Here’s something new: a walk paired with a book. I’ve never done this before.
La Familia Sagrada: does that count as a walk? Does it matter? I walked there; I walked around while I was there, listening to the audio guide; I’ll be walking back. Good enough for me.
What an incredible cathedral; what a testament to faith and human creativity and the sublime and the beautiful.
Here’s an odd coincidence: while in line for the Passion Tower, a woman behind me looked familiar. Where are you from? we asked each other. Susan lives in Saskatoon; we met at my book launch there in January.
I would’ve stayed longer, but I slept in (jet lag, I guess) and had trouble getting organized, and so I missed breakfast. By two in the afternoon, my stomach was making those noises and I had a headache. Time to find lunch.
Then, lunch: inexpensive and delicious—grilled vegetables, local garlic sausage, Greek yogurt with honey. And Gillian Jerome’s book, Nevertheless: Walking Poems.
I’ve been looking for things I might be able to teach in a course about walking and writing next winter, and before I left for Spain, I threw this book into my bag. I enjoyed it, particularly the way Jerome talks back to solitary, male walkers (Rilke, Rousseau) and instead sees walking as a way to connect with others. Not just the people she’s walking with: also passersby, people sitting or lying down whom she sees, people she remembers. She also realizes her links to the places where she’s walking—particularly their histories, but also their futures as the Anthropocene thunders onward. Jerome is a gardener, too; I included the photo I took of the lavender outside Sagrada Família because that’s one of the flowers she grows in her Vancouver yard. Caring for plants is another way to recognize our connections to the places where we live. So too, I just realized, is writing about them.
I don’t think Jerome would mind if I shared this lovely sonnet, “Poem for Autumn,” which I’m too lazy to type out, and since AI bots visit this blog daily, scraping text to feed themselves, it’s probably better to present it this way:
Lunch is finished. Time to pay up and return to my wandering.