What are you doing?
I am praying.
I thought you weren’t religious.
I’m not. I’m spiritual.
Then why Grace Cathedral? Why the big church?
It comforts me. It humbles me. I find peace here. Here and places like this, I feel closer to God whoever and whatever that may be.
What are you praying for?
I’m not really praying for anything. I’m praying about. I’m I’m feeling weak today, so I am sending out a prayer to do what I cannot do, what my arms feel too weak to do, to embrace the world and within that embrace find the divine spirit and just give thanks. In the past weeks, I have come from a place of great loneliness, and last night I was reminded that I am not alone.
But you knew that. The problem was that all those people were in San Francisco and you were in the desert and the Sierra.
Yes.
So what now? You are leaving again to go be alone, most of the time, in Maine.
I’m going to be with my father and to write.
Yes, but you’ll be alone a lot there. And then you’re planning on going to go to Spain, again alone.
I know. Sounds crazy doesn’t it?
Absolutely bonkers.
Yeah. I don’t know what I’m doing really. Or why. I thought I knew. But now and again the charts get lost, you know? The plans. And the step by step instructions on how to carry them out. It’s a problem with being entirely self-lead, self-driven. Being the navigator. Today is one of those days.
So you are praying for something.
Yes, I suppose I am. I’m praying for courage and clarity.
What do you really want?
I want to continue to write this book and have it finished by my birthday, end of October. I want it final edited by Thanksgiving, published and in my hand and on iPads by Christmas.
Do you have to go to Spain and walk the Way of St. James to finish this story?
No. I suppose not. It just spoke to me as an appropriate and really majestic finish to a season of walking and writing, to yet another journey of self-discovery, or discovery of life, whatever it is I am discovering and uncovering, or recovering in my travels.
What happens if you can find no one to join you in Spain, no one to go with you, a strong likelihood at this point with your planned departure just one month away.
I don’t know. I may go anyway, on faith, if the spirit tells me that I must, to trust that I will meet plenty of other pilgrims on the way.
And what if logistics and finances fail and you don’t go at all? You’ve spoken of a kind of mock-pilgrimage, going to The Doyle Hotel in Duncannon PA and spending a month there interviewing Appalachian Trail thruhikers and wrapping up the book that way.
I may do that.
Is that wise?
Wise or not, it certainly answers to my earlier expressed sentiment that I’d rather be in an LA dive bar drinking cheap beer and writing Bukowski-esque poems. A story is a story, and every story needs an ending and that would be just as good an ending as any I think, with my imagination at play with the facts.
What are your plans for winter?
To hole up somewhere, curl up by a fire and lick my wounds, to recover from a season of physical & mental extremes, of hard hiking and a committed writing life that borders on insanity and is most certainly masochistic.
Amen.
You said it.
Will you leave me with a story?
Yes. A short one. Here you are.
The Sierra Nevada, 11,200 feet. No moon tonight. I am surrounded by high stone minarets and castle walls, lost in a sea of jagged peaks splayed out like a hand of flat black playing cards held at arms length. I go to bed on a thin foam mat still in my shoes, still in my down jacket, too tired to undress. With my head back, eyes open, I watch in awe as the vault of the heavens loses its natural adhesion and all the stars fall down on me where I lay, fall in a rain of tiny golden fires. Cool to the touch they do not burn but gather on and around me piling up like dry hail they stick and stay, and I run my hand through the stars and smile with delight. Where are you now my love? I ask the night. I scoop two handfuls of cool blazing stars together and, as one would with water from a stream, I douse myself in the mystery of ages of people staring skyward at night, pour stars over my head and gasp as they cascade down my face, the effect to my open eyes that of flying through space.
- Rick McKinney
This entry really left me breathless…