“Most [people] either compromise or drop their greatest talents and start running after, what they perceive to be, a more reasonable success, and somewhere in between they end up with a discontented settlement. Safety is indeed stability, but it is not progression.”  ― Criss Jami

Nothing like a heat wave in Valencia and not being able to use a/c, thanks to Russia’s war with Ukraine, causing Spain’s record high, unstable, electricity costs, to make us scramble to find a place with cooler weather. The 60 degree temps in Scotland in June made it an easy decision to hop on over.

I brought along a book of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories as the UK was reporting long lines at the airports. I contemplated and dismissed bringing my laptop to catch up on long overdue blog posts, as the last several months lingering COVID brain fog has left me discombobulated and feeling like my musings are trivial and pedantic. During the long wait at the airport, I read Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro, written in 1936 while he worked in Spain as a journalist and reporter during their Civil War. In the story, the protagonist Harry has been injured on his trip to Africa and is dying from gangrene. He laments: “Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. He would never know now… he would never do it, because each day of not writing dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did not work at all.“

This prodded my brain: “each day of not writing, dulled [my] ability,” and the thought hovered as we touched down and drove through Edinburgh. Certainly there is safety and stability staying on the non-writing sidelines, but if the cost was a “discontent settlement,” and ‘non progression,’ then returning to my scribblings, despite a cotton filled, dizzy head was imperative. I was reminded of one of the lessons from childhood, from my physical therapist mom, that dizziness and instability was never an excuse for inactivity. She would get patients up and walking right after surgery, even while the room was spinning and weakness threatened their collapse. And as part of her patient’s dizziness recovery, she would have them turn circles, with arms reached straight out from their sides, to help their brains learn stability in their instability. It seemed counterintuitive that to become stable, you first had to make and embrace the unstable. This memory felt like a nudge, to keep writing when I felt like I couldn’t write anymore… and in the continued writing, I would find the stability in the (in)stability.

Nothing is stable including life itself.” – Sunday Adelaja

Edinburgh was rainy and chilly our first full day, and the walk through the Princes Street Gardens, under the imposing Edinburgh Castle, was just what we needed. We stopped at the Scottish National Gallery to see the works of some of the masters: Degas, Van Gogh, Sargent, Correggio, Raphael, Da Vinci, Velasquez, Botticelli and Monet.

One of my favorite paintings in the museum was not Claude Monet’s “Haystacks,” that everyone rushed to and crowded around, but his little known Seascape. Monet’s father wanted him to pursue a career in business, and Monet tried to appease him and find joy in it, as that was where the money was, but Monet’s passion was for art. He left home for Paris and studied with the masters, but struggled with depression, self-doubt, poverty and illness, and considered giving up. He met and married Camille and together they experienced even greater financial hardship. Monet was so despondent, that he attempted to drown himself in the River Seine. His wife died with TB after the birth of their second child, and Monet was at a crossroads. Give up and return to stable businesses a career, or carry on in the instability of painting and pursue his passion. He wrote, “It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.”

“No one knows the anxiety I go through, and the trouble I give myself.” C. Monet

Monet dug deep and created, and failed, delved into other styles, didn’t care for them, reflected upon what he enjoyed, which was painting flowers. Eventually, he came up with a technique called “en plein air,” as he painted a Still Life, a static jug resting on the table. It depressed him so much that he took the jug painting outside, and painted over it with this stormy sea at Honfelur Harbor in Normandy. The bold techniques and thick dark paint were very unusual for Monet, but this was the beginning of his love of outdoor painting, “en plain air.” Traditionally artists painted inside in a workshop, where they ground minerals for pigment, mixed paints and sat their subjects, but Monet despite the chaos and disorder of throwing everything into his satchel, he bound his supplies and his easel to himself and headed into nature to paint. He painted what he saw in the world around him…the fields surrounded by wildflowers, ponds with waterlilies, and did what made his heart leap. His enlightened work became sought after, and he painted contentedly for the rest of his life achieving financial solvency.

