- Time of past OR future Camino
- Too many and too often!
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It's a constant practice, this business of looking very different--but also wonderful. You're a visible messenger of faith...as well as being like a neon sign saying "It's perfectly OK to live a different way! The conversations with people get deep very quickly.I particularly appreciated his own wrestling with the issue of 'being who he was': walking visibly as a Buddhist monk with the attention and issues that it might entail. I had wrestled with some of the same issues; I am a Roman Catholic cleric and part of me wanted to 'blend in' on my upcoming Camino--put on some standard-issue hiking gear and be a 'standard-issue hiker' for a few weeks. But, in conscience, I just couldn't. A week ago, I finally made the decision to walk in my clerics...to make myself available to whomever might need a prayer or a blessing and open myself up to whatever might come from it.
And I have had the honour of serving three months each year for a non sectarian Canadian charity in India since 2006. Our homes in India, Nepal, Tibet and Bangladesh have opened their arms to me; they have become my homes away from home (until my first Camino last year). Each child is raised in their own religion and their own culture.Many thanks to @Viranani for the links above. Especially for the saga of the journey through India. I've only dipped into it so far but it looks like a joy to savour at leisure. All the more so since my wife and I spent six months in India and Nepal in the winter of 1989-90 - one year before that journey took place. Lumbini, Varanasi, Sarnath and Bodh Gaya were amongst the places we visited. For our visit we were based in Nagpur which is something of a centre for the very different Buddhist movement inspired by B R Ambedkar. My avatar here is my much younger self in the Ganga just upstream of Varanasi city
Me too--it's the best of both worlds. Thanks for starting it Bradypus. I had thought about starting a similar thread a while ago with these links but decided it was too 'Buddhist'!Love this thread.
This sounds like a wonderful place, movinmaggie. Please PM me with a link to their website, if they have one. I'd love to offer a donation.And I have had the honour of serving three months each year for a non sectarian Canadian charity in India since 2006.
So true Malcom! I do a lot of loving-kindness practice on the Camino, cultivating loving-kindness with each step. In sitting meditation there's a phrase that can be used to do this ('may all beings be well, happy, and peaceful') but when I walk that gets compressed to just 'well...happy...peaceful,' with the words coinciding with feet touching the earth. When I can really connect with the words, the meanings, and all beings, while really 'being in the body' walking along--well, it's a very different way of being! Special, and at the same time very ordinary and normal.It might be worth adding that something like the Jesus prayer can be synchronised with the footsteps instead of (or as well as) the breath. Thich Nhat Hanh has some useful bits of advice on doing that while walking, using phrases like "I take refuge in the Buddha" or "Our Father who art in heaven" or "I walk on the fresh earth", with one word for each step, or for each double step. My own experience is that there's something special about the times when footsteps, breath, and phrase all come together for a while.
And those noisy nights and early mornings in albergues are the ideal training ground for all the little annoyances of life.Must be one of the best practice anyone could wish to continue as they return home afterwards IMHO.
It might be a little confusing now as I have changed my avatar over the years. This is the photo I was using at the time of the OP. Way back in another century when I had dark hair. Or much hair at all...I had to 'like' the post where Bradypus referred to his avatar as himself in younger days... a timeless post, @Bradypus.
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