Day 2: Roncesvalles to Larrasoaña

Post by Lindsay, photo by Lauren. 

Waking up in Roncesvalles was hard. The lights flipped on at 6am, and everyone jumped out of bed, checking their packs, getting ready to leave.

I snuggled further into my sleeping liner and closed my eyes for another 10 minutes.

We had set up walking with Michael, a French Canadian currently living in San Francisco, and Connie, a woman from Holland, the night before. We were supposed to meet outside the alburgue at 7am. We got there, and they were nowhere to be found. So we started walking to Burguete, where the nearest store and cafe was located.

The woods on the way to Burguete were gorgeous. They looked like a forest out of a fairy tale. As we entered the town, we saw a large stone cross at the edge of the woods and a sign. The sign explained how the forest is known as "The Oakwood of the Witches", because one of the highest concentration of covens in all of Spain used to meet there hundreds of years ago. The cross was put there by villagers in the belief that it would keep witches from hurting the village.

Before we walked into Burguete's market, we saw Michael outside, eating bread. "You didn't wait for us!" I called. He just smiled and waved. I told him we were going to buy breakfast. He smiled and waved again.

We entered the market, and Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" started playing on the radio. Even though it was probably just strategic placement by the shop owner, who gets a lot of business from morning pilgrims, we couldn't help but laugh at the perfect timing. We loaded up on cheese, fruit, and baguettes, paid, and headed out the door.

Michael was already gone.

We ate at a picnic table (where a chicken walked around our feet looking for scraps) and headed on our way.

Today I kept pace with Ron, Christina, and Lauren as we ascended the mountains. The landscape grew more dense and wooded, with wild roses creating arbors over our path, the occasional stray cow staring us down as we walked by.

At lunch, we were finally able to talk with Michael and Connie. Connie shared her reason for walking the Camino, a reason she hadn't mentioned the day before: she was on the Camino carrying the ashes of her father, jazz musician Theo Loevendie, to leave at the end of the trail. Her father was very connected to mountains, she said. It seemed like a good place to bring him.

After lunch, we walked quickly to Zubiri, knowing we wanted to get a few interviews there.

In Zubiri, we met up with our friends from Norway and Texas (Tom and John) for an interview. Tom and John met when they both walked the Camino a few years before and discovered through conversation a deep, brotherly friendship. On that trip, Tom walked to deal with the grief of his wife's death. John walked because he was a homebody who rarely liked even going to other places in Texas, and wanted to prove to himself that he had courage. They've been planning this second trip for over a year now, excited to challenge themselves again and discover more about themselves.

From there, we walked to Larrasoaña, where we almost couldn't find a bed... But luckily, the last hostel had exactly four beds left. We made spaghetti in the microwave (Lauren turned out to be a barebones-cooking champ) and went to bed, planning on catching Michael to walk more of the journey with him tomorrow.

Day 1: A Mistake in Roncesvalles

Roncevalles, a town that consists only of a monastery, and alburgue, and a couple restaurants, is known for its church services in which the pilgrims are blessed. We were excited to record the service, and showed up at what we thought was the right time. But we were wrong. The service had been earlier, when we were eating. Discouraged, we decided to go in and get a few shots of the church anyway. But the camera batteries were acting weird, so we waited while Ron went back to the alburgue to get a new one.

We went in the church, and all the lights were out sign said we could deposit 1 euro and get 8 minutes of light. I hunted around in my bag, and found that I had one euro coin. Right as I was about to deposit it, a group of men walked into the church, down to the front.

We knelt to pray, and as we did, the men started singing haunting chants in Latin. They weren't dressed in what I thought a monk would wear, and I don't think they we're pilgrims. But their singing was one of the most beautiful things I ever heard, and only Lauren, Christina, Ron, and I got to experience it. They kept singing long after the 8 minutes of light ended, and we stayed, soaking it all in.

If Ron hadn't needed to go get a new battery, we probably would have used our 8 minutes and missed those men. If we had made it to the service, I don't think it could have possibly been as moving as that moment.

It's funny how life works.

Day 1: St-Jean-Pied-De-Port to Roncesvalles

Last night, lying on my bed in the alburgue, I couldn't sleep. I kept wishing that I had more time to meditate, to write, to do all the things I wanted to do as a director before I began the Camino de Santiago. Today, as our ascent into the Pyrenees began, I got what I wished for... But I didn't see it that way at first.

For whatever reason, I had a hard time keeping pace with my crew today. Yes, this first day, hiking 24km up into the mountains out of France, is supposed to be one of the most physically challenging. But I was being truly wimpy. Pilgrims much older than I were passing me by. men riding bicycles up a mountain were passing me by. I told my friends not to worry about waiting for me, and pretty soon I could no longer see them.