Disorder is inherent in stability.” Tom Robbins

Edinburgh’s Folly on Calton Hill

We followed up the art museum, built by city architect William Playfair, by taking Mary King’s Close tour under Edinburgh, and the following day by climbing Calton Hill for the birds eye view over Edinburgh. At the top of the hill was a section of columns copied from the Parthenon in Greece. Edinburgh city officials tasked William Playfair to build a replica of the Acropolis as a way to commemorate the Scots who had lost their lives in the Napoleonic Wars. Because Lord Elgin had just brought the British museum some Entablatures from the Parthenon, known as the “Elgin Marbles,” Playfair was inspired to continue the Greek theme. However, in 1829, the money ran out, and the Parthenon on Calton Hill was never completed. The roofless shell became known as “Edinburgh’s folly” or disgrace. A folly is an architectural element, but it plays on the meaning of a folly being a lack foresight, and an unstable undertaking. William Playfair, worked hard to push past the reputation of his unfinished facade of the Edinburgh Parthenon and went on to complete the University of Edinburgh, the Observatory and the Royal Institution. It was a life lesson and reminder that we are not the sum total of our mistakes, missteps, unfinished undertakings if we move past letting them define us and allow them to redesign us. Architect Playfair didn’t tuck tail, find another career, stay in the stability of laying low, but he kept on building in Northern Ireland, England as well as Scotland and he progressed while pursuing what made him tick. And Edinburgh is a remarkable city because of his talents.

William Playfair’s University of Edinburgh

This reminded me of a biography I read on Madame Curie. She said something that applied scientifically as well as to life in general: “Stability can only be obtained by inactive matter.” It is less drag and energy to be inactive matter… But while it is stable, the unproductive mass only takes up space. In that vein, if happiness is to be found in creative outlets and pursuits, writing, painting, building, etc., a period of floundering, instability and evolving, is worth the energy and output to become active matter. This is where joy and steady footing in life is found. As Saul Bellow aptly put it: ” My balance comes from instability.” The drumbeat of the trip seemed to be surrendering to instability.

With the rain as our companion, the next day we took a train to Stirling to see one of the most important castles in Scotland. Stirling Castle was built in a strong defensive position, high on a stable sill, where molten lava rose from far below, but the history inside the castle had its share of instability.

“I choose unstable possibilities. I choose to surrender myself to that instability.” -Haruki Murakami

James IV started building Stirling castle during his reign, and his son James V took over completing the castle after he married French Marie de Guise. Their daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, had an inordinate amount of instability after her father James V passed away. Her life was always in danger, and she stayed in France for a time before returning to Stirling with her infant son James VI. Mary was forced to abdicate her throne in 1567 by anti-Catholic forces, became a political pawn and was imprisoned for 19 years in various castles in England by her cousin Elizabeth I. Mary Queen of Scots was deemed guilty of treason by a fearful and jealous Elizabeth I, and was Mary was beheaded in 1587. It was a terrible business with a dull ax. But out of such an unfair and brutal time, Mary Queen of Scot’s legacy is that England and Scotland were united under a single ruling monarch, as her son, James VI, moved to England after Elizabeth I’s death and ruled both Scotland and England. He became Scotland’s most successful king. It was a time of stability and metamorphosis for the two countries. Out of instability, a transformation of stability became possible.

Homeostasis, from the Greek “state of stability,” is a core tenet of physiology. It is where the body intercepts distress signals, and corrects disturbances found in the organs, muscle and glands. The internal workings of the body constantly fight to maintain a stable state of equilibrium. For example, when we get chilled the body shivers; when we get overheated, the body sweats; when sodium spikes, the kidneys conserve water and expel salt. It monitors everything from temperature to blood sugar, but also calcium, oxygen, hormones, etc.. I am learning, as I fight for internal equilibrium and health, that to be truly happy in life, it requires breaking through homeostasis in our thoughts and behaviors, to reach our true potential. Our brain rests on autopilot, thinking and doing less, to try and save and conserve energy, and to overcome this default state wiring requires activating and challenging the brain. In the long run, breaking out of homeostasis, becoming unstable and uncomfortable for a time, brings more wisdom and happiness.

