I left before the sun came up and departed Arganzon in the dark, using my iPhone for light when necessary. The stars were starting to fade but Orion’s Belt was plain to see. The sun slowly rose in the east casting a long shadow of myself heading west.
I left early to avoid any surprises. I had to get to Miranda de Ebro before 2:30 pm when my train to Leon was scheduled to depart. Missing the train would not have been a good thing; I even considered taking a train from Arganzon to Miranda, but where is the fun in that? As it was, the walk was quite easy and I arrived well before noon.
A few days ago while walking, I imagined what the earth would be like in another million years on a logarithmic scale, that is in ten years, one hundred years, one thousand years and so on. Today, I imagined what earth would look like today if our species hadn’t evolved or ended in a dead end like our Denisovan and Neanderthal cousins. Life on earth started about one billion years after the planet formed, and considering it is about 5 billion years old, that means life forms had 4 billion years to evolve a creature like us. (I am using rough numbers here). But if there were no hominins 5 million years ago, which is not that long in the grand scheme, life on earth would be pretty much the same as it was 10 million or a hundred million years ago, given that a large asteroid could come along and shake things up considerably.
Given that life is an emergent process, will it therefore always evolve to a human-like creature, that is, one with advanced consciousness, and even self-consciousness? And an awareness of things like beauty and an ability to communicate? And maybe also to fight and destroy and all those “bad” things Homo sapiens do?
Now, I don’t spend the entire day thinking those thoughts. It might drive me crazy! Sometimes I think about time, and that sliver of the present that exists between the future and the past, that sliver in which our consciousness exists. That sliver in which self-consciousness might catch a glimpse of eternity, outside of the future and the past.
Sorry, I am rambling.
Miranda de Ebro is the last stop for me on the Camino Viejo. There are actually a few more stages to the Viejo, but they would take me to a place called Aguilar de Campoo which is a little village with no transportation facilities. Thus, arriving in Miranda is the end of the second section of my hybrid Camino.
I caught my train as scheduled and soon arrived in Leon to begin the third and last section of the hybrid journey: the Camino San Salvador. I walked around Leon and purchased some Siglo de Oro Reserva, a delicious Manchego style cheese from this region and some dried beef to make sandwiches on some of the stages coming up which have few services.
Ultreia et suseia!
