Week One Notes

Week Two Notes

Week Three Notes

Week Four Notes

Week Five Notes

Week Six Notes

Being overwhelmed trying to think bigger, I go back to thinking smaller.  I keep coming back to my flimsy journal. The delicateness of the paper is beginning to interest me. The way it crinkles with the glue. The way it is too thin to hold paint. I like the tactile-ness of leafing through the brittle pages. I pulled some teabags and onion and garlic skins out of the trash and began gluing them down. There’s tiny marks and lines and scars in all these things naturally. Like maps. Instead of being a painter, I’m learning how to make marks, and observe the beautiful things just in the trash! What a welcome change. 

 I can’t separate my writing from my drawing. They always belong together. 

Swamplands. Where messy things get to dance.

You know how when you have in your head a few notes of a tune but you don’t know what it is, and if you hum it, it ends up becoming a different song from the one that’s nagging at you? Or when you remember a street corner but you can’t remember where it is? That kind of thing. My mother liked to use the word frantumaglia—bits and pieces of uncertain origin which rattle around in your head, not always comfortably.

I’d had in my mind for years to a sudden selection of fragments, welded into a story that seemed convincing—that escapes me, I can’t give an honest account. I’m afraid that it’s the same thing as with dreams. Even as you’re recounting them, you know that you’re betraying them.

Elena Ferrante

Walking women. End pages of Camino journal.

 Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, 
raised a huge stone from it, 
and left it leaning. 
It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down. 

“That is the way,” he said. 

“But there are no stairs.” 

“You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.”  



- GM 

"I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, 

like the chestnut bur,

 and my eyes like the sherry in the glass

 that the guest leaves."

-emily dickinson

“Even when real clouds or trees had been the material of the vision, they had been so only by reminding me of another world; and I did not like the return to ours. But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged. Or, more accurately, I saw the common things drawn into the bright shadow. In the depth of my disgraces, in the then invincible ignorance of my intellect, all this was given me without asking. That night my imagination was baptized.”    -C.S. Lewis

"My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent/

and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets./ 

He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals."

CAMINO NOTES (2nd day in over the Pyranees)...

June 18th Roncavauex to Larrasona : 

Amazingly easy! Shade and downhill (most) of the way —-but when it did go uphill, especially in the sun, my body rebelled and I could only go a snail’s pace. Took me 7 hours roundabout. Left at 6, arrived at 1pm. Got to the hostel in Larrasona, and felt the beginning of soreness. But so far my feet have been holding up just fine. Went to the “supermarket” to get beer and the guy gave me a toast with red spanish wine to welcome me, and told me where the swimming hole was. Never found it, but the guy was so lovely! The hostel, simple, but nice and quiet! Where are all the other peregrines? I have a feeling some of them didn’t make it this far and stayed in the town just before. It feels strangely empty in the village.  Only 8 Euro. 

Town I wish I stayed: Zubria had a better river coziness

Arrived! 

Left on June 17th —-Saint Jean to Roncaexaux

Hellishly difficult! Some parts felt weirdly easy, but other parts felt like a nightmare…sun spots and uphill, and when they combined=lethal.  Besides that, the views = unbelievable. Low down fog, like you were in heaven and lots of horses, and cows with old-fashion bells that jangled, and free-range sheep.  Took me 9 hours roundabout. Left at 6:15 —arrived at 3pm. Arrived like a zombie; barely hanging on. But even still, it was doable. Arrived at giant church hostel with 300 beds. 12 euro. Talked to an American man inside from Minneapolis and said I was a “rockstar” because he had to complete that trip in two days—he couldn’t make it in one go. Gave me encouragement for my fitness level.  The American man said he was making the trip because he felt “empty inside”. So many interesting reasons why people do such a thing. Another girl was doing it as she’d just been divorced. 

Town I wish I stayed: Orrion, Orrias? So pretty.

I always wondered why the sky (a sunset) can never look good in pictures. One of my last nights, on my lovely balcony, overlooking the faraway Willamette that merges into the Great Colombia whom Lewis and Clark sailed down, toward the Pacific, well---- I have a sunset. I take a picture.


The picture is dull and emotionless. Why?

I think now, sitting here I understand. It's because when you really appreciate a sunset, you develop a relationship with each feathery cloud, with each heavy pregnancy of the thunderbolt too moody to entertain the gold, red and pink. And you watch them as if they are old friends, just above your head, and it really does seem as if gods reside just beyond their edges. Hiding from us. Pebbled paths, melancholy streaks of mortal pinks, and they all seem to fall toward a certain fragile center and a final  understanding.

But this can only be understood through one's own eyesight. Not a camera.




And that's why I so very much rebel, repel and disagree with our relationships with screens. We cannot see what is actually happening with them. Furthermore, they stunt our emotional understanding of what is going on around us.