My sister Anne is five years older than me. She’s the eldest in the family, I’m the second eldest.

For as long as I can remember, we’ve always fought.

Don’t ask me why – we just have.

You’d think that as we got older, we’d have grown out of it. We would have mellowed. But no – if anything, our animosity towards each other only deepened.

It came to a head a couple of years ago, during the massive floods that swamped Brisbane. I was in India at the time, and I didn’t get in touch with her, not knowing she had a rental property that was under threat.

She thought I was uncaring. I thought she was hysterical. It opened up old wounds that went back thirty or forty years. Fifty years probably.

We made our peace, kind of, but there was still a residue of acrimony. Something that sat deep within both of us. Something that wouldn’t be shifted with easy apologies and kissy kissy make-ups. I felt we’d both probably take our enmity to our graves.

And then I walked the Camino.
And my sister began reading my blog.
And something quite miraculous happened –
We became friends.

All the anger and bitterness that we’d both harboured towards each other dissolved. It just disappeared. She saw another side of me, and I realised it was meaningless to hang onto old energies that were hurtful to both of us.

Then she read my book, and it only amplified her feelings towards me. She saw how the Camino had whittled me down to a half decent human being.

Anne wrote me a lovely email yesterday, congratulating me on the book, and saying some things that I thought could make for a very poignant post on this blog.

So Anne, sister, big sister –

I’m sorry,
I love you,
Please forgive me,
Thank you.

Anne Taylor’s Guest Post

Hi Bill,

Congratulations on your wonderful Camino blogs and your book. 

Reading them all, I felt that I got to know the person I grew up with, but yet never really knew at the time.  We both know that there were tensions between us, but I don’t wish to talk about the past. 

Instead, I’d like to express my gratitude for what you have done for me – and us – by walking the Camino and revealing the changes in you as you progressed. 

As you gradually displayed your new, softer, kinder self and your new humility I realised that here was a person I’d really like to know and spend time with. 

As you cast off your old layers (you know the ones!), so did I.   Your book and blogs made me laugh aloud on almost every page (it was very funny), marvel at your tenacity and shed tears towards the end as I saw how deeply you cared about your fellow-pilgrims. 

The symbolism of the towel was extremely moving.  The Meseta section in particular really resonated with me, because that’s where I experienced the death of my old attitudes towards you.

Your journey has had a profound flow-on effect on me, and then you, that neither of us would ever have dreamed would happen.  It was totally out of left-field!  I call it a magical effect: 

I’ve connected with my brother after all these years.  So thank you Bill, and thank you Camino.

With Sincere Love,
Your sister,
Anne 

As many of you know, Arlene – who is a regular on this blog – recently returned from her second Camino. It was a deeply moving experience for her.

Here she shares those experiences with us…

CAMINO DE SANTIAGO 2013

I dedicated this, my 2013 Camino to my deceased husband, Peter, the father of my children.  Pete died far too young, he was only 46 years old when he was taken from this world. 

Prior to his death, we had been going through some difficult times, our relationship was very strained. We were barely speaking to each other; in fact it seems our only words were angry, cross, and defensive.

Then he was taken. There were no more angry words, there was no more bickering, there simply was NO MORE.

As you can imagine, I have carried so much guilt and regret since that day 19 years ago. I wish I had not been so stubborn, so stuck in the mire of blame. He passed before we could resolve our problems. I have felt guilty and regretted my stubbornness since that day. He passed away and I never got to tell him how sorry I was and still am.

Last year when I walked the Camino, I simply walked the Camino. I didn’t have any specific reason or purpose, this year my intention was to walk in honor of my deceased husband. To walk for his understanding and his forgiveness, to walk so I would be able to forgive myself, so I can finally stop carrying the heaviness of this guilt.

Because of my purpose this year, I chose to walk the Camino solo, alone with own thoughts.  I met others who I would chat with for a while. I did encounter most of these people repeatedly along the Way, sometimes I would walk with one or the other of them for a good part of the day, other times I would prefer to walk alone.

I stayed in hotels and casas rural to insure my solitude.  I most always am a very social person, I like being around people. But the purpose of this Camino was to make peace with events in my past and I needed to be alone to be successful in achieving my purpose.

I set my daily goals to stretch my comfortable walking distances so that I would be tired by the time I reached my destination.  I ate the menu del dia when I arrived at my destination, usually about 2 or 2:30 in the afternoon.  After eating, I returned to my room showered, got ready for the next day, wrote in my journal, blogged and then meditated until I was ready to go to sleep.

I didn’t join the other pilgrims in the evening, nor did I drink more than a glass or two of wine with the menu each day. I simply thought those activities would interfere with the purpose of my Camino.

After I had been walking for some time, actually approaching the town of Foncebadon, I broke down and cried like a baby.  I was very thankful the walk was shrouded in mist and I was alone, the other Peregrinos didn’t notice my tears.

