"Everything's fine, except for the pain."

I came across this (low-res) photo of Marz (left, purple pants) teaching my sister to dance Gangnam Style in 2012--remember that?
This was a year after bink, Marz, and I had walked Camino, and Marz had moved here.

I recently found the exact time and place where Marz & I met.
We met through the William Shatner (Capt. Kirk) fansite, Look At His Butt!

BELOW: On November 3, 2009, the Butt Girls had reposted a silly macro I'd made--a mashup of Kirk w/ a tagline from Shatner's Priceline ads.

Marz had followed the link to my Kirk of the Week macros here on this blog.
(Here: all the KotWs--wow, I'd forgotten--I made 30-some!)

I was inspired to look up this exact post because, sadly, one of the LAHB! founders, Pat aka "Jungle Kitty", died suddenly at the end of 2022.
Here: the podcast from Feb 2023 where Lene announces the death of her best friend and podcast cohost, Pat.

LAHB! had been part of a Golden Age of Star Trek, when a lot of new fans--including Marz--came onboard after the 2009 Star Trek reboot movie inspired them to look up The Original Series from the 1960s--and many of them started their own blogs or youTube channels.

And that's how I met Marz--because of this goofy blog...
You never know what leads to what.

When bink & I decided to walk Camino in 2011, I suggested we invite Marz along. Marz lived in Oregon, met us in Pamplona, and ended up moving here afterward.
(A couple Scandinavian Star Trek Web-friends joined us on Camino too, at the end, for the last week's walk to the sea).

Ms Moon had challenged me to think of ways Camino had changed me. Getting to know Marz in person was obviously a huge and good life changer--and Look At His Butt! gets credit for that too.

But walking the Camino itself mostly changed me in little, subtle ways. It was never the Revelation from On High that I'd secretly hoped for when I started the first time (2001).
I had no mystic dreams or spiritual visions of the sort Shirley MacLaine had advertised in her book The Camino, published in 2000.

In a lot of ways, I felt confirmed more than changed by Camino.
Things I intuited were true were shored up by real-life physical experience.
I'd written down some of these.

THIS quote, from Day 14, was absolutely key--bink & I still say it:
a pilgrim named Lynette from Australia, when someone asked her how Camino was going, said,

"Everything's fine,
except for the pain."

I'd always felt that modern American life--as I'd experienced it--wasn't good with pain, or sadness, or other hard and not-pleasant parts of life.
The message was (is) that pain was a problem, a glitch in the system, a bug we were supposed to fix.

But that's not true, not necessarily. Pain is an integral part of the system---blisters come with walking, grief comes with love--it isn't a sign that something's wrong.

I mean, it might be! One woman insisted on walking on infected, wounded feet, and that is stupid. You can get blood poisoning and die.
But my culture didn't teach us (me, growing up) how to discern:
Is this dangerous? Should I stop?
Or is this pain a normal part of having a body and a heart, and I should just keep walking?

Just Keep Walking is definitely the No. 1 Lesson I take from Camino.

[More on this topic later.]

Camino starts NOW, . . . and it never ends.

Specifically though, Marz arrived in Spain two weeks ago today. She is starting her third week on Camino.

Hi, Marz! whenever & wherever you see this.
I hope everything's fine, and the pain isn't too bad!
xo Frexipan, Brado Rand, the Baby Rhino