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<DIV>Great story Gabrielle--Ojo Andrea:</DIV>
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<DIV>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 </DIV></BODY></HTML>