A Writer Afoot

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Walking the Camino

I am writing this from a hotel in Rua, Spain. It’s early, and my roommate has headed out for a cooler spot and the possibility of a cafe con leche. If you have been following my Facebook posts, you have had a glimpse most days, but here are some more:

A woman walking her big smooth skinned gold cow down the road. Woman is dressed in calico, bringing a stick. She waves as we pass…Buen Camino!…

A dog comes bolting from the meadow behind a bar (not a bar like the US, but like a very small cafe with beer or sidra and maybe a few trinkets) where we stopped for our morning drink break. She is a big sturdy golden lab mix, trailing her broken chain, and a tumble of seven puppies, yipping in frantic effort to keep up. Mother trots blithely down the road, dives into the trees surrounding a field, pups hurry to catch up, disappearing one by one.

One morning awakening to a rooster crowing, over and over, then opening the windows to see a vista of mist and ancient buildings and a brand new supermercado and windmills on a hill in the distance. Old and new, ancient and modern, all mixed up.

Walking with women on the Camino, talking, talking, talking. Sorting through the confusion of how to choose a career path with one young woman, talking about work and writing and relationships with others. Walking alone, I listen, too, and meander through the past decade, which has been both tumultuous and incredibly rewarding.

Wandering through the Spanish countryside at the pace of…well, a walker. Slow enough to really see things. The chickens in a yard, sable and shiny and hearty looking. (Now these are free range chickens!) There are forests of deep shade, and fields of peppers and corn and beans. Old dry stone walls, a house overrun with vines, a freshly build hacienda with gigantic fuschia and hydrangea bushes. In the evening, the sun stays up until past ten, and we walked around after dinner last night, letting it paint our skin pink.

Almost to Santiago. We will arrive tomorrow. I will be sad to leave my new friends, but also glad to go home to my beloved CR and Jack.

The girls in the basement are waking up, looking with glee at all the stuff I’ve collected for them. We’ll see what they make of it all.

A wander through Glastonbury

There’s a bit of a time lag here…have not had a lot of connectivity to the Internet, but I hope you’ll enjoy the trip ramblings anyway.

Books read: 1 memoir, 1 British WF, 1 American WF, 6 short stories, 1 Australian WF.

Miles walked thus far: approximately 30

Date stamp: On the way home from Weston Super Mare. Written on the bus.

Last Wednesday, on our free day with the tour, we went to Glastonbury, to walk up to the Tor where King Arthur supposedly pulled the sword from the earth, and to the ruins of the Abbey, which King Henry the Eighth knocked down in 1539. We took a taxi (which I keep calling a cab and no one understands what I mean) on narrow lanes through the green, hedgerows of the countryside. Farmhouses, square and white with rectangular windows and steep roofs, stand right against the road, so close you could almost touch the walls if you stuck an arm out of the window. The grass in each yard is bordered with flowers—poppies, just now, red and orange and pink, sprays of foxglove and larkspur and delphiniums, pots of pansies—and the blossoms are twice or three times the size of the same flowers at home in Colorado.

The town of Glastonbury is a medieval warren of narrow lanes lined with shops and houses that open directly onto the streets. The taxi dropped us at a triangular plaza with a clock and benches, with the Abbey ruins behind and a hilly street climbing toward the Tor. New Age shops of every ilk sold their indiscriminant sacred relics—baskets of crystals and wands next to tokens painted with Native American symbols next to postcards of the Chalice Well. If one wished to be adorned as a witch or a goth or a yogi, all items of loose and printed and glittering clothing were available, batiked and sequined and gauzy. British and European hippies converged, all ages, with beards and bellies, wrinkles or smooth arms, everything in between.

Between the shops were hotels as old as the streets—one born in 15th century. The church is ancient, and the Abbey, of course, dates back to the 11th century. The Tor is very, very old. St. Patrick is said to have sheltered there before heading to Ireland. The Chalice was supposed to have been buried in the Well.

I loved the vigorous walk to the top of the Tor, and the scenery was glorious, green fields around like a painting of What England Looks Like. Houses in the distance, built along a ridge, fields just below us with a narrow road going between them. Pathways up the Tor itself, one from the main road, one looping behind the town to the top. It might have felt more sacred but there were so many people it was hard to get to the heart of it. It did have a rich silence about it, the silence of time and history and things long spent. The hill was ringed by meditators, facing outward. A boy about five peed into the grass while his mother looked on beneficently.