Finally I started to release some of my guilt! Maybe my healing had begun. I left Foncebadon after a hot cup of cafe con leche and made my way to the Cruz de Ferro. At the cross I left two stones, one for me and another for Pete then climbed down the stone pile and got back in the queue to place the stones my friends had asked me to place for them.

Oddly, it was on the walk immediately after the Cruz de Ferro that my knee began to bother me. I am unsure if it had anything to do with releasing my guilt, or simply because the descent was extremely challenging. I suppose I will never know.

I continued on my way to Santiago, sometimes crying, sometimes smiling and sometimes laughing while I relived my life with Pete.  It seemed to me the Camino was working its magic, I was beginning to let go of my guilt.

By the time I reached Galicia, the rainy weather had all of my attention. It was very hard walking in the rain, I was continuously struggling to get my poncho on and off and the gators were bothering my legs. My knee was also hurting all the time now.

Finally I walked into the square in front of the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela and broke down sobbing. Thankfully right in front of me stood a fellow from England I had walked and talked with on several occasions. He hugged me as I wept, when I looked up, he was weeping too.

We both cried for a while and then walked to the Pilgrim’s Office together for our Compostela.  I understand arrival at the Cathedral has different effects on individuals. For me it was unbelievably emotional.

At the Pilgrim’s Office, I explained to the representative I had walked in honor of my deceased husband and received my Compostela in my name “Vicarie Pro” my husband’s name. 

The next day at the Pilgrim’s Mass, I again experienced the uncontrollable crying I had when I entered Santiago de Compostela. I’m sure I wasn’t the only pilgrim crying though. 

All of my tears and the Camino de Santiago have helped me release the anger and guilt I had related to my husband’s death. I believe I achieved the result I was hoping to attain by walking the Camino and would walk another Camino in a “New York Minute”.

The Camino may not be for everybody. It may not help solve everyone’s problems. But I do believe it gives time to pray and contemplate. It strips unnecessary items from you and reduces your needs to the most elemental – food, water, and a bed to sleep in.

The most important thing the Camino gave to me in 2013 was time to reflect and clear the slate.

¡Ultreia y Vaya con Dios!

My friend Vida Sobott, who is a very unusual and talented lady, posted this on her Facebook page overnight.

I had to share it with you here… As a bit of fun…

A man decides to end his life.

As a train approaches he throws himself off the platform onto the tracks.

Just at that moment, someone in one of the carriages mistakenly pulls the emergency stop lever. The train comes to an abrupt halt. Unwittingly, this person thwarted the man’s attempted suicide.

Coincidence?

A young man’s father visits from overseas. He wants to go to a koala park. The young man doesn’t want to. It’s a long drive. But the father is insistent. They have an argument. Still the father is insistent. The young man can’t understand why.

They go to the koala park, and there he meets a girl who becomes his wife, and life-long partner.

Coincidence?

Anthony Hopkins, the actor, commits to a role in a film based on a book – The Girl from Petrovka. But the book is out of print. He goes to several bookstores in London, and can’t find a copy.

Dispirited, he goes to Leicester Square tube station to get a train home. He sits on a bench and there beside him is a discarded book. It’s The Girl from Petrovka.

Later, on the set of the movie in Vienna he meet’s the book’s author. He tells the writer of the coincidence.

The writer informs him that he lent his book to a friend in London. They check the book that Hopkins picked up off the bench, and inside are the writer’s handwritten annotations. It’s the same book the author lent to his friend.

Coincidence?

These are incidents detailed in a feature article published last weekend in The Weekend Australian Magazine. There’s an interesting quote in the article: Coincidence is God’s way of staying anonymous.

It’s a cliche now: There are no coincidences. But if not, then what is it?

I say it’s PGS. I believe that young man’s father had a strong intuitive impulse to go to the koala park, perhaps not knowing why, certainly not anticipating the outcome – that his son would meet his future wife.

Anthony Hopkins and the book? Same thing. I would say it was his PGS directed him to that bench in that tube station. And it was PGS at work which made the previous owner of the book leave it on that bench for Hopkins to pick up.

Why didn’t someone else pick it up? Why didn’t Hopkins get a taxi, or go to another tube station? What are we talking about here? What’s at work here?

Last week while I was working up at my university, out of the blue a professor handed me a book to read. The book was on synchronicity. At the time I was completely flummoxed as to why he would lend it to me. We hadn’t been talking about synchronicity. And this was the first book he’d ever lent me. But he wanted me to read it.

Here is the magazine article, if you’re interested. It makes fascinating reading –

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/six-degrees-of-separation/story-e6frg8h6-1226745955381

A week today Jennifer and I fly out to London, then Portugal.

