It seems like the gremlins at Word Press have denied us a Comments box again.
I’m about to leave for Sydney, so I’ll wrap my head around this tonight. In the meantime, if you want to contact me, or send me your comments, then do so on:
billpgsblog@gmail.com
And I’ll get back to you, or post your comment once this is sorted.
Once again I apologise on behalf of those pesky Word Press gremlins.
Today another adventure begins –
Jennifer and I leave Mudgee and head down to Sydney where on Thursday we fly out to Bombay.
There we begin work on my intuition film.
From Bombay we head to Delhi, then up to the holy town of Rishikesh on the Ganges. And downstream to the major pilgrimage city of Haridwar.
Then we head north to Amristar in Punjab, and the famed Golden Temple. From there we then head up into the base of the Himalayas, to the Dalai Lama’s residence-in-exile at Dharamsala.
We then fly to Rome, to seek the Church’s views on intuition.
While in Italy we’ll also do a scout of the Assisi tour, which we’re mounting next year.
I’m very excited to be finally shooting this film, which has been gestating now for fifteen years, ever since an intuitive “voice” saved my life very early one morning in New Orleans.
Thank you to those who’ve come on board as investors to help me realise this amazing film. And to those who might be interested in supporting this project, please let me know and I’ll send you some information.
I approach any new film with a degree of trepidation. I know what a huge undertaking it is, and what a huge responsibility.
But it’s also an incredible privilege – because I’m in the fortunate position where I can disseminate ideas to a world audience. It’s taken me nearly forty years of honing my craft to have this privilege, and consequently I want each film I now make to matter.
I believe this next film will matter.
I’ll be blogging daily and posting photos – so stay tuned here for regular updates.
Whenever I travel, I always carry a St. Christopher’s medallion with me. St. Christopher is the patron saint of travellers. I do this because in 1982 I made a film about a lone sailor whose yacht sank in a storm in the middle of the Pacific. The sailor was a remarkable man, aged 70, and he survived for 32 days adrift in a life raft.
He put his survival down to a St Christopher medal he had with him.
Ever since making that film – my second independent film, and one that I’m particularly proud of – I’ve carried a medallion with me in my wallet whenever I travel. I got it from the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. I also have one on my car key ring.
I’m not Catholic, and I’m not religious, but still these medallions are important to me. I’d feel very uncomfortable traveling without one.
And on this journey I’ll also carry a little Ganesha with me – the Hindu Elephant God that clears away all obstacles.
So I’m well armed.
Wish me luck!
Bill
I’ve just received an email from someone saying that they can’t comment on the blog –
Weird.
I haven’t changed any settings, but sometimes Word Press goes psycho, and changes things without me realising.
So I’ll go in and see what’s what – but if you want to contact me, or leave a comment that I can later post, then email me on: billpgsblog@gmail.com
In the meantime I’ll go into Word Press admin and see if I can figure out what’s wrong.
Wish me luck!
Bill
I’m not in the habit of re-printing newspaper article on this blog, but this feature piece in Der Spiegel, reprinted in the NY Times, is worth a read.
I’ve cut and pasted the intro – with a link to the rest of the article, which is quite long. Interestingly it raises a number of questions that Julian Lord is currently facing on his Camino, and discussing through his posts on this blog.
Here is the article:
Not long ago, only a few people would make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Now, over 200,000 people a year spend several grueling weeks along the route. Traditionalists turn up their noses at the crowds, but the rewards are still vast.
In the Middle Ages, pilgrimages were neither a quest for meaning, nor an opportunity for contemplation, nor an event. People had real worries and pilgrimages were part of a deal. On the one hand was the willingness of the faithful to suffer, on the other was God’s capacity for deliverance. The one walks, the other heals — a transaction based on reciprocity.
Similar to mendicants, pilgrims had no possessions beyond what they carried with them: a walking stick, a small sack of belongings, a gourd full of drinking water and the clothes on their back. They were filled with reverence and, not uncommonly, a thirst for adventure.
The grave of St. James in Santiago de Compostela has been a pilgrimage site for over 1,000 years. When times were quiet, only a dozen people would make the effort. At other times, it would be a couple of thousand.
But the quiet years are over. More than 200,000 people followed the Way of St. James last year. And this year, those who make money from the steady stream of wayfarers are in a particularly celebratory mood. Four million copies of the book “I’m Off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago” by German TV celebrity Hape Kerkeling have been sold in Germany, and its impact has been huge: Since its publication in German nine years ago, Germans have made up the largest share of foreigners making the pilgrimage. Last year, according to church statistics, 16,000 of them turned up in Santiago, a new record. And now, German public television station ARD is making the movie.