At first, there was no meditation as I walked. All I could think of was putting one foot in front of the other. Then I got angry... Angry at myself for not doing better, angry at my friends for all being so fit, then angry at myself for even thinking such a thing. ( I seriously had a moment where I wished I'd hired a person I knew was less fit then me just so I'd look better at that moment. It's amazing what grumpiness can do.)

But then I fell in step with Jordie, an Australian woman who came to the Camino seeking mountains, a landscape so different from her Northern Australian home. I met a Norwegian who lives in Spain and actually knows about Winston-Salem and has been there several times (because he's in the cigarette business, a fact he was hesitant to share. Of course, I'm really glad he did.)

Just as I was saying to him that I was sure he'd be the only person on the Camino I'd meet who actually knew about Winston, this woman stopped. Her daughter, Aslan, went to UNC School of the Arts (my alma mater) for modern dance.

As the day went on, I caught up with my friends a few times, we stood together on grassy mountains and watched horses run by, laughed at sheep marked with red or blue dots on their bums, and feasted on our simple bakery lunches. But as I slowed down, because I couldn't help but slow down, I found myself meditating in the journey, the meditation I had so craved the night before. It took forgetting myself, letting go of any comparison to my friends, and focusing on the beauty of the new people I met for me to let go and be thankful for my slower pace. I am sure that, as the days go on, I will get stronger. But I hope each of us in this film crew has the opportunity to step out alone and be with others, even dare to be just with ourselves. Hopefully, as the days go on, I will take the time to choose that path, and not wait to be forced into it by circumstance.

Freer Every Day

"The Camino gives you many gifts. The first, is humility. Leave who you think you are. You will find it on the Camino." That's what the alburgue owner tells us, like some French yoda, in the dimly lit, wooden building. We are in St-Jean-Pied-De-Port, France, and tomorrow we begin the Camino. We'll cross the Pyrenees towards Roncesvalles, a hard first day.

The alburgue owner took one look at my pack and told me it as too heavy. "You don't know how much film equipment I'm carrying," I wanted to say. But facts are facts. I can't cross the mountains with this much weight. No one can.

The whole crew sat in our shared room, making a pile of things to throw away or send home. Any dead weight has to go to make room for the film equipment, the reason we're here.

I looked at my books. I didn't want to go on this journey without any of them. I wanted to be filled with the thoughts of Rilke, find inspiration in the philosophy of Donald Miller for my interviews. They were writers who I loved, storytellers who I wanted to emulate.

But I had to give them up. I have to trust that this journey will impact me as a storyteller enough that I don't need their words. And I love words. Words are what I depend on, and being in a country where the native language is not my own has already humbled me, because even as my Spanish improves, I cannot engage in conversation like I do in the states. I am thankful for the fluency of those I travel with, but that doesn't take away the frustrations at myself for my current lack of verbal smoothness. When your strengths suddenly seem less strong, what do you find comfort in?

Sitting here, writing, the words of French Yoda seem less hokey. Humility might be a gift I get begrudgingly right now. But we'll see what new words I find as I step out, freer every day.

Almost There

Emily here! Lindsay and the crew started the Camino today. This post and the upcoming one will catch us up to where they are, starting the trail in the Pyrenees Mountains. Waking up at a hostel in Pamplona after a long train ride in from Barcelona. I can already hear different languages chattering in the nearby kitchen as people prepare breakfasts.

Pamplona is already a stark contrast to Barcelona. The air is a little chillier, the people a little warmer, and there's not a neon sign in sight. Walking around at night wasn't too different from walking around Winston-Salem, until you got to the town center. There, cafes once frequented by Hemingway were buzzing with life even at midnight, patrons sipping wine and eating pinchos. It's a more laid back, traditional city. Many have told us that Barcelona is like nowhere else in Spain. Our tastes of more "normal" cities begins, I guess.

We feel almost teased by the charm of the city, since we know we'll be stopping back through here in the Camino. Today, Ron and Gabriela will meet us here, and we'll take a bus the rest if the way to St-Jean-Port-de-Pied. Last night, when we told the taxi driver where we were starting the Camino, he warned us that it was the most difficult section. We've been told by Americans that this first section that crosses over the Pyrenees really is less difficult than comparable sections of the AT, but I guess we'll see. I've never carried such a heavy pack before. That will make a difference.

We can't wait to be done traveling, done adjusting to a new time zone (we're six hours ahead of the east coast). Right now it looks like we'll start the Camino in the 16th.

