Camino Blog – Day 13 – Rough against rough

Welcome to this Camino Blog. If you are new it might be best to start with the introduction. Otherwise, carry on.

Location: Atapuerca

Distance: 18.3km – 265.9km total. Shortish day. Basically a ⅓ of the way! 🙂

Weather: Overcast, chilly this morning (we were quite high) and overcast. Nice for walking. Forecast, for thunder and lightning this afternoon.

Terrain: Straight up 200m+ this morning. Quite a long way through a forest and ended up walking into town on road.

Physical condition: Still pretty good but the foot still so so. Hopefully a bit better over the next few days.

Other: Atapuerca’s claim to fame is that is has the oldest fossilized human remains in Europe. Other than that, not much else but it is quiet and the albergue is nice. Given how many were at yesterday’s one we are pleased to get a spot so easily. There is a pretty flash restaurant across the road with a vegetarian option which Crystal is very enthusiastic about.

Intro to round 2:

One of the theories about the Camino is that there are three stages. First, everything is physical. The second stage is mental (or strangely, females are reported to say emotional). Given that we are about to go through a stretch a bit like walking from Christchurch to Timaru, I can see why. The final stage is religious/spiritual.

In some ways I think this blog posting is a bit similar.

I am very aware that the first time round was mainly about getting the SBs down. This process was necessary to get the details out of my mind so I didn’t have to go back over and over the rational for them all the time. Since I have downloaded most of the key points I actually don’t have much else to say about them now.

What I will do though is experiment with changing the perspective of how they are worded. In their current form they are a creed like, communal declaration. At the risk of sounding a bit loco, I will word them both as a personal declaration and as if they were being uttered by God. This is mainly a mental technique. Putting it in different ways triggers different thought patterns and ways of looking and feeling about the statements that can be revealing.

This might be all you get, or something might come to mind. You may want to try to join me with this process.

SB 1 – There is a God

You are

I Am

I rashly told my biking group that if God didn’t speak to me after 800km of walking then God doesn’t exist. Perhaps a few too many that night. But the lack of any great revelation might put the spanner in the works of this exercise to say the least.

However, I would be the first to admit that I spend large amounts of time doubting God’s existence. I am sure I am not alone. One thing about these SBs is that they build on each other and I often find myself hanging on with fingertips to the very basis of them all.

Pictures

Table tennis outside at the alburgue. Dodgy table