But will that mean that even more people will come? If so, it raises questions about the meaning of the trek — and fears that it could become little more than a traveling circus. There is no doubting the potential economic benefits for one of Spain’s poorest regions, but there are also 1,000 years of tradition to consider.
This is an attempt to find answers to such questions. A search among soul-searchers.
Time to be a Pilgrim
It seems that each time I return to the Camino, the extremes of the Pilgrim customs grow further and further away from each other.
The stark conditions of the ’93 and ’94 Camino, where everyone, rich or poor (except the very richest), would walk and sleep in the same circumstances — either you walked every step, or you could forget about a place in the Refugio, and anyone who broke those rules was a false pilgrim, that the Hostels down the line would be warned of –
And the Hostels themselves were most often converted barns, sties, or one-room houses, often with dirt floors, simply fitted with some bunk beds, a cold shower and WC, and a tiny desk and chair for the Hospitalero.
I can remember in ’93 that my first hot shower on the Camino was about 3 days before Santiago.
Sure, there were a few places to stay along the way that provided better comfort, usually religious establishments, but these were the exception not the rule, and they were still quite Spartan compared to even the bare minimum that people expect nowadays.
What was gained, though, in those conditions was amazing — as even the deepest and most firmly defined social differences between any and every Pilgrim simply could not exist on the Camino as it existed then.
Millionaire or unemployed, University man or manual labourer, devout Catholic or vague agnostic, we were all the same in the harshness of the Path and the starkness of the Pilgrim life.
Yes, some people did sometimes take a bus, and the pack transport services were already in their infancy, but barring illness and such, the only distinctions between the True and the False pilgrims involved either using or shunning those services, or having a motor vehicle backup.
The current creature comforts and their easy availability are of course not bad in themselves, but they have contributed greatly to turning far too much of the Camino into the Tourigrino Way.
The Camino is now inhabited by a certain type of cash-conscious bourgeois bien-pensants that have zero comprehension of even the basics of the spiritual Journey towards the Apostle and towards the Church and towards God, nor otherwise of any other of the various deeper reasons and spirituality of the Way.
But the Camino remains, ever true to itself and to each Pilgrim, denying any claims of ownership upon it, and any attempt to place a cash value on Pilgrimage.
How appropriate this one for a Camino blog! Enjoy!!
The French Way
The title to this piece may be confusing, so let’s clear it up right now — I mean the Camino in France, and not the Camino Francès. And I mainly mean my own Camino from Lourdes to Somport than anything else.
About the Camino itself, the thing that has really struck me is how Catholic the Way from Lourdes to Somport actually is — I have never seen such a strong Catholic presence anywhere else along any Camino routes, and I do not mean just locally, but over this entire section of the Way.
This did not strike me simply as some sort of anthropological curiosity — No.
My passage from Lourdes to Spain has truly been a passage from the familiar to the foreign via the religious and via the spiritual that makes all of these disparate things, from whichever modern point of view of our minds, into the deeply religious Christian Worship of God as He provides us with such a simple Wealth.
I cannot help but be delighted that somewhere, at least, on this Camino, its Catholic Christian nature is openly celebrated, and not hidden away.
——
As for the Somport Way in and for itself, in its non-religious aspects, there are around 1% of the Pilgrims at SJPP and &c. The GR version of this Way is even more annoying than usual, as the French Hiking Federation volunteers seem as keen as always to send their victims into sundry mud slides, up some uselessly difficult 5 km detours up whichever mountain madness, and to generally assume that all Santiago Pilgrims are lunatic masochists. Except no, some of us aren’t !!!
——
My days seem to be gradually lessening in difficulty, though it’s a long slog — I am nevertheless very pleased to report that my knees appear not to be bothering me on this Camino too much …
So Far !!!
—
I have feasted my departure from France as well as my arrival in Spain — these Borderlands may be spiritually nourishing, as suggested hereabove ; but they also mess up your normalcy !!!
I was on my walk the other morning and I heard someone calling out to me.
I turned to see that it was a lovely lady who lives nearby. My wife and I have known her for years, and the previous weekend she’d invited us to her house, along with some friends, for dinner.
The woman’s name is Lesley, she used to own one of the top wineries in the district, and she’s a wonderful cook. As we walked into her beautiful house on the river in Mudgee, odours wafted through from the kitchen. She told us proudly that she’d been cooking two shoulders of organic lamb for the past six hours.
Pulled lamb, she called it. Because the flesh would pull away from the bone, due to the slow cooking.
I’ve been vegetarian ever since I got that very strange message while meditating at the Yogananda Self-Realization Temple in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. That was two months ago.