I sat for awhile, feeling at first like a fake, because the town was such a New Agey jumble of mingled everything, so much that none of it means anything after awhile. I felt a little awkward because CR was with me, but he didn’t mind, sitting down next to me as he does when we’re at church. Finally, I closed my eyes, and there, waiting with a low chuckle, was SPIRIT, big and golden and warm, soaking into me.

Well, okay. So maybe I have to offer an opportunity for communication.

We went back down, and stopped by the gardens of the Chalice Well, which was silent and holy in a way the Tor was not. We collected water at the fount, and I walked in the pool of healing, splashing the cold, cold water over my knee. I would have meditated again at the well itself, but there was a family group sitting there, and it seemed…strange to encroach. I might have waited my turn if CR hadn’t been there, but he was being so patient, I know that’s just an excuse.

Anyway, we wandered into town for lunch at a traditional tiny teashop, where we ate cream teas and I had a bowl of soup, this one cauliflower and Stilton. Last night, it was Cock A Leekie, which is chicken and leek, and Tuesday, it was carrot and coriander. Soup fest this time…the weather has been right for that.

After lunch, we went to the Abbey, which was deeply moving. Huge, obviously once a wealthy pool of welcome and shelter. I have long known about the dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry the Eighth, but the vastness of it was not real to me until I stood in the middle of that ruin, feeling the loss of what must have been a glorious church, and abbey….Henry’s act of violence was every bit as ferocious and violent as the Taliban tearing down the monuments in Afghanistan. Wanton destruction.

That’s all for now. The computer wants to restart and I’m going to let it, and drift a little on the scenery.

Old and new...a quick post from the train

Long walk in the warm glaze of afternoon in ”rural” Hawkhurst. Terrified by the tiny cars whizzing three inches from my body on lanes not quite wide enough for two Tonka trucks, I detoured through a graveyard surrounded by meadows and vast hillsides peopled only by birds and dragonflies, the greenery topped with butercups. A public footpath winds around a pasture where a white horse grazes, long tail swishing, and then leads me to the road where a 5 ton lorry hurtles by, blowing my hair straight up. Old and new, ancient and modern, all here in a jumble.

England: the seaside, part one

Having technical difficulties with photos. Will add later.

Time: 8:20 pm, English time. Weather: bright and warm. Not a drop of rain in sight.

Books read: 2 (1 memoir, picked up on impulse at the Borders in the Orlando airport, 1 British Women’s Fiction picked up at a thrift shop in Cranbrook, Kent when my Kindle broke somewhere between Denver and London).

Approximate # of miles walked (not including any miles walked while sightseeing): 9

Where I am right this second: in the bar area of a Victoria hotel in Weston Super Mare. I am drinking a Well’s Bombardier Ale, which I have to say is very, very good. I might have another, since I am, after all, on vaca…holiday.

What I can hear: the murmur of British voices. One so thick to my right that it must be Welsh or something. Cannot understand it at all. A pair of couples, maybe in their sixties, are discussing their holidays in clean accents much like CR’s, which I at least understand.

Today, we traveled to Cheddar Gorge, which is a spectacularly beautiful canyon. Crumbling gray limestone, thick greenery everywhere. It was raining most of the time we wandered around the village, which reminded me decidedly of Manitou Springs, Colorado—90% tourist traps with a couple of very interesting spots. In this case, it was the last place that makes Cheddar by hand, every day, where we watched a part of the process and sampled various varieties. The cave aged is, I think, meant to be the ultimate, but I have to admit I preferred the sharp, long-aged version.

This afternoon, I walked on the beach for a long way. It was utterly empty save a few dogs and their owners, including the biggest German shepherd I have ever seen, who was so beautiful and noble I was instantly reinforced in my quest to find a mix shepherd pup to rescue. Love them madly. This is not technically the sea, but perched on the Bristol channel, so the waves are small and simple. The shells are little shatterings across the sand. An island, broad and green, rises to one side, inviting you to come hike and enjoy the delights to be found on top, but a river cuts it off from the mainland, and signs warn of dangerous sands. (Which I will admit I only know because CR went running there. I walked nearly that far, but gave up before I found the very end.)

