March 13/April 2. The sun has come out, plum trees are starting to bloom in Eastsound, I leave for Scotland in exactly 3 weeks, and I am feeling glum. Four weeks ago, while slightly increasing my walking so I would be ready for a couple of 22 mile days during my three week walk in Scotland (West Highland Way, Great Glen Way, and Speyside Way), I started to notice discomfort in my left upper foot. I tried to do imagined massage and energy work as I walked, which often clears up small aches and pains almost miraculously. This particular pain came and went, but over the next week it gradually worsened. I noticed it was throwing off my gait and that it was no longer a good idea to rely on my own healing efforts or to ignore it. I called out the healers - made appointments with Rick Doty for body work, the Bradbury's for chiropractic care and acupuncture, Dr. Cindy Bullock for podiatry, and I drove to Everett to Althea's footwear (a podiatrist-recommended specialty shoe store for...
Sunday April 30. Glasgow. Greetings, fellow wayfarers. Here I am on the airplane on my way to Heraklion, Crete. Sister Judy is also in the air in her long journey from Shell Beach CA to Los Ángeles to Newark to Athens to Heraklion. Chris is also in the air, having left Orcas yesterday for the ferry ride to the mainland, then the drive to Seattle. She got to the airport at 4am for an early morning departure this morning. I believe she and Judy will meet up in Newark, then fly the rest of the way together (I think they even managed to get seats together). I will arrive Heraklion at 10:30pm tonight (8:30pm in Scotland - the time zone I’ve grown accustomed to in the past month). I will stay at a hotel near the airport then join them when they arrive Heraklion (2:30pm tomorrow). We will meet up with the car rental driver from Frangokastello (on the southwest coast of Crete) who will drive us to Fata Morgana apartments where we will spend the next two weeks so...
Continued from Speyside Way - Day 1 - part 1. Okay friends. I need to go back to bed (after someone mistaking the middle of the night for morning when I looked at my watch). So let’s pick one or two photos that show how much I enjoyed the walk and let it go at that. I hope you enjoyed going through all those gates with me. Who knows what mysteries of regulation and navigation we were exploring symbolically as we moved through them? I have not in my fascination with gates been unfaithful to bridges. An early part of the walk was beside the train track and I enjoyed the train bridges. This one in particular intrigued me. Look at that slanted stone work! And you aren’t going to get away without a few lively trees dancing their slow motion dance. Nor will you be spared yet another attempt to capture the sway and curve of the earth - that slow geological dance whose movement we don’t see but sense in the shape of things…I had hoped that the road curve and fence curve w...
Thank you River. Almost a mirror image of Callum’s celebration pose!
ReplyDeleteAlthough Callum dreamed I was his football coach, I think it’s pretty clear he is mine!
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