For instance, when starting a new exercise program, the pain and discomfort activates the brain which tells the body to quit and save energy. The brain will cajole and rationalize that there is too much exertion; but, when pushed through, the discomfort makes the heart and lungs stronger. With this understanding, comes the knowledge that when pursuing passions and talents, the brain will try to sabotage in order to conserve energy, but breaking though this, working harder and concentrating helps strengthen not only the brain, but the creativity within and without. It took Marie Curie over three years to isolate one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride. It was painstaking concentration and work. We have X-rays and cancer treatments because she fought past the homeostasis, sacrificed and followed her vision. Einstein’s theory of relativity was a struggle of eight years. The fascinating thing is when the brain tries to conserve energy, many times the outcome is boredom and deficiency. It is living an impoverished life internally. Pushing past this deficit requires purposefully trying new things, extending ourselves, working on our talents, goals, passions, and putting homeostasis and stability in the backseat to instability and new ground. The brain will resist, but continuing anyway, means the neurotransmitters fire, a sense of accomplishment and happiness reigns, when we produce something of value. We leave the cocoon of safety and metamorphosis into a better version of ourselves.

“Even the sun has its cycles of instability. Every revolution produces a new order. Every death is simultaneously a metamorphosis.” Jordan B. Peterson

“[The moon] … is an example of practiced instability … it wanes when it must, and reliably returns to full strength … it is a humble model of reasonable potential that I can emulate, and follow.” 
― Terry Crawford Palardy

On our fourth day in Scotland, we took the train to Glasgow, and then hopped aboard the Highland Express, with stunning water views, to Loch Lomond. We were planning on hiking Ben Lomond mountain, but the unexpected heavy rain and shortened ferry schedules put a damper on all our plans. I felt disappoint and kept trying to make it work. Finally, I changed tactics and found a boat cruise on Loch Lomond on the northern fjords. The lake water started out like glass, but the wind and rain kicked up and suddenly the boat was rocking and passengers were getting whipped by the wind, and they ran for cover inside the boat on a lower deck. Steve and I had the upper deck completely to ourselves. It was unsteady with the waves and wind, but we widened our stance and engaged our core for stability and held on. We were rewarded with cascading waterfalls, and vibrant green hills, and I, the girl who likes a plan and tries to stick to the plan, was suddenly happy that our plans were all disrupted and that we carried on even when our brains said ‘give it up and stay in the dry hotel.’ “Practiced stability” and transformation. I like the idea of transforming into someone who pushes past the brain’s call to conserve and live impoverished… to become a person capable of accepting disappointment, who reroutes at dead ends, who glimpses the remarkable and works harder to achieve and create.

“A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.” -Tom Robbins

 “There is nothing so stable as change.” Bob Dylan

In a time of upheaval with wars, fires, heat waves, lakes turned to dry beds, animal diseases leaping to humans, mutating viruses, etc., it is easy to give in to fear, depression and despondency. But in realizing unsteady footing helps us move differently, think differently, become more fluid and discover the time and life we have in front of us, however imperfect or disrupted, is a gift. Stability and safety make the brain less hyper-vigilant, but there are times when we must tell our brain– “That’s enough. Calmly step aside as I am challenging myself.”

I am a person who seeks peace and always tries to soothe, smooth and not rock the boat, but I have noticed by not rocking boat emotionally, and by avoiding a rocking boat physically, as I get seasick, I am limiting myself and squelching growth. As we are headed out to pursue sailing in the Mediterranean, I know it’s time to tell my brain and stomach to embrace the queasiness, the unsteadiness, and focus on the challenge, new skills and new horizons instead. Living in the dulled and softened places, that Hemingway’s character describes, is not where I want to reside. Leaning into the instability of possibilities, putting myself in the path that forces movement, allowing for waxing and waning of courage and lack of it, searching for the balanced in an unbalanced world, is an uncharted island for me but, .I know its the place transformation and metamorphosis inhabit.