It’s quiet in my head right now, the tuners focused outward, not inward. This, too, is part of the writing life, arguably one of the most crucial: taking in whatever life offers, letting it flow in and fall into some dark center where it will ferment with other things and eventually grow something new. Today what went in: greenery and hedgerows, seagulls and seawalls, dogs and the effects of aging, the curious fact that there are those little turtle humps in so many bays and seas. I’m thinking of all the odd jobs people have—a girl is testing a microphone, getting ready to sing for the old dears in a seaside town on the Bristol Channel. The old men are flirting with her, and their wives are shaking their heads, shushing them. She is so young she wears braces. Today, there was an old woman selling sweeties in a stall in an indoor mall. The waiters are Spanish.

So many jobs. So many locations. So many different life paths and possibilities.

Anticipation...will you come along with me?

I keep resolving to be better about the blog. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy it–I do. It’s just that lately it seems there are a million beautiful places for you to fill the well, and I want to make a post that is meaningful and real and good every single time. But that hasn’t been happening, and anyway, it’s counter to my entire philosophy of showing up and doing what’s mine to do today.

With that in mind, I’m going to drop the Impossible Standards and get back to just blogging about whatever I find compelling or interesting or annoying on a given day.

Today, I’m thinking about travel. About Spain and England, about walking the Bristol channel and sitting on trains with my notebook, looking out the window, letting the well get filled. I’ve wanted to go to Spain since I was a young teen, studying Spanish with the plump, white-haired Julia Child lookalike who was my teacher. I can’t remember her name, but I remember that she traveled every summer to some exotic place and always brought things back with her for her students. She was exuberant and cheerful and despite the fact that I was in my utterly anti-establishment phase, I loved her. It seemed that it wouldn’t be such a bad life to teach Spanish all winter then travel to some distant land each summer. She influenced me to consider bilingual education as a major in college, and I probably would have enjoyed it.

In those days, I desperately wanted to travel to Spain. Not Mexico, not Argentina, not Ecuador. Spain. (Despite the fact that Mexico City is *much* closer to me than New York City, which I’ve visited many many times, I’ve never been to Mexico, and yes, I do find this somewhat shameful. I would like to go. It just never seems to happen.) My uncle had spent a year in Spain when I was a child, and I remember him stopping by our house on his way out. He held tiny kittens in his very large hands, and then he was off to the Far Away. I didn’t know anyone else, even at 16, who had traveled so far without the military.

Those of you who have read The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue might remember Trudy’s passion for Spain and the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. That was my fantasy in motion. Going to Sevilla, immersing in Spain, in Spanish, in the Far Away. I honestly thought I’d set the yearning aside, replacing it with dreams of India and other locales. I sent my son there a few years ago, and he brought me a rosary from Barcelona. When he let it fall, bead by bead, into my waiting palm, he said, “You need to go to Spain. It’s perfect for you.”

That rosary has been draped around a statue on my altar for these five years, but actually traveling to Spain has been nowhere on my radar. I expected I would go at some point, but here it is. Now. I suppose I should bring the rosary with me, in my pocket, as I walk the Camino de Santiago–me and my sixteen year old self. I’ll carry my old Spanish teacher with me, too, and my uncle who was so brave to go and study abroad when he was only a teenager. And my eyes will be wide open, and my heart, and I will see what I will see.

I am so surprised to be going!

Will you come along?

Finished!

As I type this, a summery breeze is blowing through my office window. I can smell lilacs. The new book, HOW TO BAKE A PERFECT LIFE is finished at last…written, rewritten, given to agent and editor for thorough reads, then revised some more, and returned. It is on its way. I’ve seen a mock up of the cover, and will post one when I get a final. This is always a bittersweet period, when it sinks in that I actually have finished, and I won’t be living with these friends again. They’re on their way into the world. I’m glad, but also a little blue.

So now I’m catching up on the multitudes of tasks that have fallen by the wayside while I immersed in this book. Catching up on email from readers (please be patient with me if you emailed and I haven’t yet responded–I answer them all myself and it takes time, but I will get to every single one of them), catching up on blogs, catching up with friends I haven’t seen in a couple of months. Walking. Studying Spanish. Reading. Dancing.

What I’m really doing most of the time is packing and repacking in my head. My goal is to make it through England and Spain, four weeks, with one carry-on and a backpack. So, no more than two pairs of shoes. One fleece and one turtleneck and one rainjacket. A dress that packs very well, some leggings, and scarves to accessorize. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve been walking many miles every week, aiming for at least 30, and only making that rarely. This week, I had the exuberant pleasure of dancing with Carlos AyaRosas, one of the founders of Nia, who is retiring this year. Under other circumstances, I would have cut back on the dancing to give my body a chance to adjust to the extra walking miles, but how could I forgo that chance? No way!

