Camino 12 (Tuesday 5 November): Rivadiso

I’m chilled and the 30 kms of walking in the rain (again) has left me very tired. I walked through plantations of eucalypts today and was homesick for wild trees after days of walking on chestnut burrs and acorns.

So many of us gathered last night in ethos auberge in Palais de Rey, lots of old faces. Most of the bare-minimum mob, nearly all of them Spanish, stayed in different hostels. The beds were good but the food disappointing, so we are hoping for better things in Rivadiso, in a wonderfully restored auberge.

We set out in the light rain and fog and missed the sun all day. It just feels like a waiting game, with forty clicks to Santiago. Our conversations are shortened with this strange fatigue, but Tobias thinks he walk with me to the sea, because i am more thoughtful that the younger travellers. A nice compliment!

So, in lieu of a deeper reflection, which I don’t feel up to today, here are the stamps from my credencial. A nice collection!

Poetry and Religion
– Les Murray

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words
and nothing’s true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier’s one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can’t pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can’t poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There’ll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds – crested pigeon, rosella parrot –
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.