kindled into fire
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times – it was my life, and now I was 50. It took me another year to realize, or more accurately, to make up my mind, that it was time to walk the Camino de Santiago. And I needed to bring someone with me.
“I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
My daughter lassoed me on my 51st birthday. “You need to buy your ticket.” I bought a one-way ticket to Bilbao, on the northern coast, the closest airport to the border with France, where the northern Camino route begins in Irun, Spain. “Did you get your passport?” I’d never had one.
So everything began with me wanting desperately to go, but stalling. And then deciding. And then never looking back. Because the someone I needed to bring with me…was 17-year-old me. The kid who was going to escape all the crazy of my younger life by going to college, getting that journalism degree, writing for National Geographic, traveling the world, meeting the world’s people. Falling in love with all of them, writing their stories. Over and over, year after year, becoming a citizen of the whole, wide world.
When I quit college, and then when I got married at 19, and then when I started having kids at 20, and 22, and 23, and 27 – that kid just had to sit and wait, reading book after book, writing angry poems, listening to the Rolling Stones, especially, “You can’t always get what you want….” That kid just had to watch while I worked like a grown-up every day, typing up reports instead of stories, interviewing homeless alcoholics instead of Amazonian tribal chieftans or Sami herding reindeer in the Far North or the great-great-great-great’s of Genghis Khan.
At first, I tried to half-listen to that kid. I read those angry words into microphones in small, dark theaters filled with smoke and poets. I sang sorrow to open art exhibits and crooned bluesy warnings in front of velvet drapes and mixed drinks. I breathed sultry innuendo into the erotic poetry night. I was good. I was married. It was terrible. I got divorced. I got a job.
That kid didn’t know I was trying to offer a consolation prize. The other kids needed a home, regular meals, a ride to school so they wouldn’t drop their science project, a cheering parent on the sidelines of their games. If I couldn’t go to meet the world’s people, maybe I could have the world’s people come to me – give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me…. And Life did.
Don’t get me wrong – their stories were rich, rich with lost hopes and survival, disillusionment and yet perseverance. But I didn’t write those. I entered their basic demographic information into databases. For all their stories of childhood abuse, foster homes, learning disabilities, drug use, prostitution, jail time, gang crimes, mental illness – I ticked boxes. Type an X. Type an X. Another X. Another.
“Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.”
If you’re looking for it, Life offers real consolation. Not bestowed as a prize, but earned by hard work, like that paycheck. Real connection in those moments when I listened, cared, said so. I learned to be quiet and let people tell their stories themselves. I developed a radar for danger, alert to people’s state of urgency and desperation, aware of my safety while ensuring theirs as well. I was an emergency responder without a badge or a siren, only my voice, and my eyes, which both needed to communicate at the highest levels. And amazingly to me, I rose to that challenge. I became someone who could evaluate a developing situation and set a boundary with a six-foot-four, 250-pound man who was coming unraveled and needed to leave for the day. I became someone who could empathize with the anger and fear but could keep it together. I became someone people could trust.
So that 17-year-old’s life passed again, and we were 34. And then it passed again. And we were 51.
Somewhere between 34 and 51, something shifted for me. Originally, when I met with homeless people and they told me their stories, they’d inevitably thank me. I shrugged this off, reminding them they were the ones who had been brave, who’d opened up, who’d risked. They’d ask, “So, you have a master’s degree or something? Are you a doctor?” To which I would answer, “No, man – I’m just a poet with a sweet day job.” I’d thank them for talking to me.
But somewhere in my 40s, I stopped saying it. I stopped saying I was a poet with a sweet day job. What had been so honest, so true, for so long, became a memory. Became my history. I had quit going to poetry readings long ago. Now I wasn’t even writing, just a thought here, a Christmas card poem there. I hadn’t written a song in years. I started to believe I was a social worker. But I didn’t have the education; social work requires credentials, a trail of letters following your name. I had lots of experience, many skills, but needed a couple of college degrees to work anywhere but in the one job I had. And then I left that job.
Life intervened. This is what I know now. The Universe turned my world upside down. Ownership of the homeless resource center where I worked changed. A private group created their own agency, thought they could run the center through good intentions and quickly ran it into the ground. I tried to work with them, and then I fought them, and then I left them. I did it very intentionally, to attract community attention. It worked. The center was investigated. Ownership changed hands again. The center was saved.
But all of that took over a year. In the meantime, I needed a job. I found work an hour away. I sold my house and found a closer apartment. However, because I didn’t have the degrees, I couldn’t do the work I knew how to do. I could only approach the depth I’d had, but it was out of reach now. I thought about college, but at my age, I didn’t really want to spend the money from selling my house on a social work degree, which would earn me not much more than a non-degree job. I saw burn-out on the horizon, but it didn’t look like anger. It looked like boredom. Leading to apathy.
That’s when I realized I had quit saying I was the poet with the sweet day job. I hadn’t seen it disappear; it had just faded away.
“I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew….”
I was a fraud in both worlds. I was a social worker with no credentials, and a poet with no poems. I couldn’t do the real social work I knew, and I hadn’t become the journalist I’d originally intended. What to do? I did what has always saved me: I wrote. I wrote what I was experiencing, began searching, exploring the unformed ideas that were rising. For three years, I was more honest than I’d been in a really long time. I had learned how to interview in all those years talking with homeless people. So I interviewed a really fascinating character I had never thought to talk to about all this: 17-year-old me.
Ah, that kid. There she sat in her metaphoric basement bedroom, headphones on, cross-legged on top of her bed, grounded seemingly for eternity. I sat down next to her, and she took off her headphones. And I just listened.
As I was writing, I gave her the respect I hadn’t been able to give her before. She was a wild-child, hair on fire, eyes blazing, heart broken, brilliant, fantastic. Yet she wasn’t only defined by what she’d gone through. She knew who she was, what she wanted, where she wanted to go. We don’t believe teenagers, that they know what they’re talking about, that they could possibly know who they are. But she was solid. She knew. She wanted to go see the world. For herself. With her own eyes.
“And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire.”
I realized she was right. I knew people would say I’d had a great career, was a good social worker no matter what, had done so much good for my community, helped so many people. That’s true, there’s truth in that. But I knew, and young me knew, that I’d been treading water. I have a talent for making those lemons into lemonade, so I’d made a humongous, industrial vat of lemonade, decades’ worth, and that’s where I was resignedly kicking and swaying my arms, floating confined. And getting tired.
Social work wasn’t my calling – it was my foundation. It was my training ground.
I had to go. Whether the time was right or not, whether anyone understood or not, I had to go. And I had to take 17-year-old me along, before I lost her forever. I couldn’t bear that thought. I – finally – loved that kid. Ferociously.
The Camino de Santiago was an easy choice. Since I was 15 I’ve been an amateur religious studies aficionado, reading on my own about Buddhism and Sufism and mystical traditions in Catholicism, Shinto beliefs that everything has a spirit, Hindu beliefs in keeping multiple virtues in balance with the help of multiple deities. If I couldn’t go on the Muslim hajj, I could hike the great camino across Spain, some of it traipsed by the weary faithful since before the year 800. I was seeking kindred spirits to walk and talk with for a time. I was seeking seekers.
As I got off the plane that had carried me across the wild Atlantic, I turned inside to 17-year-old me, smiled, and said, “You ready? C’mon – let’s go.”
“It was remembered afterwards that when he bent down and touched her face with his lips, he murmured some words. The child, who was nearest to him, told them afterwards, and told her grandchildren when she was a handsome old lady, that she heard him say, ‘A life you love.’”