Pollock Park- Glasgow

As a visual learner, images and places help me find my way. This gem of a park in Glasgow, with its shaggy Highland cows, meandering river and shrubbery maze, has become my (in)stability muse. The Pollock family did not have the heirs to maintain it and gave it to the Glaswegians with love, and with the hope that it would inspire them to contemplate and create. It was here Steve and I further brainstormed a mystery thriller we want to write. The idea of sitting still long enough to write a book, and putting in the energy to finish it, makes me tremble and feel cattywampus. As the city fights the weeds and rodents rom taking over this Pollock home, I fight against homeostasis and giving up before I even start writing the book. The new path is worth the energy to find out where it leads, so I don’t each the end of my life and lament: “Now [s]he would never write the things that [s]he had saved to write until [s]he knew enough to write them well”. Join me in picking out your new paths, picking up old passions and pursuits, and understanding we are more than our body and brain impulses that convince us not to reach for what is just out of reach.

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“You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness.”

– Jon Kabat-Zinn

It’s been nine months this week since we left Santiago de Compostela with our Camino shells, completion certificates, and equal parts struggle and resiliency etched upon our bones. I truly believed a few months after we returned to Valencia, that we were done with the Camino lessons. However, we are rushing toward the year mark, and the Camino lessons don’t seem to be done with us, todavia — not yet. In Spanish todavia means “still,” an action that happened in the past but continues in the present. Or, something that continues happening, “on top of” the original experience. The eyes of my heart have been slowly opening to todavia, the evolving taking place “on top of” our camino experience. It started as a gentle tide, flowing and pulling me along, but the current has grown stronger, and I am learning resistance to lessons deemed necessary by the universe is a waste of energy, and acceptance is the flotation device that rights me after crashing waves do their best to submerge and drown hope.

My first inkling of continually running Camino lessons occurred with glass breaking on the Camino, a quick succession of glass items breaking right after the Camino, and its continuance nearly every month since the Camino. It went from a bottle of perfume, a tumbler, a wineglass with water in it, to a gallon jar filled with distilled water, and finally a brand new mirror I’d hung that fell and broke right beside my bed, waking me up from a dead sleep. The first couple broken items, I chocked up to clumsiness, or the full moon, a Twilight Zone moment, then worried it was a neurological COVID symptom, but the final straw of the mirror glass breaking made me sit up in bed and ask out loud “what is up?” And craziest of all, after I replaced and hung a new mirror in its place, that new, well anchored mirror also fell broke beside me as well. The universe shook my by the shoulders with all the annoying broken glass synchronicities. I am not a superstitious person but as an English Major, drawn to repeated symbols and motifs, the increasing mountain of broken glass has given me great pause.

Glass as a property is quite fascinating. It is made of sand grains of quartz crystal, heated until molten, and then cooled to an amorphous solid (meaning it becomes a non ordered crystalline). When glass breaks, it can be recycled, re-melted and transformed into something else…even though its elements remain the same, the lack of orderly arranged atoms means it can be reworked and evolve to a new thing. But even in the evolution, glass still possesses its unique qualities of both strength and fragility. This dichotomy of glass, strength and weakness, has occupied my mind. As a farm girl, prone to think of myself as strong and capable after all the physical labor, of late I’ve had to accept that I am also fragile after several bouts of COVID. I am durable yet delicate like glass. And in this state of being weak yet strong, with broken glass all around me, all the introspection has still left peering “through the glass darkly,” as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, still searching for a sliver, a shard of light and understanding. My thoughts circle often to my sister who is suffering with compounding mental illness. She has broken from reality and no amount of positive thinking, prayer or psychiatry has returned her to cognitive soundness and able to raise her three teenage children. I have felt the loss of her as if she has actually died. But the symbolism of the broken pieces of our relationship evolving, glasslike, into something else, eddies in the currents of my mind. In the sweeping up of broken glass, two thoughts have come to me: one, things break and I need to move past broken things in my life, and two, I needed to change the glass lens I am looking through.

