Far from home. (Alimentos para el alma #3)

Locations: Arnedillo and Arnedo, La Rioja, España

Soul Site: Ermita de la Virgen de la Torre (Arnedillo)

Alimento: Fardelejos (Arnedo)

Highlight: Pozas de Arnedillo

Freshman year of college, I ended up taking a seminar called Autobiography (everyone thought we had signed up for a class on the U.S. presidents. On the first day we learned that something had been mislabeled in the system, and this was not the case).

I was naturally a pretty introspective kid, but I believe this class sort of changed me forever. After continuous weeks of questioning the existence of the self and the thread connecting past and present and annotating memoirs and watching grainy documentaries that poked holes right through the definition of the genre, I’m pretty sure I was left forever marked as a contemplative. (For better or worse; I question everything that happens to me. And then usually laugh at it. If I am not enraptured by a conversation, I am most definitely elbow-deep in reflective thought.)

One text in particular really got me, such that I’ve guarded it as my “bio” on at least one social media platform ever since (but, see, that sentence alone makes me wonder…). It’s Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing first published in 1972, decades after her death. One, “A Sketch of the Past,” is absolutely loaded with gobstoppers for someone like you, fellow contemplative, to chew through.

(Source: Richard Gilbert at Draft No. 4)

Here’s Woolf describing this concept of “moments of being” I still remember every 1000th time I blink today, three years later:

"Every day includes more non-being than being. Yesterday for example . . . as it happened a good day; above the average in ‘being.’ It [the weather] was fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages; . . . I walked over Mount Misery and along the river; and save that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I like—there were the willows, I remember, all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue.

I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book—the memoirs of Madame de la Fayette—which interested me. These separate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of non-being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton. . . . The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being. I think Jane Austen can, and Trollope; perhaps Thackeray and Dickens and Tolstoy. I have never been able to do both." ("Sketch of the Past")

Regardless of whether she can or cannot do “both,” I want to, I thought! Not necessarily in how I write, but… you know, how I go about my day. I want to feather dust away that “nondescript cotton” as often as I can. I want more moments of being.

The question is whether you create them or stumble upon them.

Sometimes, I think, it’s both.

On November 19, the Fulbright La Rioja cohort took an afternoon to visit Arnedillo and Arnedo. Less than 500 people call the tiny pueblo of Arnedillo home, while Arnedo is the third-largest city in the region at a whopping near-15,000. It is famous for its footwear factories and outlets. I was quite excited about this particular event for two reasons: first, because my friend from the U.S. happened to have booked a quick trip to visit me that weekend, so I asked for permission to invite her along; second, I was reminded that Arnedillo is the village of one of my six teachers this year, which meant I could get some insider information before we saw it for ourselves! I’d had Arnedillo planned as a tentative location to study and write about, so the timing could not have been more perfect.

After receiving word that my friend would indeed be able to join us for an afternoon in the natural hot springs (termas or pozas) and a meal in shoe city, I tracked down my teacher to chat (aka, revealed that I have this blog) and posed the intention of the visit. I was thrilled to then receive from him a list of personal recommendations (with star ratings!) for what to see with our limited hours in the village accompanied by a hand-drawn map delineating a path my friend and I could follow to see some of the aforementioned sights. We could walk directly from the bus stop to one of the historic hilltop chapels or shrines (ermitas, directly translates to hermitages), and then through an underground tunnel that would essentially move us underneath the entire village out to the pozas to meet back up with the rest of our cohort. How cool, I thought, realizing how delighted I might be, too, if someone eagerly approached me asking how to spend two hours in my grandparents’ neighborhood in Kansas City, or my area of small-town Illinois.

It came as no surprise that this paper map, though hand-drawn, turned out to be far more accurate than Apple Maps could ever dream to be. Annie and I waved goodbye to our group as they headed straight for the pozas and jogged away (time was ticking, and it was cold, and we knew that a hot bath was waiting for us at the end of this walk). We walked directly through the winding downhill streets past women hanging their floral sheets out to dry; then some men repairing loose brick-sized cobblestones in the street. Wow, if you lived here, I thought, no matter where in town you ended up, you sure could never be very far from home. Carefully we stepped between a patch of trees and broke out beside the river. It was rushing wildly. The sun seemed to fling its beams onto every rocky corner of the mountains framing our view, smiling, and the air smelled crisp, and the sky had taken on magnificent peppermint blue. We were freezing, but wow, were we being.

“Can you imagine imagining we would be here last November when we were sitting at Bru Burger in South Bend eating bread pudding and planning the best way to split our weekend hours between the library and the bars?”

“Never.”

But, alas, this has been our life.

“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper...” ("Sketch of the Past")

Thanks, Virginia.

We then located the tunnel (which, admittedly, was a bit creepy) and funneled through as fast as we could to avoid the Cuggy Thief. A basketball court lied exactly where it was supposed to be, and then a “small path,” and then the pozas came into view to greet us. Annie and I slid into the steaming water with the rest of our cohort and breathed a very long sigh. I was being silly and digging my toes deep into pebbles lining the bottoms of the hot pools and joking with those around me about the benefits of taking a dip in the cold bath before returning to the extra-hot pool, I was being chastised by obvious locals about taking only one pebble as a souvenir (I may still have left with two or three…), I was being still in silence, smiling…I thought of nothing at all except the here, the now. I was being.

And being there (+ being, there,) was very, very cool. (As were we when we finally had to crawl out and re-clothe ourselves in that chilly late-November wind).

Re-bundled, I again split off with Annie for our mission’s stop into an ermita on our way back to the bus. This pint-sized chapel, Ermita de la Virgen de la Torre, had a red facade that was perfectly striking against the untouched landscape behind it. Arnedillo’s site holds a snippet of information about this and the other ermitas here, but to summarize, this one was built in the 1500s before being reconstructed later and is probably named for a statue of Mary that originally appeared in a watchtower above it. The lit offering candles blew with every gust of wind through the entryway, and we stood for a few minutes in slow silence. How history has been so carefully preserved, even in spots far less frequented! How easily one can fall into peace and prayer in stepping away for a few breaths.

Our little mission ended with a slight sprint to catch the bus to Arnedo, where we ate chicken sandwiches at a random restaurant and scouted out a bakery so that I could find my fardelejo, a pastry of Arab origin that’s been made in Arnedo since the 9th century and is now famous in all of La Rioja. This pillow-shaped egg and sugar pastry has a soft outer layer filled with almond marzipan of a much lighter texture than we know in the U.S. It took a while for the baker to come back downstairs and find about 17 22-year old damp and chatty American Fulbrighters packing her shop like sardines, waiting patiently to purchase individual fardelejos from her at such an odd time of the day (read: siesta). But she finally did, and likely she laughed about us that evening, and I thanked her profusely for allowing the completion of my quest.

(Source; sadly I had no self control on the bus home and my phone did not eat first, but this is an accurate photo)

On the bus back home, I thought again of my past, and where I was just a few months ago. I thought of where I was now and how I was still a little drippy, full of fardelejo, with rocks in my socks and pebbles from an ancient hot bath in my pocket, exhausted, happy. How I was so very far from home, but so very close to being where and who I want to be.

Thanks, Arnedillo.

My phone refuses to download most of my photos from this day, so here's some screenshots from the studio.

Plot twist: this was all a Terrence Malick-level daydream.