We'll be scouting the Camino Portuguese for our tour which we'll be leading next April.

We'll fly from London to Porto, then pick up a car and drive the route, checking out accommodation, restaurants, and points of interest along the way, right through to Santiago.

Jennifer and I will be researching the historical, religious and spiritual aspects of the route, and the country we'll be walking through next April. We'll be visiting all the major churches and cathedrals along the Camino.

I also want to begin to lock in hotels, rates etc – and find cool places to eat. Already I know a place in Barcelos, famous for its chickens, that has the best grilled Portuguese Chicken in the land.

I'll be blogging daily while I'm away, and of course posting photographs.

In Santiago Jennifer and I will be meeting up with Marie, who posts here under the name of Marie the Basque. She has already signed up for the tour, and is making the trip over to Santiago especially to meet us.

I'm excited to meet her.

I also hope to meet Ivar in Santiago, and Johnnie Walker. If any of you have their email addresses, would you mind sending them to me? At –

billpgsblog@gmail.com

I'll also be on the lookout for a person who can act as a local liaison – that person needs to speak Portuguese, Spanish, English, drive a van, and have the personal skills to handle the needs of fifteen pilgrims.

If any of you know of such a person, again please get in touch.

And if any of you can suggest any particular town or place for us to check out, again please let me know.

After we've done the tour scout, Jennifer and I are flying to Germany for a few days – there are people in Munich I need to meet re film financing.

It will be wonderful to be in Bavaria just before Christmas.

This week will be busy.

Duncan has got two more people for the tour, so we don't have many places left now. Because this is the first time I've led a tour, I want to make sure that Jennifer and I are properly prepared.

I woke up the other morning covered in red blotches.

Itchy.

All over my arms, and some on my lower back too.

They began to form into nasty wheals, and my first thought was that it was an allergic reaction, perhaps to something I'd eaten.

I racked back over what I'd eaten the previous 24hrs. I tried to think of anything I'd eaten that I'd never eaten before. And I remembered the previous evening succumbing to a pre-made supermarket Chicken Kiev.

It was truly disgusting.

And very yummy.

So I immediately put that down as the culprit of my red blotches.

I NEVER eat processed food, but for some reason I'd gone against all my natural instincts and eaten this toxic substance.

The wheals didn't go down, and in fact they got worse. They started to break out into little tiny sores.

And I began to think that if it was an allergic reaction to the supermarket Chicken Kiev, then perhaps I should have shown other symptoms as well – like asthmatic breathing, sweats, etc.

I went online, found myself on WebMD, and saw that I most probably had hives – but I couldn't figure out what might have caused them.

Meanwhile the wheals were getting larger, more itchy, and the sores were starting to seep. Pretty awful.

So I went to the doctor. Seems that I've been going to the doctor a bit lately, after not going for years.

The doctor examined me, asked some questions, and told me it was exema. It met all the symptoms. He asked if I'd been stressed lately, and I recalled the previous few days at the university, dealing with the students. That was stressful.

The doctor said I had to be careful that this didn't become permanent, and prescribed various ointments, creams and pills. I got the scripts filled and it cost me $126. The doctor was $75.

I got scared. Exema. That's serious. And it's not pretty. Was my immune system breaking down? Was there some larger underlying cause? Given the stress I've lived under for so many years, was my body starting to cave in?

I took the pills, put the creams on, it didn't really help.

Still there were questions… Why was it just on my arms and neck and hands? Why not my legs, or body? And why were the wheals so itchy?

I looked at myself in the mirror.

And then I remembered. The evening I'd had that putrid Chicken Kiev, I'd gone outside to take a phone call. It was coming on dusk, I sat on a chair in the garden and I got eaten by little tiny sandflies.

I'd totally forgotten this.

They'd really made a meal of me. I was in a t-shirt and jeans, and the hand that had been holding the phone, that was relatively stationary, had the most bites.

There'd been one other time I'd been bitten by sandflies – when I slept on a beach up in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, hanging out with some aboriginal tribal elders.

I recall having the same kind of reaction. Very itchy large red wheals that developed into sores.

So I didn't have hives. I didn't have exema. My immune system wasn't breaking down. The doctor got it all wrong.

They were bug bites.

When my left foot lost sensitivity at the end of my Camino, I thought I was developing MS. Or it was the onset of early diabetes. I'd gone online. Onto WedMD. Yep. MS. Diabetes.

Why do I always default to the worst possible scenario?

This post is for Rachael – whom some of you know is wont to prick and prickle me from time to time – which I enjoy.

She took me to task for urging my students to not follow rules. She thought I should have said instead: “think outside the box.”

i don’t know much about you Rachael, but you strike me as being someone who follows rules. You probably don’t know much about me, but I don’t. I say: fuck the rules. Always have, and always will –

Implicit in your comment about needing to follow the rules is that the rules are always correct. And that they should be followed without question. Because a rule is a rule, it is by definition something sacrosanct which should be adhered to for the benefit of the individual, and society as a whole.

