Day XXVII: Portomarín -> San Xulian; 18.3mi.

🛏:Albergue Casa Domingo, 10€.

“There are your fog people & your sun people, he said. I said I wasn’t sure which kind I was. He nodded. Fog’ll do that to you, he said.” – Brian Andreas

I think walking all day every day for a month has served as a kind of “mind cleanse.” After twenty-six days I’m a little burnt out on thinking but refreshed at the same time. Today and tonight I’ve found myself mostly thinking in other people’s words, so in honor of that here are (some of) the quotes / poems / lyrics that have stuck with me (and at times carried me) through the miles:

For a long time she flew, only when she thought no one else was watching.

Anyone can slay a dragon … but try waking up every morning and loving the world all over again. That’s what takes a real hero.

These are the multiple shadows because there were a lot of things she walked away from without a word of explanation when she was younger & she still thinks about them more than she needs to.

— Brian Andreas

So perhaps the best thing to do is to stop writing introductions and get on with the book. — Alan A. Milne

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It’s up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done?

— Cheryl Strayed

Happiness is only real when shared. — Christopher McCandless

This is my renaissance, this is my one response, this is the way I say I love you. This is my winding road, this is my way back home, this is the narrow door you know that I will walk through.

Don’t apologize for all of the tears you’ve cried, you’ve been way too strong now for all your life.

I’ll meet you halfway if you’re coming the long way.

And I’m still chasing cracks in the pavement, looking for the ghosts that left me waiting.

— Mat Kearney

I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it, you learned what it was all about.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

— Earnest Hemingway

You ruin your life by desensitizing yourself. We are all afraid to say too much, to feel too deeply, to let people know what they mean to us. Caring is not synonymous with crazy.

I am slowly learning how to laugh and cry and feel through it all, how to welcome the confusion and the joy that comes with loving, and living, and breaking.

Some days I feel like the person I have always wanted to be, and other days, I can feel my heart breaking for all of the past versions of myself I let down when I chose not to protect all that they were. When I chose to tell them that they were not good enough.

— Bianca Sparacino

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about. — Rumi

Pack light, love heavy. — Aaron Watson

Stay strong through your pain, grow flowers from it. You have helped me grow flowers out of mine. So bloom beautifully, dangerously, loudly. Bloom softly. However you need, just bloom. — Rupi Kauer

I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart. — Vincent van Gogh

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”

You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.

— C.S. Lewis

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity. — John Muir

I would rather have a body full of scars and a head full of memories than a life of regrets and perfect skin.

I’ll let you into my soul, but wipe your feet at the door.

— Atticus

I still have so many feelings that have yet to find a home in language.

I don’t want to forget, I want to be okay with remembering.

— Faraway

Dance to the music if you can’t sing it’s native tongue. — Nichole Nordeman

🎧:

“Every hand’s a winner & every hand’s a loser ..” (The Gambler)