travel

I miss you

The lake

In all its

Beauty

Love on everyones face

School just a walk away

I miss you

wanted to try uploading some photos. I took all of these along the Camino de Santiago, which I recently walked (from Burgos to Santiago de Compostela). 

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It's been close to two weeks since I finished, and I feel a bit twitchy, a bit unsatisfied, a bit lonely. You hear this from pilgrims sometimes – that at the end of the Camino, you just don't know what to do with yourself. That was how I felt, sitting at that cafe in Santiago with a young chaperone and a fifty-two year old woman from California and an old Spanish man with a cane. I felt like I had to keep going.

I still don't know exactly why I walked the Camino. It's too complicated. I walked because my school offered the opportunity, I suppose. I wanted to see Spain. I want to see the world, more than anything. I want to explore it and see all these little crannies and corners that are someone else's normal. I don't want to travel as much as I want to live in these places, to find the crowds of a city or the sound of a river normal so that I have really truly experienced them. I wanted to learn and speak the languages and live on a road.

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I want to taste Finisterre but not
like a Lady of Shalott.
I want to throw my arms
wide on the rocks and scream
and cry into the ocean tears that
this world is mine and now I will
wear bright painted wooden bracelets and
rings and earrings over
my washed-out gray skin and eyes and
I don’t want to pull rue and Read more »

The top floor of this wide church is tall and
soft and echoey and haunted, bare stone cold
except for the curly haired woman in the
corner with the clink clink keys.
she smiles kind of bored kind of wistful.
the ceiling is wide arching big cracked sky blue
curled coiled twisted overdone, and there is
air in the lonely vacuum pockets
in the room’s clouds, but the
real clouds are on the ground, Read more »

Yesterday, I was in a little supermarket just up the hill from where we were staying. We were in a town in Galicia called Portomarín that leans over the reservoir that flooded its old buildings, but the people moved the church up out of the old town and put it at the top of a new hill. It seemed that everything in the town was up stairs or up a hill, away from the water. My feet hurt. In the mirrored wall of the supermarket, I paused to stare at myself. My hair was a long fizzy frizzy cloud, brown and curly, not styled but uncontrolled, like sheep wool. I wore a purple-pink dress from the sporting goods store, and under it I wore puffy olive green pants. I wore several necklaces and wooden rings and the same earrings that I'd worn all month. My face was red - my nose was burnt and peeling - and my arms were tan. I held a bar of soap, a bottle of shampoo, and a box of granola bars. On my feet were pink plastic flip flops. I had vicious white blisters on my heels. I thought that I looked like an adventurer, a traveler who could cross the wheat fields where the sun broke across my face like a shattered egg and left me burnt and angry. I thought that I looked like I could walk for thirty kilometers and then go out shopping for food and soap. I felt tough and experienced. And then it rained today, for the first time. If my flip flops could talk, they'd resent that I wore them for the last few kilometers into Astorga on the sharp rocks and dusty soil. I wore them down and stained the bottoms gray. Read more »

you didn't drink from the gray-black iron fountain with

two handles, one red one blue but

the blue one didn't work and the red one sprayed

ice water everywhere. you didn't drink on the roadside by the

rocky wide field, where they sang quick songs in French, the

four women and a whitebearded man bent by their

packs. we ate candy and spilled it in the sun

and my red glassy gummy bears

drowned in the muddy dark chocolate soil and

it boiled and cooked like our skin and

our day-burnt legs were sprayed by the

soda fizz water.

we knew people and

everyone came past, through, near the fountain.

the Spanish man with the full white beard and the

red red face waved as he passed and

the Australians stopped to talk and drink and

kick dust on our ankles, and you

didn't drink on the outside of the

little town with cracked pastel murals and

mud walls and the word "bar" painted in

big black letters on the pavement. I was

as dry and tired as the crisp cracker-colored wheat

and my throat was cracked and songless,

graham cracker tongue and the candy was

drowned but you didn't drink because the

ground was dirty and the sun that

fried the gummy bear and our burnt faces

paled the music, you said, and the wheat was

too wide and the fountain too simple small hardly

mattered at all, just a lost broken oasis

gone to seed and broken by too many different

blistered footsteps and songs.

Note (would be italicized if I could figure out how): I am spending a month in Spain currently, and I'm spending most of that month walking 300 miles across the north of the country on the Camino de Santiago (the Way of Saint James), which is an ancient pilgrimage road. I've been doing a lot of writing along the way... I've brought a notebook that is slowly but steadily filling. In the next month, I'll probably post some of that writing (mainly songs and poetry) upon occasion.

