Pietrasanta

Last night some pilgrim friends and I ate food from an oven instead of a microwave and then I “slept” (against snoring) in the church dorm.

I walked for several hours along the seafront today, and would you believe that I  hardly saw the water? Many hotels and restaurants have taken the view away and eaten up the beach, too. One time in France, I was on a plain surrounded by silent white windmills as far as the eye could see in all directions. I remember thinking how magical it would be for someone who had never seen windmills to be dropped in that place, how alien. A similar thought came up today, but it was more in the vein of: if ancient persons of this area were suddenly transported to 2017, they would assume it was an invasion.

Nothing is really happening – I’m happy to write out of habit, but I’m convinced that the pure challenge of the pilgrimage is over – I miss it somehow, the struggle. I’ve never liked things to be easy, and when I think back on it, the atrocious pain in my feet and legs and various episodes of fear and sickness are the highlights of the way. Now, the lack of semantical or physical problems means that my mind is always bouncing around to other things and I’m occasionally wishing I had something else to do. But I may as well enjoy the remaining stroll to the eternal city. Anything may still happen.

Pietrasanta itself is nice. Pilgrims are invited to stay in a spare house owned by the nuns on the top of a hill overlooking the square.

I’m in the nuns’ garden reading “Growth of the Soil.”

Does anyone out there wish to start a book club?