Monday, October 5, 2009

Verso l'alto and Other Hiking Adventures

I love water. I love drinking it, especially when I eat pizza that's apparently really salty for dinner and I'm thirsty all night. I love showering in it, especially when I'm tired and dirty and haven't bathed in about 48 hours. And mostly, I love water in large quantities. HUGE quantities. Unimaginable amounts of water, like the ocean, or even a lake, or here in Italy, the sea. Something about it just captivates me, and I could sit there and look at it for hours. It's so fascinating, and always invites a bit of reflection, too. Why am I talking about this? Well, I got to spend alot of time by the sea this weekend! A group of friends and I (there were 9 of us altogether) went to Cinque Terre for the weekend. Cinque Terre literally means five earths, or five lands, or something to that effect. It's an area in northern Italy with five small coastal towns connected by hiking trails.

We took an overnight train to get there, and arrived at about 5 in the morning in the first town. (Well, half our group got there then. The other half accidentally missed the stop we needed to transfer in, and had to come up with new travel plans on the fly. Luckily, everything worked out and they made it just about an hour later than us...but that's another story). Anyway, it was still dark. We didn't really have anywhere to go or anything to do, so we went out to the beach just outside the train station. We hung out there til the sun rose and then got started with our activities for the day at about 8ish. We walked around the town, bought passes for the trails, and started hiking. The trails between the towns have a wide variety of difficulty, and we decided to go the direction that would give us the hardest hikes first, and then the easier ones at the end. So our first hike took about 2 hours, and was alot of up and down and narrow little paths.

I had a lot of "verso l'alto" moments, where I had to repeat that phrase to myself as we were going up a particularly steep portion to have the energy to keep going. "Verso l'alto" means, roughly, "towards the top". It comes from Blessed Pier Georgio Frassiti--he was a young Italian man who lived in the early 1900s. He's awesome for a lot of reasons, and one of my current favorite saints (even though he's not quite a saint yet), but among other things he loved to go mountain climbing. Once, on a picture of him halfway up a mountain, he wrote "verso l'alto". Towards the top of the mountain, and towards the top in our faith. Keep striving, keep ascending. And the journey matters, not just the destination. So anyway, sometimes I remind myself of that when I'm running up hills, and it was quite helpful during this hike, too:-)

It also helped that the scenery was absolutely gorgeous. We were basically walking along trails built into the side of a cliff the whole time, so when we looked right we saw the sea way down below us, when we looked ahead we saw more cliffs off in the distance with more of the towns, and when we looked left we saw up the rest of the cliff we were on. For awhile it seemed like every time we would round a little corner the view was more incredible that the past ones had been, like it just kept getting better and better. (And that reminded me of "further up and further in!" from Narnia).

Anyway, after a couple of hours we finished our first section of the hike and got to see the second small town. We walked around for a bit and then sat on some rocks by the sea to rest and refuel with sandwiches and fruit.

The next section of the trail was also difficult and took a long time, made even more so by a little detour we decided to take...we saw a sign that advertised a beach, and decided to follow it. We were pretty high up at the time, and so had to descend quite a ways to get there. The path leading down was probably the second most challenging part of the day, the first being coming back up. It was definitely worth it, though. We got in the water right when we finally reached the shore, and it felt great. The waves were coming in pretty hard, so we had to exert a fair amount of effort just to remain in the same place and not get carried out to sea or crashed into the rocks along the beach...the whole experience was pretty intense from start to finish. We definitely earned that beach and the water, and that made it even more awesome.

At one point, after we had gotten out of the water and were just relaxing on the shore (and eating more sandwiches and fruit), I wandered down a little ways away by myself and sat on a large rock right by the water. The waves were crashing on the rocks right in front of me. I just watched, mezmorized, for a little while, and then of course a few reflections/analogies came to mind that relate that water to life...

