Feeling fear and facing it head on. Feeling love and opening oneself to the ecstasy of that gift from God.

I think sometimes we cloak ourselves from the vividness of the life we were meant to lead. We attempt to make life into smaller more controllable, bite-sized pieces, when really we are supposed to grab the apple and bite into it with passion, feeling the juice run down our faces and our throats. Living life with passion and eyes wide open is scary...no...it's terrifying...but it's REAL! And it's ours. Our gift to be revelled in.

So, my cousin asks, do I feel a withdrawal? Yes, I do. On the Camino it was ok to cry, to yell, to laugh...to maybe even be a little bit crazy...because life is a crazy place. I guess the challenge for me is to find a way to remember and live those lessons here...where the volume for the distracting noise of avoidance is high, but the volume for truth is sometimes barely audible.