Rain & Pain

Trudging to the store each drop was thick and heavy, exploding onto my shoulders, hands, hair, and face. Halfway through the walk from El Supermercado to our apartment in Valencia, Spain, I took a break. I sat against a green wooden door, the doorframe offering refuge, and lit a smoke. Of course the quiet, as it always seems to be, was a miracle. The rain was waving like sheets in the wind, most visible in the tunnels of the car lights. Ancient towers from the Moorish days felt the rain of today as they have for many days before. The cobblestone roads in a neighborhood called Carmen, a statue of a man called The River in La Plaza de Virgen, Café Lavin, and the train station all felt the rain. Valencia’s streets are laid about like spaghetti noodles strewn on a plate, all small and winding with haphazard design. The buildings are faded pinks, yellows, and blues. The people are dressed in layered scarves and jackets colored black and brown and grey. Everything feels the rain.

The rain reminded me of the Camino de Santiago, which is a sort of walk/pilgrimage that thousands undertake each year to the town of Santiago in Northwest Spain. I left for a 10 day portion of this walk with a few acquaintances.

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My back was already hurting, my shoe broken, and myself aware that I would be spending days in isolation with strangers and without distractions—all before we boarded a bus that would take us to Lugo. Lugo is where the walk would begin.  My mood remained similar through the first day of walking: It rained all day, as it would each of the next seven, unless of course it was hailing. My feet swelled into marshmallows, my ankles cracked, and I limped. I complained to myself. The oppression of knowing that the next day would be almost twice as long as the first was mentally crippling – I was limping in all senses.

The land was green and soft with small stone and wooden villages. The sky was always grey, which made the green even greener. Aside from the destination city of Santiago there were no built structures higher than one story and most homes have only one small door right in the center of the front wall. The path we follow was defined in some places and nonexistent in others, marked every few miles by a yellow shell and arrow. Sometimes there were piles of stones that have been left by pilgrims carrying rocks for sins and lost loved ones. There was a lady pilling hay into a wooden wheelbarrow, a man with a stick resting on the hind of the cow in front of him, and boys throwing small pebbles at a big stone.

We waited for livestock to pass through the streets, we had wine from a homemade wineskin, we waded through rushing streams, we took wrong turns, we got lost, and we fell in love with one another. We knew we were in love when The Walk began to feel like a long road trip with family—complaints about the distance yet to be travelled, complaints about things that one of us said/did to the other, tears, solidarity.

On a road trip I may have the discipline to look out of the window for say, 2 of 8 hours. When you’re walking The Camino you are looking out of the window for all 8 hours and things aren’t even moving quickly. I had thoughts before The Walk, but during The Walk you could say that my thoughts had thoughts. Chiefly, I concentrated on the constant rain and hail. This is because I, as a good upper-class American, am vehemently opposed to my own discomfort. If I were to see both a jogger and someone lashing their own back with a whip, I would feel that both were roughly the same goal. I have a remote to turn my fan on and off. I put product in my hair that doesn’t look like product but still functions effectively. I want to smoke, and so I do. I want to drink beer, and so I do. I want to sleep in, and so I do. The Camino’s premise is discomfort.

Anyway, this is what I thought about the rain:

Mutual discomfort can be galvanizing. It was for us. And now I know about the old loves, parents, dreams, favorite movies, mistakes, and authenticities of a few who can say, “We walked The Camino together.” Thomas Merton says, “The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men. The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit…God’s plan was that they should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back upon the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone.”

A car could have gone to Santiago faster, keeping us free of pain, rain, and smelliness, but we would have lost everything. It seems that the pain, much because of like the rain, is what made our mortality and reality very real. And within a context of that awareness the pain and the rain served as encouragement to share honestly with each other, to listen intently to each other, and to somehow be glad that one foot continued to surpass the other. It seems that in the past I have spent too much time debating the creator of the process that gives us rain and too little time reveling in the pure existence of it. Too little time spent amazed that our greatest need falls from the sky, a miracle every time, and too much time annoyed that it is doing so. Walking for days in the rain taught me to covet and love it, to acknowledge that I need the rain and that needing the rain means that I’m alive and that it is good to be alive. Pain is much like the rain in this way.

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And that’s what I remembered when my back was against the green door. And that’s when I reconsidered the rain. And I realized that I could walk in the rain and deal with pain because I’ve walked in the rain and dealt with pain. I’ve known the rain and pain so intimately that my skin changed and the invisible strings from my shoulders to my boots were tight, and I’d become heavy. But the rain and pain are not against me. The rain is the rain and pain is pain and in life we have rain and pain and if we didn’t, maybe we’d fail to remember that we are here. I thank God for the rain and the pain because they fall on me and I feel it. I thank God because—even though they make things slippery and hard to do—it is part of what we’ve been given. The pain is sometimes loneliness, and sometimes fear, and sometimes anxiety, and sometimes cancer, and sometimes a lie, and sometimes distance, and sometimes memory, and sometimes it is a water droplet; but I know it.

So when it rains, like it was against the towers and within the cones of light, and upon the cobblestone, statues, buildings and people, I’ll turn my face upward and feel what is real. I’ll feel each drop that lands on my shoulders, hands, hair, and face. Sometimes I’ll forget all that good stuff about the rain and pain, and the rain and pain will seem too heavy, and the strings from my boots to my shoulders will get tight, and I will try to remember that feeling the rain and pain is better than feeling nothing, and that though it has rained before, the rain has never failed to stop.