On our first week of the Camino del Norte, once scorching afternoon I was so parched upon arriving at the hotel in Zarautz, I straightway poured myself a glass of water, but before I could drink it, broke it by knocking it off the bedside table with my phone cord. A few minutes later, cleaning up the watery glass, I started hearing glass breaking. Going to the window, partially encrusted with salt, as we were near the Cantabrian Sea, I made out that our room was directly above a glass recycling container. All evening long, I could hear glass being dropped and broken in the recycler. I went from cringing to appreciating the universe’s nod that we too were being broken on the Camino, but were in the makings of being repurposed. And on the last week of the Camino Primitivo, my iPhone fell off the lanyard around my neck and broke the glass lens inside my camera. It was rainy and foggy on the trail and it took me a while to realize the camera lens had broken with the fall. In the video below, of our sixteen days on the Camino Primitivo, the last few days are blurry because of the broken lens. I was irritated compiling the video because of the blurry images, but it dawned on me the dark areas were fuzzy but the light areas were not. The light areas were clearer……

General George S. Patton’s wrote a poem during the dark days of war: “So through a glass, and darkly, The age long strife I see, Where I fought in many guises, Many names but always me. And I see not in my blindness… ” George Patton

The lens I peered through at life, at my sister, appeared dark, distorted and broken, and in my blindness I didn’t comprehend the cracks of light. “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” (Leonard Cohen) I was not “seeing” or focusing on the light with my sister. The kaleidoscope pattern of all the months of broken glass, shifted just enough in my head that I caught a glimmer that I was seeing not in my blindness… All the broken glass and cracks were designed so I could find the path, the trail, the camino to seeing in my blindness.

Ancient Romans were fascinated with glass and picked up where their predecessor, the Mesopotamian’s, left off with their glass blowing techniques. Romans began experimenting, blindly at first, trying to create the strongest, clearest and loveliest colored glass. Breaking bits of old glass, heating it and adding new crystalline as well as limestone, potash, cobalt, manganese, gold and silver, they discovered while the liquid glass became very dark and opaque in the melting process, once the mixture was removed from the furnace and blown, the glass would become translucent, and the light could come through. New possibilities, discoveries and blindness to sight could only take shape in me when I repurposed all the glass wreckage, my misguided thoughts and actions and purposefully and methodically searched for the translucent.

“It is not what you look at that matters, but what you see.”- Henry David Thoreau

A friend just visited me in Valencia, and because 2022 is the International Year of Glass, we visited the Vicointer ’83 contemporary glass exhibit by Spanish glassmakers, (Joaquin Torres Esteban, Pablo Picasso, Gaudi, Jorge Oteiza) dedicated to the new glass movement. We came across one cut glass exhibit where the artist had broken the glass he was working on. Instead of trashing it, he kept it as a guide and started again. He appreciated the reminder that progress only comes after things break. After the exhibit we reminisced about a Museum visit in Tokyo, where we saw a glass bowl that had been broken and repaired with gold. The broken part, instead of detracting from the beauty, added a unique dimension and internal strength. We mulled over the idea that tragedies, illnesses and breaking points are designed to give depth, resiliency and beauty. It would be nice to bypass and sidestep the “messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness,” but such a life cannot give us power or true strength. I just finished rereading Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms. One of my favorite lines in his sparse narrative is: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” How backward and counterintuitive it seems that the struggle is the purpose, and yet, todavia, the camino lesson continues to teach that weak places only become strong places after we are broken.

