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Railroad Bridge over the Inn River. (Tomasito, photo)13
Camera Mishap
A dusting of new snow has fallen during the night. Perfect! I walk the city streets and soon find myself on a footpath beside the Inn River. Following the current downstream, I am heading north as I hoped––exactly one day late, which is probably the precisely correct pilgrim time. When I am surrounded by parkland; I pause to adjust my backpack harness. Arriving at the best fit for one’s equipment is interesting and important for a long-distance hiker, so I take time to adjust the harness straps.Walking on into the brightening day, I soon come upon a stone railway bridge, which arches across the river through the morning mist. I hear a train coming and hurry to take my camera out of its case to take a photo of the train as it crosses the bridge. In my haste I place too much strain on the camera’s carrying strap and break its’ plastic battery compartment lock. This is not the first time speed and certain carelessness have cost me dearly—the camera was a gift from my Kolbermoor friends and I can’t afford another. It apparently still works but has been seriously damaged by my clumsy handling. There is a lesson in this mishap that I have time to ponder as I continue slowly on foot: I had hoped for a camera like this one for a long time before I obtained it––and now it has been ruined by a moment of heedlessness. This is a serious loss to me but perhaps this lesson will help me proceed with more care and deliberation in using other valuable tools in the future because I really must learn to be more patient and methodical even when pressed for speed—perhaps some day when more is at stake than a short-lived plastic camera. One of the beauties of solitary pilgrimage is that you have time to meditate on the simple events of your day such as this.Tomasito, 2009
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12
Fresh Start!
Very early in the morning I come down to the common dining room where a luxurious pilgrim’s breakfast of cheese, wurst, bread and coffee has been spread for me.
After breakfast, I shoulder my huge American backpack (donated by Cousin Rose in Anchorage, Alaska) and stride boldly out into the bright winter morning sunlight of suburban Rosenheim.
Children in colorful winter clothing are waiting for school buses and a few early dog-walkers are out with their pets. Until my lungs cool off a bit, I breathe out clouds of sparkling silver mist.
I love this moment.
I’m totally free—my body, just a little tired from yesterday’s hike, is eager for today’s exercise—the cold, crisp “town” air on my face––I’m wearing gloves, a warm parka and a new woolly hunter’s cap with sun visor and fold-down earflaps which I have decorated with an edelweiss badge and am using my pilgrim’s staff which I have dressed up with an evergreen sprig and blue and white diamond pattern Bavarian ribbons. I am so bright and cheerful that I smile, even laugh out loud from pure joy as I stride along. Such sensation! Such delight! Such pilgrimage!
Tomasito, 2009
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Old Rosenheim (Tomasito photo)11.
Circular Start
So I retrace my steps to where I can leave the canal footpath and then follow a city street toward the Inn River where I still hope I will find a pretty riverside path leading north.
Walking on the city sidewalk and carrying an increasingly heavy backpack, the progress of this pilgrim is mighty slow.
City traffic whizzes by and, though I try to go the shortest way toward where I think the Inn River is, that is not at all the way the streets want to go!
Ahhh! Finally I cross a big freeway bridge with signs pointing the way to Salzburg—and far below, I see the Inn river—but, how to get down to it?
There are rows of trees down below the bridge, which may have shaded a country lane years ago, but now that land is fenced private property-- meanwhile the short winter day is already wearing out.
Slowly, slowly, I pace through a few more highway twists, and arrive at a village signpost proclaiming the village of “Hopping”! Holy Mackerel! (A pilgrim’s swearword!) Now I recognise where I am! I am less than a mile from the house where I started walking this morning—and I’m south of Kolbermoor, though I wanted to go north!
My day-long walk has been in a circle and in the wrong direction !
This is so typical of my pilgrimage style that I just stand there and laugh like a fool!
It’s a good thing I am traveling by myself—if I was leading a group of pilgrims, some of them might be annoyed—maybe even angry!
But since this may be my only opportunity in this life to sleep in the delightfully named village of Hopping, I seek for and find a small guesthouse that is open for business, though the tourist season is long gone.
The Gasthaus has a nice, clean little upstairs bedroom and a bathroom with plentiful hot water down the hall—and since I have some money on this pilgrimage, I can sleep in this cozy room instead of under a bridge all night!
I eat some of the food I’ve brought with me, drink some orange juice (what an elegant pilgrimage!) and, after a short but sincerely thankful meditation, go to sleep swathed in one of those wonderful fat, fluffy, down comforters they wisely use in this part of the world.
Certainly, if pilgrimage were always this easy, luxurious and fun, there would be no one to keep the hotel because everybody would be on pilgrimage!
Tomasito, 2009
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10
Getting Lost
To my great delight I became lost almost immediately after setting out from my friend’s house.
To many people, being lost is a profoundly humiliating condition to be avoided if at all possible.
People who must know where they are at all times need maps, compasses—even global positioning devices and “where AM I” aids of all kinds--but I don’t.
For me, most of the fun and the learning seem to begin when I am lost. I truly love wandering, as they say, where there is no path—because when I am lost I begin to rely on other guidance, other sources of information, perhaps imaginary for you, but always available to me: my “guardian angel”, my “intuition” or whatever it may be.