From "Letters to a Young Poet"

Reading Letters To A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke today as I wait for the train to Pamplona. Thought I'd share a passage that stood out to me:

"Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice. With regard to any such disquisition, review or introduction, trust yourself and your instincts; even if you go wrong in your judgement, the natural growth of your inner life will gradually, over time, lead you to other insights. Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced of accelerated. Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and term of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one's own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding of one's creative work.

These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years is nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it only comes to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquility, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day amid hardships I am thankful for: patience is all!"

Nights in Barcelona

A little out-of-focus, raw iPhone photo glimpse into a night of wandering Barcelona before the Camino begins. 

It's Loud...

As I write this, it's 1:30am, and the streets outside the pension are filled with noise. Some sort of street party. There is this bird that's the last straw. If you combine the sounds of a squeaky mattress with a cricket chirp with nails on a chalkboard, you have the call of this bird. If I could kill it, I would. Nevermind. Now there are fireworks. And singing. It's gonna be a long night.

Living the Film

This pilgrimage, for me, is more than a time to collect stories, more than my first feature film. This summer will determine where my career goes (and I don't mean in a success-driven way at all.) Movies tend to be made in similar ways, and that is usually a good thing. Filmmaking is its own language. I can always tell when I'm away from other filmmakers for a while, because when I'm with them again, I talk quickly and passionately,   like a foreigner encountering others who speak their native tongue. This common language, this uniform way if working, can help make impossible feats happen on film sets. But I often  find myself craving something different.

My happiest moments as a filmmaker have been when I'm not only creating something new, but when the process is new, or risky, and I have to jump into the situation with a small group of people, times where we have to develop a new work language so we can improv off each other's strengths  like jazz musicians, until we get to the place where we barely have to speak. We just know.

I've had tastes of that with past films. This summer, this film, is really a grand experiment. Can I throw the playbook I learned in school out the window and really live a film? No matter what happens on this pilgrimage, I will be changed. I hope that this film, this antithesis of all I've done before, will capture something beautiful. I hope that the beauty comes not only from the amazing places we will visit and people we will meet, but also from our own experiences, our own willingness to live a life like this for the summer.

Gaudí or God

We wandered around Barcelona today, seeking out architecture by Gaudí. Our last stop was the Sagrada Familia, a massive cathedral, Gaudí's magnum opus. We stood in its shadow with what seemed like a million tourists, all snapping photos and chattering in foreign tongues of Gaudí facts, Gaudí fictions. Looking up at its massive towers, I couldn't help but think of the abandoned factories of Winston-Salem, how their smoke stacks always make me feel like the factory is some sleeping monster, waiting to eat me. The towers of the Sagrada Familia gave me the same feeling.

I turned to Lauren and asked her if she thought the cathedral pointed people to God, or to Gaudí. She said that it probably depended on the person. That maybe if we were inside the cathedral, it would feel holy.

The admission was 13 euros, so we decided against testing that theory.

But now we sit by the Mediterranean Sea, and despite all the tourists, topless sunbathers, I have that peace that passes understanding, that feeling that some might call God, some a connection with nature, or the universe, or whatever. I see the sea, and my desire isn't to take a picture to prove I was there. All I want is to be in the water and to write, because somehow the intangibleness of words scribbled on lined paper better express how I feel when I stand before beauty like this.

And so I write.

We're Here!

We're here! In Spain. Yes, it's a country completely foreign to our own... But something about being here feels right. Surreal, even. As though we're supposed to be here. It's like when you meet a stranger that you connect with immediately. There will still be those awkward moments of experiencing something new... But this connection, this strange, surreal feeling, will get you through that. We're staying in a Barcelona pension until Ron arrives on the 14th (fresh off a dinosaur film in Montana.) Gabriela, who's been hanging out in Europe since her Cannes internship ended a couple weeks ago, had been helping us adjust more quickly to our temporary Spanish-speaking home.

There is so much I could write about now... And I will be writing more often... But I'll finish this post with some much-deserved thanks. Thank you to all the friends, family, and community members back home who made preproduction its own Camino. I learned so much from that journey, hard as much of it was, and it's your support that got me through. Our last night in Winston, friends playing folk music in the front porch while Lauren and I finished final film plans, was the perfect end to that journey (thank you David, Rachel, Logan, and Ryan.)

"We walk as trees across this earth."

In Coram Deo

I leave for Spain in two days. Is this real life? It's easy to feel inadequate, feel like all risk would be eliminated if only I waited until I was older, or wiser, or had more impressive calf muscles. But then I remember the times in my life when I was most scared to make my art. The times when I thought, "I'm not capable of this," the times I had to completely abandon all of myself and just make art. Those were the times I felt alive, those were the only times I made anything worthwhile, anything that actually moved people. I get to live a summer in that place of abandon.

