Limited Time Offer!

I have just self-published a booklet (sometimes called a chapbook) that is a long essay titled “Yellow Arrows to Santiago.” It is available for purchase for $7 USD + shipping cost. If you are interested, email me at tamieparkersong@gmail.com with your mailing address. I will then send you details about how you can pay and I will send you the book as soon as I receive your payment.

Here is how it starts, to give you a sense of whether you might want to order it:

Yellow Arrows to Santiago

Section One

Because I have been walking for weeks, because I have tendonitis in both ankles and both knees, because I did not train enough and so my feet feel crushed bone by small bone and all my toes have been numb for days, I am walking in a great deal of pain. Because I hurt, I am walking slowly. Because I am walking slowly, it is taking me all day to reach the village that in better times I’d have reached by late morning, given that it’s a 16-mile walk today. The blue sky is fathomless and the wheat fields fill all I can see or even imagine. What is pain? A little synapse, a little neuron firing. It isn’t mountains collapsing. Though it might as well be.

            I have come here to walk my way into the answer to a riddle, like children walk their way to the answer in a hay maze. The riddle is: what story am I meant for? I understand my options to be: stay with my husband and remain protected within the web of relationships that hold us, or leave my husband for my lover and lose all protection and acceptance. Other possibilities do exist; I even have shadowy ideas about what those possibilities are. But because they’re not possibilities named by the group I am part of—the co-creators of what I know to be reality—they’re not possibilities I can perceive, much less live. So, functionally, they do not exist. What do I want? What do I want? There’s a blankness in me where an answer to that question might be.

            It is springtime when I set out to walk 500 miles of the ancient pilgrimage path, the Camino de Santiago, across northern Spain. On the fourteenth day of the pilgrimage, at 3:00 in the afternoon, I am walking alone, across the endless, flat meseta, and the tendons in my feet are tight as piano wires: the pain is like someone banging on the high notes. Hours after all the other pilgrims have already arrived, I walk into the courtyard of the albergue—the pilgrim hostel—in the very small village of Boadilla del Camino, and the hospitalero hurries out and lifts my pack off my back.

            “Blisters?” he asks.

            “Tendonitis,” I answer.

            “Si,” he nods, makes me sit down in a cool, tiled room, asks his wife to make me a sandwich he doesn’t charge me for.

            When I search for money to pay for the night, he says, “No, later.” He guides me to the dorm, helps me climb onto a top bunk. Every day he watches pilgrims walk into his albergue by the dozen. For some reason, he knows that today I am the one who needs extra help.

            “Sleep,” he says. I lift the heavy and foreign creatures of my legs onto a pillow, gasp against the pain that always comes when the blood pours from my feet back into the rest of my body, shut my eyes, do the thing they call breathing. And then I do sleep. I sleep like consciousness is a tide pulled to some other part of the Earth. I sleep like it is the only way I will ever be saved. Something inside me is being brokered; shed like snake skin; made to be at the ready.

here’s a quote that I write by: “If you're not prepared to risk your entire reputation every time you write, then it's not worth your audience's time.” -Jose Rivera