DAY 14: ZERO IN ARMENTEIRA 0.0 miles 5,793 steps
A Zero-Day was so good. We had a planned Sleep Sabbathwhich means we stay in bed as long as our bodies allow, but the call of the breakfast buffet won out. Five courses and we were full. Perhaps one can overcome a hiker’s hunger. The forecast of a rainy day proved correct, so we stayed inside—I blogged, Suzanne listened to her book or the Bible, and we watched wet pilgrims stream by in the drizzle.
Monastery of St. María de Armenteira confiscated by the state
I stumbled upon an unrelated article about the Devaluation of Mendizábal of 1836. I am shocked to learn that our little monastery, like many other religious establishments in Spain, was closed and confiscated by the state. Some were sold. In 1834 the same thing happened in Portugal, but much more efficiently.
The monastery we see today has undergone a remarkable transformation. In 1989, while the rest of the world was watching the fall of the Berlin Wall or the protests in Tiananmen Square, Cistercian nuns quietly returned to the monastery to restore and breathe new life into this ancient place.
Until the landslide brings you down
Over lunch, Suzanne tells us how Santiago affected her. She remembers our first night in Spain, when Fleetwood Mac landslide played while we chatted at the table at Casa Alternativo.
I took my love, I took it down I climbed a mountain and turned around And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Until the landslide brought me down
While I was thinking, not feeling like a priest that night, the landslide stirred inside her. “Life has been incredible,” she says, “so many blessings, so much grace poured out on us. But one day, the song says, a landslide will take us down. Maybe it’ll be you, maybe it’ll be me. But one of us will go under, and then…” A melancholy mood takes over, but not for long.
Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love? Can the child in my heart grow beyond this? Can I sail through the changing tides of the ocean? Can I handle the seasons of my life?
You may not know this about her, but Suzanne is a hummingbird. I think it’s cute how she hums and my game is to figure out what she’s humming. On this trip it was mostly Taizé community chants, but not today, it was Landslide. “That’s what happened to Mom, everything was fine until cancer took her.”
Well, I was afraid of change
Because I built my life around you
But time makes you braver
Children also grow older
And I’m getting older too
I search for the lyrics on my phone. The familiar tune plays in my head as I read them, thinking back to my clubbing days 40 years ago when we would play this song. Now it evokes a deeper meaning, a moment of change and uncertainty, especially as we are both in our 60s now. We were living in Africa when they found out Suzanne’s mother had stage four pancreatic cancer. We travelled back and forth over the last few months until she died, a landslide setting off a mudslide. Her father died even more suddenly from an allergic reaction to a bee sting, there one morning, gone that afternoon, in her 14th year.th Year.
Ah, take my love, take it down Oh, climb a mountain and turn around And when you see my reflection in the snow-capped hills Well, the landslide will bring it down
We usually talk about what’s next at some point during the day and play out different scenarios. I feel my biological clock ticking harder than Suzanne’s. I have a limited amount of time and health left to do things like the Camino de Santiago and if I am no longer able to do that, will I really wish I had worked harder? Or worked longer? Or will I lament that I have not been able to enjoy the gifts of God’s creation in these final years when the call to explore is so strong? We have been given these incredible gifts, are we obligated to continue to use them or are they actually Giftsthat we can use or not? Do we really have a choice?
From my 2017 Camino I knew that razor clams are a Galician speciality and an absolute must for seafood lovers (again). I was happy to introduce them to Suzanne
Galician octopus, or pulpo a la gallega, is a culinary icon of Spain. This simple but tasty dish is incredibly tender and melts in your mouth, as it half did before I could take this photo.
A day full of weddings
All day we watch people stream into the monastery and their cars fill and empty the courtyard. From our vantage point in the village’s other cafe, we eat lunch watching a parade of Spanish fashion elegance pass by in their dazzling evening wear, smelling good in the sometimes drizzling rain. At about 7pm, when we think the pilgrim mass is about to start, a third wedding is still going on and has been going on for hours. The mass ends and as we are about to leave, so does the bride. I took these photos, which I am quite proud of.
Then we had dinner and then went to bed. A wonderfully long, hard and blessed day of doing nothing.
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