I don’t buy that.

I question every rule. Because I’m suspicious of most rules. 

I believe most rules are foisted upon us by people with limited imaginations to control and subjugate individual spirit and creative endeavour. This is what Kafka wrote about so powerfully. So too George Orwell.

Read Steve Jobs’ biography – my God, he broke so many damn rules. And the world is a better place for it. Read Edwin Land’s biography – he illegally broke into school science labs at night when he was a kid so he could practice chemistry away from the constraints of his teachers. He subsequently invented polaroid glasses and the polaroid camera.

Jonas Salk broke rules to find the vaccine for polio. De Vinci stole corpses to do autopsies so he could understand human anatomy, breaking every criminal and religious law in the book. Galileo outraged the church at the time by suggesting that the earth revolve around the sun. Some of mankind’s greatest scientific breakthroughs have come from people not following the rules.

Albert Einstein, called “The James Dean of Science,” because of his rule breaking, said: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

In my field – cinema – following rules leads to mediocrity. The startling works of art come from artists who break the conventional rules. This is what I’m talking about when I speak to students. Scorsese broke so many rules of cinema in his early works – so did Fellini, and Antonioni, and Jean Luc Goddard. The French New Wave revolutionised cinema by not following the conventional rules of the time. They caused a huge fuss.

At the Cannes Film Festival, there’s a division called Directors Fortnight, which each year launches some of the world’s best films. Directors Fortnight was created by enfant terrible film directors in the French cinema who railed against the staid and conventional rules of Official Competition. They believed those rules were too constrictive to the art form.

But you can’t live your life breaking rules in one part of your life and not other parts of your life. You have Woody Allen having an affair with his daughter… good for him is what I say. And you have Steve Jobs perpetually parking in handicapped zones and driving way above the speed limit. It comes with the territory. Genius ain’t nice.

If you say: think outside the box, I would say stomp on the box. You shouldn’t have been in a box in the first place.

I went back to the Neurologist today – a follow up to a previous visit concerning the numbness in my left foot.

The numbness developed during the Camino – and it was worrying. Tests revealed that it was due to an impaction on the S1 nerve from my spine.

Today the neurologist put me through further tests, and the numbness has all but gone. He could not explain why it happened in the first place, and he said there was no medical reason why I could not walk the Portuguese Camino next April – assuming my right knee behaves itself!

But it was good news.

Jennifer and I then found a Columbia hiking store that had everything marked down 50%. Jennifer bought a terrific pair of boots for our scout in Portugal in two weeks, plus a warm rain jacket. I bought two Columbia hiking shirts, the super-duper hi tech sort, for $50 each.

The trip down to Sydney through the fire ravaged Blue Mountains earlier that morning had been uneventful. Lots of fire trucks, some smoking woods here and there, but nothing like the hellfire that the media had been predicting. Thankfully.

In fact, the roads were all but empty. A trip that usually takes us nearly 4hrs took us a little over 3hrs. Everyone was hunkering down, not driving on the roads.

This afternoon I met with the head of the post production house that will be investing in the picSeeder winner – the online film competition Jennifer and I launched earlier this year.

It looks like they'll be investing about half a million dollars into the picture, to have it completed for the Cannes Film Festival next May. I will be an Executive Producer, and my company picSeeder will have a front presentation credit on the movie.

The film is chaming and innocent and an eye-popping piece of cinema. I'm thrilled that this crazy competition that Jen and I launched while I was walking the Camino will now have a major boost – and that the filmmaker after 8 years of toiling on his passion project, will get a huge leg-up into the industry.

While i was at the meeting, Jennifer saw GRAVITY, in 3D on an IMAX screen. Like me, she was blown away. She came out of the movie though with a very interesting take on the underlying themes – female skewed stuff that I had largely missed. Her understanding of story leaves me in the shade often.

Tonight we'll have dinner with all our children. That will be a special time. It normally only happens at Christmas.

Here is a photo of our daughter, Nellie. She has only recently returned from Spain where she lived and worked for about six years. Her book, ONLY IN SPAIN, is being published in North America in spring next year.

It's been revealed that the massive and destructive bush fires that have swept through the mountains behind Sydney this past week were caused by the Army – letting off explosives in a training exercise.

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/confirmed-army-exercise-started-blaze-in-blue-mountains-20131023-2w1vt.html

For those who have lost their houses, there will be a lot of anger.

The firefighters who have risked their lives battling these blazes will be angry too.

What about all the livestock that was incinerated?

And what about the taxpayers, who will have to foot the bill for tens of millions of dollars?

I see a class action coming on…