pilgriming

 Our author, after studying the medieval methods of Hildegard von Bingen, wanted to go on the popular pilgrimage of the day, the one that begins in Santiago de Compostela, Spain and goes into France. Because of her responsibilities at the hospital, she had to break it up, doing part of it - over three or four years, I forget which. She found a friend to go with her.

Rosalind and I began to organize the second section. We would walk for two hundred miles through the south of France, and we would begin in our footsteps of the year before. We flew to Paris, took the fast and slow trains to our starting point, and spent the night in the hotel we'd left the year before. Then we put on last year's clothes, fastened our shells to our packs, lifted up our walking sticks, and took the next step.

Our doctor then tells about the mainly uninhabited lands they pass through that day, and the monastery they will rest at overnight. They have to be there by seven or will miss dinner. Period. They realize they won't make it. 

It was way past seven when we arrived. As we walked through the monastery's gates, flushed and thirsty, our of the main door came a tiny, very old nun in a dark blue habit and white wimple. She, too, was flushed and sweating. But she was smiling. Her eyes behind her glasses twinkled. She said in French, "You made it! We were so worried! Come in." 

We followed her inside. With its stone floor, stone walls, and stone ceiling, the monastery was cool. 

"Put your things here," she said, showing us the stone washroom. "Wash up...and hurry. We've delayed dinner for you."

They ended up having one of the best meals ever, and enjoyed the company of the other pilgrims then, and throughout the pilgrimage. I had my own room, whitewashed and plastered, with a sleigh bed of walnut and a rope mattress. In the night, there was a thunderstorm; in the morning, there were the monastery bells, and out of my window I could see the nuns' medicinal herb garden down below. The longest and hardest day turned out to be the opposite of what I'd expected. And over and over again, for the rest of that second section, that's how things would turn out. That was the main lesson I took from the pilgrimage that year.

During that second section of walking I began to see that a pilgrimage had a rhythm, a dailiness, just like at home. Every day I awoke, ate breakfast, started walking, and things happened. People showed up; I had adventures. Some I liked, some I didn't. Some I expected to like and did not like; others I expected not to like and did like. I began to see that the unexpected - the inattendu, the unawaited-for, as the French have it - was the only thing I could expect. One was presented with an experience, a person, whose value one did not know in advance. What seemed to be good might be bad; what seemed to be bad, good. One didn't know; one had to wait.

That waiting to see how it would turn out was what made pilgriming different from ordinary life, I began to see. And that year I learned I didn't have to leave it with my last footstep. If I wanted, I could take that kind of waiting home and have my daily life become a kind of pilgrimage.

With that open expecting, I discovered that a day at the hospital was even more interesting. One never knew. All one knew was that there would be a beginning and a middle and an end to the day, just like on a pilgrimage. And just like on a pilgrimage, characters would appear - patients, nurses, deliverymen, doctors - with spiritual and moral messages, if I chose to decipher them. Sometimes in words, sometimes in actions, sometimes in silence.

                                                  - from God's Hotel, by Victoria Sweet

have your figured out that I think everybody should read this book?