“She understood that the hardest times in life to go through were when you were transitioning from one version of yourself to another.” – Sarah Allen Addison

“Change and growth is so painful. But it’s so necessary for us to evolve.” – Sarah Mclachlan

This reminder that evolving only happens after pain and breakage pressed in on me one stagnant Valencia summer evening where the sunset turned all the white Mediterranean buildings a beautiful terracotta hue. I was fighting a fever and another bout of COVID, and I had just broken the lid to the sugar bowl and dropped a teacup trying to make a hot lemon and honey drink for my sore throat, and the despondency of broken me and the broken cup all seemed too much to endure. Steve had just flipped through the channels and paused on an old Star Trek Next Generation movie, where a sentient robot character named Data, who had been severely injured, fights off the Borg queen’s poisonous, invading thoughts ‘to just give up.’ Data fights back and declares: “I will not give up. I am programed to evolve.” This gave me another nudge and reminder that this was my moment to evolve. To become better and stronger in the broken places.

“Look around you. Everything changes. Everything on this earth is in a continuous state of evolving, refining, improving, adapting, enhancing…changing. You were not put on this earth to remain stagnant.” – Steve Maraboli

Charles Darwin, while writing The Origin of Species, suffered debilitating stomach and chest pains, and various panic disorders. Reading a biography about Darwin and his wife, I caught a glimpse of Darwin’s evolution from faithful, to unbelieving, and back to faithful as he wrote: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives but the most adaptable to change.” Breaking, adapting and evolving. Maybe all the breaking of my kitchenware and mirrors set the course so I could evolve enough to embrace the future. The Camino was just the beginning of embracing the messy, the blind curves, the breakable and chaotic, and was always meant as a reminder to search for trail markers of changeability and adaptability. Maybe the Camino was always an evolving journey without a finish line or end.

A Coruna – The City of Glass

The day before we left Santiago, and headed home to Valencia, we took a train to A Coruna, the Glass City, where the Camino Ingles traverses, to see the Iglesia de Santiago Apostol, where St. James appeared in a vision to a discouraged Spanish Commander, in the 8th century, who was outnumbered while fighting off Turks. The vision gave insight and courage to the Spanish Commander, and he rallied his troops and pushed back the invaders. Looking back, I find it interesting that the church doors look like broken glass pieced back together. And around the corner, the City of Glass “Galerias,” glass enclosed balconies, shimmered. The glass allows Galegos to still see the sun and sky during the rain and dark skies of the harsh winters of Galicia. They see through the winter glass darkly and find light.

Looking out at the big bright orange moon tonight reminded me of looking through my Aunt’s telescope. She loved to pick out constellations and planets, and tell stories, and show my siblings and I far off planets through the glass lens. I remember I was upset that I couldn’t see what she saw so clearly through her telescope lens. One night after hearing me sigh in frustration, that I couldn’t see, she told me to keep both my eyes open (not close one eye like I had been doing) and then look though the lens. And for the first time, I could see clearly and admired the planet Venus. I think again of all the broken glass around me, my poor sister’s broken brain, my broken health, and I wonder if I open both my eyes, my physical eyes and the eyes of my heart, if I can see better through the lens, through the dark, and see how to love her best despite the pain and destruction she causes, how to love my life even when I’m Long COVID exhausted all the time now ( I could walk 22 miles a day on the Camino and struggle now to walk 2 miles without extreme fatigue). I wonder if this is the camino lesson “todavia,” still carrying on long after leaving Santiago…. broken isn’t really broken… just change the lens I’m looking through…..

One last thought about the broken glass… In Japanese culture, broken glass is a positive thing. It signifies an end of something, an end of a cycle, and the beginning of possibilities, new life phases, adventures, people and new paths. Feng Shui tradition says when glass breaks in uncountable pieces, it is a time to embrace change. I can’t count the pieces anymore, and it feels like a time of change. Steve has taken up sailing, and we have been talking about buying a used boat to sail the islands in the Mediterranean. The tradition in the Med after buying a boat is to break a bottle on the ship’s bow to ensure good journeys ahead. Perhaps that’s fitting end to all the breaking glass. We purposefully break the glass and move on. Join me breaking through the old, breaking out of blindness and moving towards clearer vision, mindsets and journeys with both eyes open.