I have stinging nettle tans today,
scratched red and blotched like
spilled raspberry tea, and I am
sunburnt to the ankles and walking on
white numb ghost feet. I am
scraped and needled with pink
ink, I wear these tattoos all the way
through to my blood. I have
this grass burnt into my veins
and there are wheat-prick
twists on each full wall,
graffiti in my muscles, dirtied
words and dirty roads in my
bones, but it's bright but it's light like the
sun like the sun like the sun.

I am going to miss the blueberries this year. They're
green and hard on the bushes, angry tart little
eyeballs. They are watching the chickens,
very scathing,
beady sour buttons.
I'm going to miss the blueberries this year, when they
turn blue (veined with purple blood) and smear their mashed
green insides all over our hands,
ripe eyes watching the chickens,
very heavy, very tired. I'm going to miss the blueberry eyes
rolling across the floor this year,
ground into the carpet and our feet,
sticky splatted eyedrops.
The blueberries are going to watch me from across the ocean
this year and the grass will grow high and wispy and weave
through their bushes but I won't see.
When I get on the plane tomorrow and
the grasses wrap around my ankles, I'm going to break them and
they'll be waving, lost in the ocean's kelp, but the blueberries will follow me
out across the north of Spain, glaring as they
turn to cold-blooded blue and
asking where I am.

Within my heart
rests one desire,
to travel to Dublin,
embrace the mire

Upon the isle
Of gleaming green,
Lock eye to eye
With beauty unseen

To hear the choir,
To feel the fire,
To hunt the shire,
To climb through briar,

To love the Prior,
To hate the Crier,
To shun the Liar,
To admire the Higher,

When things seem dire
I call the Higher,
He answers me
Through the Prior

“In three days,”
The Prior said,
And so I wait
With stale bread

 I am one of those people  Read more »

I feel all ready for something to happen

something to explode, something to change Read more »

Once upon a time I knew
Exactly what to say
Once upon a time we were
Together every day
We danced and spun
We played and sang
Our laughter through
our world it rang
And echoed all around
At the ending of the day

When the rain came falling down
We'd run into our rooms
And merrily we'd roll ourselves
into blanket cocoon
We read and talked
We laughed a lot
We waited 'til
The rain, it stopped
Then ran out in the night
So we could dance beneath the moon

Once upon a time I thought
to take it on myself
To wander through the garden gate
And there find something else! Read more »

Have you ever been consumed with something so much that some may say you have an addiction?
I have two, Running and Travel.
These two completely different topics are an obsession to me. Read more »

Here i lie, upon my back
coming upon a new place, slowly
but fast

I speed along the highway, bumping
rubber wheels keep me afloat on this
sea of earth, come to me.

The soft wheel beneath my fingers
the pulse of music through my ears
pounds the beat of the traveler.

For hours I've gone along
time slipping by like the surgeon's knife
so sharp you won't feel a thing.

I stare at the horizon, changing still
As I move from place to place
the sky never changes.

The same moon, the same stars
I gazed upon from where I came
or do they travel with me?

My only companions on this dusty road
coins, silver and gold
lighting my way past the cones of my headlights

As I go i think of nothing
and write on, inside my mind.
Sometimes life just slides by.

forever traveling

-Locke

By Lila Teenyanoff
Thetford Academy, Grade 8

"Strong and content I travel the open road"
Flying across the country the wind at my back
Sky scrapers looming over head
Pigeons fly through the smog filled sky
Seagulls circle over the wide blue sea
Waves crashing on the sea shore
I continue on traveling the open road

Sun rises and sets as days pass by
My feet grow weary
My travel has lasted long
My knowledge of the world has grown
My eyes have observed much
But all travelers must change one day or another
With a new place to explore in mind, but not here on this planet
For strong and content I shall travel the open galaxy

I, myself, have been to the crystal city on the water.
I have stood on the glass balcony which reflected back below.
I have traveled endless miles into the sky which this place sits,
Where the shows are the thunderclouds far down where we row,
Above the clouds where storms cease to exist.

I stand on the balcony of Room 232 of Chiang Mai Ram hospital, staring into the warm Thai night and thinking of everything that had happened, what it would mean in the cool, distant morning. Read more »

When I laid on the floor of the Miami Airport
trying to find a little shut eye
music feeding into my ears, a phone at my side,
I was any other girl.
My Spanish-English dictionary proved a good pastime.
What new words could I learn between flights?
As we leave the ground my eyes linger below.
Will there be as many lights when we land?
It seems strange in the beginning. Read more »