It was deliciously exhilarating! Carlos is a very physical dancer, and a great teacher, with an entirely different style than our (beloved) Loretta Milo. The workshop was two hours and we danced our heads off–the kind of dancing that makes you forget everything and sweat away all stress and fill up entirely with joy. I have been faithfully attending at least one, and sometimes three, classes a week since I began eighteen months ago. I always learn something new about my body or the music or how to count something that had eluded me before, but dancing with Carlos and his wife, who looks like she might be half-fey, coming out of the trees just to teach us to dance, and having the pleasure of watching Loretta and some of the other black belts lose themselves in the dance was…pure flame, pure notes, pure love. I wish you could all have been there with me.

Have you ever tried something new that ran away with your heart?

Magic globe

I visited a pair of book clubs in Woodland Park on Tuesday night, and they gave me a gorgeous lavender plant. I had it in the sink to water and noticed the reflection. It looks as if there is another world inside that reflection, doesn’t it?

I have now packed the book off to my editor. This is my watch-movies-and-tv recovery weekend. I might take a couple days after that, too, because I have EARNED them. Love this book so madly. I hope you guys love it as much as I do. Can’t wait for you to see it.

Filling the well with sunsets, walks, and hipstamatic

This is the leanest period of blogs from me since I began. I just noticed that I’ve barely put up a blog a month since the blizzard posts from DC. I promise I will get back to more regular posts soon. Honestly, it’s just been a very deep immersion of a book for some reason. It’s hard to live in this world and in that one, and the book wins every time.

Walking, walking. I’m nearly finished with revisions on HOW TO BAKE A PERFECT LIFE, which is out December 28, and am trying to inch up the walking miles every week to be ready for the trip to Spain. Last night, walking around my neighborhood, listening to Enya on the iPod, I could feel all the annoyances and irritations of the day dripping from the ends of my fingers. I was roaringly irritable for no particular reason (except that I am a wee bit ready for a vacation), and rather than be a grouch, I took myself out for a walk around my neighborhood. There’s a 2-6 mile loop I can adapt to time/circumstances. Some of it wanders by homes, and some through fields, and one long stretch along a drainage ditch surrounded by trees and grass, where backyards butt up against the easement. It’s a dog-walking neighborhood, and a teenagers walking neighborhood, and a jogging neighborhood, thought that seems to happen more in the morning.

Last night, the sunset arrived at the tail end of my 90 minutes ambling, and it seemed to last forever. At first, there where whimsical purple fishes swimming through coral skies, and then snakes and eels, and spaceships coming to earth. It is a vast, vast sky, and I succumbed to taking pictures. Here are a couple of them:

The Maxfield Parrish sky:

Finally, this one is from one of my favorite apps in recent weeks, the Hipstamatic, which produces old-school looking shots. Like this one of the sand in the park:

Cool, no?

What sort of artist’s dates are you giving yourself these days?

Book Club Pic

Almost finished with the new book. In the meantime, I thought you might like this picture. The Book Babes book club read The Lost Recipe for Happiness and sent me some pictures of their feast. Thanks, Diane! (I love the attention to detail, don’t you?)

I’d love to post more. Send me yours!

Award news for THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS

Sorry to be absent so much lately. I’m working hard on the 2011 book. it’s the most ambitious I’ve undertaken so far, and it’s taking all my writing huevos to get it on the page. I did write a post on setting for Writer Unboxed yesterday, and it has generated some excellent discussion. Please join in.

IN OTHER NEWS: I am delighted to let you know that THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS is a RITA finalist. Quite a powerful panel of books, and I’m honored to be in such company. Happy, happy, happy.

I’ll write a post about my deep and visceral reaction to Tucson one day soon. In the meantime, I’m studying Spanish and have gone back to cello. Thinking hard about a vegetable garden this summer. Needed some hobbies that were not related to words and writing!

Will get back to posting regularly soon, I promise.

A Writer Afoot

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Walking the Camino

A wander through Glastonbury

Old and new...a quick post from the train

England: the seaside, part one

Anticipation...will you come along with me?

Finished!

Magic globe

Filling the well with sunsets, walks, and hipstamatic

Book Club Pic

Award news for THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS

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