DAY 8
Freedom.
Mentally untethered to the possibility that my host may eat my beating heart, I wake early and start walking south along the shore. I find myself in Denia, though amazingly do not make it to the mountain I spotted a few days earlier.
While I walk, I listen to David Whyte's What To Remember When Waking.
In it, he reads his poem Todar Phadraic. It is not my favorite of his works, but its genesis interests me as it's the first I hear of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a mythological race of people who lived in Ireland. Uninterested in battle, they "turned sideways into the light and disappear into the originality of it all." Whyte describes this event as them "no longer wanting to have that conversation." This interests me because I know that if I do not expire on the Mediterranean, I do not wish to return to the place and life that I left behind exactly one week ago.
It is the tedium of modern life that chisels away at me, and it is that which I hope to dance around while tricking it into thinking I'm dancing with.
I recall what Scott Rosenberg taught me in my 20s: give it a name, so I Christen it the time-rich life. Simultaneously, Jim James puts his lips to my ear: "Tryin' gets nothing done."
As always, I walk.
Sardines are cheap at the Super Mercado. A different breakfast for Nina.
I close the day sleeping with the bedroom door open.
52KM.
I wake a few hours later with a full bladder. Raised by women (mother, aunt, sisters, grandmother), I've always peed seated. Tonight's no exception. Sitting there, I feel something soft against my calfs. Blanche sidling by. I bend to stroke her and rise bloodied.