First, I thought about the rocks that the waves were breaking on. They weren't huge, but they were pretty big. As the waves came in, these rocks interrupted their flow and the water just splashed up and over them, pretty violently. In other areas without these large rocks, the water just continued undisturbed all the way to shore. From my point of view, seeing the big picture, it was obvious that the solidity of these rocks was what was causing to waves to crash hard against them. But from the rocks' point of view, it must have seemed like the whole sea was nothing but turbulence. So then make those things represent us, engaged in our spiritual battles, and you can probably guess the connection here...the more solid you are, the more evil is going to seem to crash around you. You'll come up against difficulties and challenges, simply because you refuse to be moved along with whatever direction the world is going. But you will be able to stand firm and not be shaken. And in fact these crashes are proof that you ARE solid, even if it doesn't feel like that. This isn't really a new idea, just a new way of thinking about it that I'd never had before...

Also, after thinking about the craziness and the violence of the waves coming and going out, it seemed like quite a contrast to then look far out to the horizon and see such peaceful and quiet waters. You can hardly tell that there are waves at all out there, in fact. And then I thought about how gigantic the sea is surface area wise, and it occured to me that most of the sea is in that calm, steady state. It's just on the edges where the changes occur. And that I compared to way we experience emotions. Ideally, we should have a strong inner core, peaceful and steady. On the surface (or on the edges..), our feelings might change, emotions going up and down like waves flowing in and out, but that doesn't affect that other, deep part of us. And as long as that deep part really IS strong enough to not be affected by small surface changes, then those shouldn't worry us, whether they're good or bad.

When we were finished at the beach, we had to climb back up to the main path. It wasn't easy, but we all made it, all in one piece, no less. From there it was just a short walk to the next town, where we celebrated by getting granite and in my case, gelato. It was late afternoon by this point, and we'd only been to three of the five towns. Luckily, the next two trails were MUCH easier than the first two, and much shorter as well. We breezed through them in no time, and ended up in the last town just in time for dinner. We went to a fairly nice sit down place, and everyone but me had seafood. That's really the only food I'm picky about and won't eat if I don't absolutely have to. My pizza margherita (cheese pizza) was delicious, though, and I splurged on a dessert (tartufa--a kind of fancy ice cream), which made it even better. By this point we were all pretty much exhausted, but with the good feeling of knowing we had really done something that day. We had a small mix up when we tried to get to our hostel--we had planned to take the 10:30 shuttle bus from the town, but it turned out that that bus only ran til the end of September. We had to take a 10 minute train ride to the next town and then take a taxi. It worked out alright though, and we got to experience crazy Italian driving firsthand.

We went to sleep almost as soon as we got there, but woke up early to take the first bus back into town. We went to the beach (a different, much calmer and much more easily accessible beach), and went for a morning swim. It felt great, although the water was a bit cold. It was really clear, though--we could see straight to the bottom even in places that were seven or so feet deep. We hung out on the beach for awhile, and then went to mass at 11 in the local church. It was a really neat mass. First of all, it seemed more like a parish than the churches I've been to here in Rome. They had a bulletin, and even a couple of altar servers. Also, the altar was set up for the priest to celebrate ad oriens, and I realized again that it really does just make more sense that way. At the end, the priest said some special prayers to Mary, because the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary is this week. Then for the closing song, we sang the Salve Regina--in Latin, in the same tune that I know. I was pretty excited about that, because I really like singing it in general, and because there I was in little Riomaggiore, able to participate fully, in that part at least, with my Italian brothers and sisters. It was cool.

After that, we got lunch and sat on some rocks by the water to eat it. Then it was time to catch our train back to Rome. Traveling back went smoothly, and we arrived at about 6:15 pm. It was a great trip, and now I'm really looking forward to doing more traveling, which I'll get to in about a week. The week after this one is our week long class field trip to Bologna, the Veneto, and Venice, and then after that we have our week long fall break. I do have a fair amount of work to get done before then, but I definitely have things to look forward to!

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