For me, allowing this guidance to emerge and to accept its direction is one of the most compelling reasons to “pilgrim” in the first place. Really, if everything is pre-planned and pre-known, why not just take a “package tour” with everything paid in advance and no surprises (you hope!). I have actually seen advertisements for “pilgrimage tours” to well-known “holy places” where the client can pay for a time-limited “pilgrimage” without the inconvenience and discomfort of walking.
Of course, people are very different and many may profit from such tours but they do not appeal to me.
Please understand that I never plan to get lost. I really expected that, since both the Mangfal and the Inn Rivers have been “roads” of commerce for centuries and since Germans love well-cared-for walking paths through pretty scenery, there would be connections from the beautifully maintained Mangfal canal-path to the place where the canal rejoined the Mangfal River (probably, I imagined, some rustic but well-built bridge) and then to its confluence with the great Inn river where there would naturally be (I imagined) a lovely park-like path beside the majestic river all the way to Straubing.
Indeed, I had followed the course of the Inn on another pilgrimage in the southerly direction as it flowed out of the Alps with no problem, but on this occasion, when I arrived at the junction of the Mangfal with the Inn, instead of bridge and park, I found myself on a sandbar with a swamp on one side, rushing water on the other, freeway bridges overhead and fenced private property in every other direction.
There is no room for a picturesque pilgrimage path in up-to-date Rosenheim, and I am perhaps the first “real pilgrim” to walk this way in a long, long while.
tomasito, 2009
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Stone "Celtic" Cross in Forest Near Kolbermoor, Germany. (Tomasito photo)
9
Prayer "Mantras"
I have noticed that these different mantra-type prayers do not seem to have exactly the same effect on me, but they all seem righteous and good. Of course, before they become a Prayer of the Heart I think they must be repeated many, many, many times since faithful, continuous practice seems necessary.If the above seems foolish to you--well, it seemed foolish to me too. I had to experience the work myself—and that meant abandoning some prejudices and expending some effort.
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained” is more than a folk saying. Perhaps a person should also have reached a particular state of need in their spiritual development when this sort of activity is right--though I am not sure about this.When I have finished “pilgrimming” and have stopped reciting the mantras, their total effect has continued to be beneficial to me, I think, though in exactly WHAT way I really could not say.Tomasito, 2009
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8
To Become a Prayer
Some pilgrims like to use a rosary to count their repetitions of the "Jesus Prayer" and in the beginning I experimented with a rosary too, counting the beads just for fun.
I think it may be good for a person like me--who is easily distracted--to use a rosary to engage as many senses as possible in the prayer.
And if a person has only a limited time to pray, the rosary does make a handy timer.
But as I became more intimately involved with the prayer during my first long pilgrimage, counting beads seemed unnecessary.
Yet to me this did not seem to be merely robotic repetition, but a deeper altering of the condition of my consciousness—with nothing to attain, nothing to do--except to walk or sometimes ride an old bicycle.
Eventually, I suppose you might say that the pray-er--(you or me)--becomes the prayer.
In a way. the prayer becomes the core--the Self.
The Jesus Prayer then, as repeated by this pilgrim at least, was not really so much of an asking prayer (though the words ARE a plea for mercy) but a being prayer.
And since my first pilgrimage using the Jesus Prayer, I have experimented as I walk by reciting other mantra-type prayers from other of religious traditions—sometimes just for a change and sometimes for reasons I felt might be important for my "spiritual growth".
I have used Estafer-u-Allah (God have mercy) from the Moslem tradition; Aum, Mani padme hum (Aum, The jewel in the lotus) from the Hindu tradition, Aum—Ahhh—hum, vajra Guru Padma siddhi hum (Aum—Ahhh—hum. Diamond Guru Padmasambhava, hum) from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and others.
Tomasito, 2009
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7.
The Pilgrim's Prayer
I had abandoned the religious activities of my youth in a reaction against not only the hypocrisy I saw in the church but even more so in a reaction to the hypocrisy I saw in myself. Regarding the Russian pilgrim's “Jesus Prayer” for example––at first I couldn't even recite the words comfortably in English, so I learned to repeat it in the original Greek—the meaningless sounds of that language: “Kyrie Jesu Christe eleson mas” were less repulsive to me than the old trite saw: “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on us” was.The author of The Way of the Pilgrim recommended that a sincere pilgrim should repeat this simple formula continually as he walks, and since he walks all day, he repeats the prayer several thousand times daily. After a few days or weeks of this, he no longer needs to articulate the prayer—he repeats it silently as he walks, and eventually he will discover that the prayer has become, quite literally, the “Prayer of the Heart” since it is being repeated automatically night and day, awake or asleep, in his heart as they say. I found through experience, that for myself at any rate, this is literally true.
During pilgrimage, for example, I would wake up in the middle of the night in strange surroundings and instead of normal fear I would experience the subtle but real comfort of the prayer running along quietly in my head
The prayer helped sustain my mental equilibrium, I guess you could call it.Tomasito, 2009
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Railroad Bridge over the Inn River. (Tomasito, photo)