There's an old saying with pilgrims. They sought to live life in coram Deo, in the face of God. To abandon all you're comfortable with until you have no option but to cling to the face of God like a child clings to their Father, dependent and expectant of provision. To live in coram Deo is to live life outside of your own ability to provide for yourself, to live expectantly, trusting that a Father who gives richly will provide even when it looks like you have nothing. No matter what you believe in, don't we all crave those moments? That stepping out into what we can't control can create something beautiful, can lead us into adventure, to places we never thought we could get to on our own? To live a life where we grow simply because we stepped out into something fantastically, terrifyingly new rather than calculating the next step?

This Land Is My Land...

You know that kid in school who, when given an assignment, can’t help taking the prompt in a direction it wasn’t really supposed to go in the first place, and sometimes it means they write something truly great, but mostly it just looks like they just can’t stick to an assignment? Well, that kid was me. (Any former teachers of mine are probably shaking their heads. At least I realize this now, right?) As I sit to write this blog post, I struggle between what I think I should write, and what I want to write. And since I recently vowed to you, whoever you are out there, that I will be honest and write often, I am going to go with what I want. (Even though it was my own self-imposed assignment to begin with.) A couple months ago, a friend and former classmate of mine, Ian McClerin (who is directing a feature film of his own this summer) introduced me through Facebook to his neighbor, Alejandra Rodriguez. Alejandra, a Professor of Spanish and Sacred Theater at Duke University, grew up in Santiago de Compostela. She agreed to meet with me to share stories of her hometown, and so we met, on Saint Patrick’s Day, in a café in Durham, NC.

Looking back over the preproduction of Travel Light., I realize now that my conversation with Alejandra was one of the first times when this film felt real to me, one of the first times I felt like I was getting new textures of Spain that stacks of guide books and countless Google searches couldn’t provide. Alejandra showed me photos of her beloved hometown, small details such as the placements of statues in a cathedral providing the launch-point for epic tales. She said a million beautiful things that fed my imagination, but there was one thing that stood out, one thing that I’ve gone back to again and again as I’ve thought about my hopes for this film. And that’s what, three paragraphs of exposition in, I’m going to write about.

(Don’t worry, more of Alejandra’s stories and insights will be featured in the actual film.)

A person’s character is defined by the land they live on. That’s what Alejandra said when describing the people of Santiago de Compostela. It’s a belief held throughout Spain, she explained. Santiago de Compostela sits in the mountains, veiled in mist, rain feeding both its hills and the poetic, guarded, wittily sarcastic nature of its people. The Meseta of Spain, with its open land, houses an open people, who hold no secrets, who put everything out in the open. The land-to-people analogies can continue, of course, and it got me to thinking about how the land I’ve lived on has shaped my life.

I’ve lived the Carolinas most of my life, but it’s Winston-Salem, this small city I expected to not like very much when I first moved here, that somehow has my heart. Winston-Salem rests in what’s known as The Foothills, the gateway to the mountains. We’re The City of the Arts, a city trying to grow beyond its tobacco roots and build something new, something that will last.

What does my love of Winston-Salem, this town where I went to college and now live, say about me?

Do I love it because this land, this city, reflects where I am in my life right now? I’m so small, on the threshold of this mountain, stretching to become something more, to grow, to see what potential might have been there all along, if I’d only had eyes to see it.

This idea of being defined by land? It’s not that crazy, that foreign. Everyone who makes the pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago believes it, whether they realize it or not. This journey across land, this metaphor, this microcosm of the human experience, with all its challenges and beauty, is supposed to redefine people. Breaking free of the land you live in, the land that shapes you, and going somewhere different… you have to change. I can’t guess how I’ll be redefined by this journey, if I’ll be tougher or wiser or more open to whatever life brings. Not knowing what’s in store scares me. I know the land I live on now… the blackberry patch in my front yard, the creek that runs through Washington Park, the trails of Pilot Mountain… Thus, I know myself.

Right?

How will this summer in a foreign land reshape me? -Lindsay

From This Point On...

So here we are. The Travel Light. team departs for Spain on June 11^th, and a lot is going to be changing. We’re making our first feature film, and to be honest, I get so invested in the details I forget how strange this journey really is… backpacking 500 miles across Spain to collect stories from around the world? Who does that? From this point on, the blog is going to become more of a production journal. I promise to write honestly and write often. I cannot promise that the writing will be perfect. The screenwriter inside me wants all writing to be sparse, visual, and packed in paragraphs of no more than three sentences. This blogging thing is a new animal. But if you’ll forgive me my mistakes, I’ll lay it all out, and we’ll see together what we have at the end of this journey. - Lindsay