EMPTINESS//fright

[Andrea Innes-Michailov]

Wow Felipe, that is intense.  I especially relate to your emptiness "We have
everything in the US and yet at the same time we seem to have nothing.  I
have been plagued by an emptiness for decades that I have filled with
substances, dalliances,  excesses, and obsessions".   I am the same on so
many levels and I do not want to waste my time for much longer.  You are
blessed to have made such a discovery.

Where is your wife from and where are you from originally and what does your
wife say about Spain?  if I may ask...

Andrea


 -----Original Message-----
From: Road to Santiago Pilgrimage [mailto:GOCAMINOaPETE.URI.EDU]On Behalf Of
Felipe Sanchez
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2002 11:59 PM
To: GOCAMINOaPETE.URI.EDU
Subject: Re: Fright


  Great story Gabrielle--Ojo Andrea:

  My Camino experience is the same but since I could converse with the
indigenes I had a series of memorable encounters, invitations,
conversations, and memories that I could not have duplicated here in the
Colonies.  In fact I seem to have found a social element in Spain that I had
been missing all  my life.  I cannot explain this phenomenon nor will I
posit an etiology but such is my comfort and satisfaction level while on the
Hibernian Peninsula that I am seriously considering expatriation as a way to
complete my declining years.  We have everything in the US and yet at the
same time we seem to have nothing.  I have been plagued by an emptiness for
decades that I have filled with substances, dalliances,  excesses, and
obsessions.  Now, post Camino, I seem to have found my voice, love has for
the first time penetrated my consciousness in the form of a chance encounter
and "flechazo" near Palas do Rei, and my life-long, damnable, pervasive,
persistent, soul-numbing melancholy has finally dissipated.  Camino?  In
many ways it has been my road to salvation, a road I started down years ago
in Guatemala, afterwards with a multitude of Spanish classes, an
intercultural marriage, my personal apotheosis at Trujillo, and a continuing
fascination with Spain, the language and her people.  Would that everyone
could extract and integrate into their lives that with which I have been
gifted by "The Mother Country."  Give yourself freely to the Camino and she
will reward you in ways even the most prescient among us cannot foresee.
Felipe Sanchez