you have to stop and smell the lavender

woke up this morning, snotty but ready to go.

pottered around like someone on holiday - had brekkie, went to the post office and posted back the most excellent souvenir I bought yesterday, an original etching of Cruz de Ferro - that´s the place I mentioned earlier, the one where you place your stone or memento from home.

I´d been feeling a bit odd about putting my stone there - it has a lot of emotion and energy attached to it. For a stone that had been sitting on my mantle-piece for a long time without any notice being paid to it, it has now taken on a significance far greater than I am able to explain or even comprehend myself. In short though, I picked up the stone from Waikanae beach around the same place that my mum´s ashes are scattered, so it holds special value for that alone. But there´s more to this stone. The day before I was leaving to come here I was in a bit of a quandry about which stone to take, I´d selected two quite similar stones from the mantle-piece - one black, one white. I was stressing about the trip and doing final preparations. My gorgeous gf was right there with me giving me lots of encouragement and support and doing all those last minute things that, in my state, I wouldn´t have gotten around to. We were workshopping which stone to take, thought about both, but decided on the black one. Once I´d made that decision I left the white one behind, at home, and sub-consciously it became the counter-point (or is that counter-stone) to the other.

The theory behind the stone placing is that you´ve rubbed all your cares and woes into it and can release them at the peak of this walk - 1505m above sea level. I confess to forgetting most of the time that I have it in my pocket and until now I´ve been obsessing a bit about why I´m on this walk and not really meditating on other things in my life. But honestly, sometimes there´s just no time to think - sounds odd but that´s been my experience so far.

So, as I said, I was feeling a bit odd about leaving behind a stone that I hadn´t been rubbing and that I somehow thought I would be losing something by leaving it here in Spain. But last night I was on my way to do the museum rounds in Astorga and stopped to look in the window of an art shop. A beautiful etching caught my eye - the scene was of Cruz de Ferro. I knew immediately that I had to buy it, no matter how much it cost, and that this would be the link back to my Camino and somehow serve as not only a reminder but as a focus for working out problems in my life as they arise.

Perhaps this is a lot of importance to put on a picture but I will look at it and know that my little black stone, with all it´s shape and history, will form part of a bigger picture and will forever be linked back to wonderful memories of the most important people in my life. I can look at its little white sister stone and feel a sense of connection to other lands, other times and my own journey.

My journey has begun again, as always in life, there have been some set backs, but I am on the road again, walking through interesting villages, looking at the scenery and flowers and taking my time now - what a great lesson to have learnt.

So why do you have to stop and smell the lavender? because its beautiful and if you walk too far or too fast you´ll miss it.