The message was clear and immediate: If you’re about to eat meat, look into the eyes of that animal and ask yourself if you feel comfortable killing it for food.
I wrote a blog at the time. Here it is –
Ever since that message, I haven’t eaten meat. I’ve eaten seafood now and again, but I’ve had no meat, no chicken or poultry, and certainly no lamb.
I love lamb. There’s nothing more delicious than roast lamb, lamb cutlets, lamb korma curry, rack of lamb and slow-cooked pulled lamb.
But I also love baby lambs.
As I walk around Mudgee, I often see baby lambs frolicking in the paddocks. I couldn’t bring myself to kill one – whether it be for food or for any other reason. I just couldn’t kill a baby lamb.
We sat down for dinner, and I had the lamb. Didn’t say a word. And it was delicious. Lesley suggested I have seconds, and I didn’t say no.
So the other morning when she yelled out to me, I walked over and thanked her once again for the beautiful meal – and mentioned to her that it was the first time I’d eaten meat in two months.
She asked why, and I told her the story of the Yogananda Temple and the message I’d received. She was mortified. She began to apologise profusely.
“You should have told me,” she said. “I would have cooked you something vegetarian.”
I laughed and said it wasn’t a problem. “You’d spent a long time preparing that meal, you’d put a lot of thought and love into it, and I was a guest in your house. The least I could do was appreciate the meal you’d cooked for us all, without any fuss, and thank you gratefully.”
Still she was mortified.
I explained to her that refraining from eating meat was a decision I’d made after receiving that message, but I wasn’t going to be obsessive about it. The message wasn’t Don’t eat meat,” it simply told me to give consideration to the life of the creature that would be killed for my food.
I could argue that the lamb had already been killed for that dinner.
I could also argue that I love eating lamb.
I could also argue that I’m weak and a hypocrite.
But I could argue as well that I’d prefer to live in the real world, a world of moderation, and walk what the Buddhists call the Middle Path.
I haven’t eaten meat since that night. And I have no plans to do so. But if I was presented with a similar scenario, I’d eat what’s put in front of me – without complaint.
And I’d be grateful.
Word seems to have spread about the fun we had on the Portuguese Camino tour – because we are now fully booked for the Assisi Tour in April of next year.
If you’re interested, you can put your name down on a wait list in case anyone drops out.
We’re putting together another Portuguese Camino Tour in October, if anyone is interested. We’re already starting to fill that up.
Our beautiful and hilarious local liaison van driver / translator / parking in tow-away-zones lass, Catarina, will be on board again – subject though to us getting sufficient numbers.
After the Assisi Tour, we’re planning a Celtic Camino Tour possibly in the 2nd half of next year. That will involve a series of ancient pilgrimage walks around the West Coast of Ireland, which is a spectacularly beautiful part of the world.
But right at the moment we’re filling up the next Portuguese Camino, which will kick off out of Porto towards the end of October. So email me if you’re interested at –
billpgsblog@gmail.com
Bill Bennett.
LOURDES
The Camino this time is still continuing to be very nice with me, which is most encouraging !!
The hitch-hike from Saint-Gilles to Lourdes was lightning quick (well, apart from the bit where I managed to head the wrong way on foot LOL), and Oscar, who took me most of the way, to within 10 miles of Lourdes, is an Italian bike pilgrim who will have done his first Camino stage today.
I arrived in Lourdes at about 6 PM last night, then immediately found a place selling Chimay gold top, a beer I had been wishing to taste for roughly 20 years, but even that pleasure was unable to lessen the beautiful joy of the Lourdes Pilgrim Hostel, as it is simply, and hands down, the BEST I have ever stayed in.
The internal wooden architecture instantly tells you that this isn’t just any old Refugio — while you’re here, it’s Home. The wonderful Jean-Louis is keeping it mostly single-handed, on a Donativo basis, and he provides not just a wonderful breakfast and a superb home-cooking supper — but also his fatherly kindness and warmth, so that his stuff is your stuff, his kitchen your kitchen, and your Camino is his joy.
Last night I was the only Pilgrim in the main dormitory, and there was only one other pilgrim in the Hostel — tonight though there is a mix, seven of us, four starting still Lourdes, two having walked in from beyond, and the last being a foot pilgrim to Lourdes who has therefore just finished his hike.
Five of us are walking on out tomorrow, so I’ll see which I’ll be bumping into along the Way …
I attended a Traditional Latin Mass this evening, just down the road, which naturally turned out to be the Mass of the Transfiguration, which is one of the most important Saint James Masses of the year (among many other aspects of course hehehe).
Looking terribly forward to start the Camino in the morning.
PGS - The Way 
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